Dallas Business and Marketing Blog

Affiliate marketing has become one of the biggest industries in Internet marketing today. There are all types of affiliates from small work at home individuals to large corporations who leverage their resources to send surplus traffic to strategic partners websites. One of the biggest problems affiliate marketers face is building a database of leads and customers. Sure you can do e-newsletters, e-books, free reports and blog subscriptions but what about all the visitors that actually buy or start to buy something from you?

Do you realize that they are the most qualified leads you can have? Now some affiliate programs give you the customer data so you can do follow-up and add-on marketing, but many do not. Further many times your customers start to buy but fall out of the order process. Because you don’t have access to the affiliate sites server logs you never get that data. Those leads are golden! They are people that started to buy and changed their mind, that means…

A. They are buyers
B. They are qualified
C. They are still in the market

So how do you gain access to the names and emails of these people? Some affiliate marketing programs have api interfaces and other technologies that let you create your own order form and pass the data across to them. With this you can capture the data, but again this is only some programs and for a lot of small time affiliates or smaller companies they don’t have the resources to do this type of integration.

Well I am about to give you a very simple, low tech way to capture the names and emails of every visitor you send to an affiliate site and better yet it will also be a iron clad way to cloak your affiliate links so they never get hijacked or affect your Google quality score.

Step One - Make a copy of the affiliate page, almost an exact one. Put instructions on the sign up, something like “part one of two” this will tell your user that they are going to have to enter more information.

Step Two - Use your email marketing system (I recommend Aweber) to create a simple form that asks for name and email address.

Step Three - Set the thank you page (the page the user is sent to after filling out the form) to the sign up page on the affiliate site. This way your user enters name and email, clicks enter and goes into the real sign up process.

Now there are some things you need to be aware of. First is may tick off some of your users, odds are they will have to enter that same information again. Next you will need to include verbiage on that page that says they give you permission to email them, if you are smart you will also set this list up for double opt in (meaning they will get an email and click a link that says they are ok with you sending them information).

The beauty of this technique is that anyone can do it, you don’t need to be a programmer and your affiliate partner can’t do anything to get in the way of your information capture. Next many of your potential customers will never finish an order, with this step you will capture tons of leads to follow up with. Next the process if fully automated, once in your follow up system you can automate follow up messages, do broadcasts, etc.

Another side benefit is it will help you track down orders that you may not be getting paid on. I would love to tell you that all companies pay affiliates for every single order, yet orders fall through cracks and sometimes they are simply stolen. It might be nice to see how many people start to order from that affiliate program you never make any sales though.

This is not the perfect way to accomplish this task by any means, a pass through programmed form that will prevent your client from having to enter duplicate data is a lot better, however like I said this technique can be used with just about any program and utilized by any marketer with even very basic skills.

~ Jack Spirko

Technorati Tags: affiliate marketing, email marketing, leads, list building, follow up marketing, internet marketing, lead capture, database development

Popularity: 16% [?]