I know I’m going to get a lot of heat from those of you who are addicted to your iPhones, but I had to shine light on one of the best, most functionality-packed smart-phones that I’ve come across. I just got my BlackBerry Bold and I must say, I absolutely love it. Let me count the ways…

- Stats (and webpages) are more accessible than ever. I logged right into Linktrust and the ASP pages looked great after my mobile browser resized them. I also logged into a few other business associates’ tracking systems and they were scaled perfectly for my screen. If you want stats on the go, without having to use a supplemental 3rd-party application, this is great.

- Scripts. You heard it right. Recently, I wrote a script in my text editor on my Blackberry Bold and uploaded it to the server on which it needed to go all from the little powerhouse in the palm of my hand. A year ago, that would have been crazy-talk.

- You’re probably wondering how I uploaded this to the server. Well, the BlackBerry bold supports all sorts of protocols right in the default browser (including FTP). I was actually able to download a 3rd party SSH application and get into the server to perform all of the operations and file transfers that I needed. *Side note : never SSH into any server as root from any handheld device. That is a horribly bad idea.*

The Blackberry Bold also comes jam-packed with a plethora of other features such as WiFi over 3G integration, real-time video streaming (and the buffering is nothing to shake a stick at), a great camera, and an awesome camera, to name a few.

If you’re in the Affiliate Marketing industry, or any technology-oriented industry for that matter, the Blackberry Bold will be an asset to your success on-the-go.

The affiliate marketing industry is growing at the speed of, well, the internet. If you’re an affiliate marketing n00bie (yes boys and girls, those are zeros, not letters, this is affiliate marketing, mind you), chances are your head is spinning with all the information out there just waiting to confuse you. I figured if Letterman gets to do it, I should too, so here are my top ten beginner’s tips to help you keep your head above water and even make an extra buck or two…

1. Take a Break from the Evil G. Google has a nasty habit lately of permanently voting publishers off the island, but fortunately the new Yahoo/Microsoft merger is rife for Google affiliate marketing expats. The deal combines Yahoo’s 19.6% of U.S. search traffic with Microsoft’s 8.4% to give the new partnership a 28% market share.

2. Go Global Baby. Try targeting an offer that allows international traffic to non-US countries. Fewer competitors, and in turn, cheaper clicks.

3. Learn How To Take a Bullet. Time is money people and let’s face it, it’s no secret that consumers are multitasking while they are at the computer (checking email, watching TV, on the phone, aiming). People LOVE to read lists and bullet points much more so than regular paragraph-structured content. Taking the hard work out for your audience by quickly bulleting our listing your key points will conciesly convery your messags, and in turn, increase your clicks.

4. Get in touch with your inner grammar snob. While you may have just spent sleepless nights creating your campaign, resist the urge to start sending traffic without one last review with fresh eyes. Having a grammatical or spelling error in your ad hurts the credibility of your ad, and what a silly thing to loose revenue on.

5. Hot Mama! Target online moms. According to Marketing to Moms Coalition Survey 2008, 67% of Moms online look for help making a purchasing decision.

6. Stay Skinny. Group your keywords very tightly, and keep that ad copy just as tight around that small group of keywords. This will give you the leg up from your less-ambitious competitors. And for goodness sake, include the keywords in your URL.

7. Speak in Specifics. This is well-established direct-response copy writing best practice. Specific numbers increase credibility and create curiosity. Always test and retest, but you will probably find that including a very specific number (i.e. lost 3 pounds) improves CTR over vague numbers. (i.e. lost a few pounds).

8. Study up. Stay savvy on the industry by reading all of the industry blogs. Lucky for you, you can find all the ones worth reading in one convenient, bookmark-ready blog aggregator - www.affbuzz.com.

9. Diversify that portfolio. Affiliate marketing income is rarely steady so continuously test new traffic channels and offers to create stability or better yet, grow!

10. Your New BFFs. Call me biased, but numero diez is a personal fave. Your affiliate marketing managers should be your best friends. Because when you look good, they look good, so they should be very interested in your success. Your AKMG affiliate managers certainly are, and we are here to listen to you and your needs so we can make tailored suggestions for you. Our job is to fight for you when need be, bring offers onto the network we think will fit your traffic, get you the best payouts, and be the first to show you the newest proven offer. The more you interact with us, the more we can help you get what you need.

Would love to hear your thoughts and feedback kiddies, so pay attention to number 10 and don’t be a stranger….

Blogzilla

I have a HUGE confession to make.

Before I worked at AKMG, my personal hotmail account would get tons of advertising promotions, seemingly unsolicited. I always wondered how these advertisers got my email address for these random products.

I mean, ResV Vanish?

I still consider myself young, and not exactly the demographic for this product!

So that’s just a bit of an explanation to cushion the punch of my real confession. Because of my frustration with advertisements that were irrelevant to me, I would simply click “report as phishing scam” to rid them once and for all! Oops…my bad.

Little did I know of the opt out link at the bottom of the advertisements to properly unsubscribe from mailing lists without hurting the affiliates. What a concept.

I do believe that there is a bit of Karma involved in the fact that this once petty detail (eliminating junk mail) in my life now happens to be the lifeline of the company that I work for!

For the amount of consideration we invest into compliance with regards to CAN SPAM, maybe I should enroll in some community service program to teach consumers how to correctly unsubscribe from email lists. For what it’s worth, I think I owe it to the online advertising industry.

Suppression lists play a major role in email campaigns. Without suppression lists, you can get yourself into some potentially hairy situations. Here is a little breakdown about suppression. As part of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, suppression files became a requirement for email marketers. What do suppression lists do? Suppression lists are used to hold and remove data about existing or potential customers from the senders mailing list. So everytime you click on an unsubscribe link in an email, you are put on the associated parties suppression list from that sender. Say you receive an email advertisement in your inbox and you click that opt-out button within that ad, bam! - you are added to said suppression list.

CAN-SPAM compliance is a must in email marketing. Marketers are required to keep suppression lists up to date and maintain the most current version of those lists. Security is also a factor with suppression lists. If your lists are not secured in some way, you can become vulnerable to hackers and malicious parties who can then use the suppression lists to actually send spam to.

As exhaustive as it may seem to keep these files up to date (and man can these lists be huge in filesize!) it is important not only to be CAN-SPAM compliant but also to keep email advertisements from reaching a consumers inbox who has chosen to opt out.

Mailer Mailer, an email/newsletter platform recently released their email marketing metrics report for 2009. The report was based off all email sent through the software between July 1st - December 21, 2008.

Here is a summary of the data collected:

75% of opens occur within 24 hrs, 85% within 48 hrs.

Overall open rates stand at 12.52%, a decline from the 1st half of 2008- 13.2%, which is in line with the basic overall trend: 17.2% (2nd half 2006), 16.1 (1st half 2007), 13.98 (2nd half 2007).

As the economy worsens banking/finance and real estate opens are on the decline, while spiritual and general consumer goods continues to rise.


Subject lines 35 characters or less gained more attention and had higher click rate then those that were longer than 35 characters. In general open rates decrease as character lengths increase.

When just the message is personalized was there an improvement in opens and clicks. It actually hurt opens and clicks when only the subject was personalized.

Click rates held steady from the first half of 2008 - .08%. However the over trend does show a decrease in click rates from 3% on average in 2007. This report includes a combination of both text and html creative.

General consumer goods, transportation and non for profit had the highest bounce rates. While banking, finance and manufacturing had the best delivery rates.
 


According to a recent 2009 study done by the ReturnPath, they found the average inbox placement rate for permissioned, commercial email in US and Canada was 79.3%. Of the nearly 21% of email that is not delivered to the inbox just 3.3% is sent to the junk folder, and 17.4% is not delivered at all.
In the US Gmail had the highest non delivery rate of 23%, while cox saw the the most deliverability with only 8% non delivery rate. 
 
Although deliverability, opens and clicks are on the decrease and certain industries are affected more than others during a recession, email marketing is still reported to garner the highest ROI among all direct response methods.  A study done by the direct marketing association shows email marketing’s average ROI to be $45.06 for every dollar spent, which is more than double Internet marketing’s ROI of $19.94 for every dollar spent. 

So yes, email marketing continues to live strong.

I recently had to help one of our prospective merchants set up their systems to ensure that they displayed pixels  only once per unique transaction.  The situation was one in which it was possible for the end-consumer to refresh or revisit the page that the pixel lives on (their confirmation page was not a “thank you” page, but rather a second step in a lead-gen campaign).

Per my conversation with this associate, here’s how you implement the solution by ’surrounding’ the pixel with a conditional wrapper.  The logic (written in pseudo-code below) should work like this:

IF Unique Transaction ID
Display pixel with OrderID
IF NOT Unique Transaction ID
Do NOT display pixel

This solution ensures that regardless of how many times an end-consumer visits a page (for any reason), the pixel will fire only one time, as it should.  This can easily be implemented in PHP or Javascript using simple, nested ‘IF-THEN’ loops.

Questions?  Feedback?  Email me!

Social media sites can help you promote your business and develop a stronger more recognized brand. By starting a Twitter, Facebook account and creating a fan page for your company you will engage your customers and place your branding in the forefront of their mind on a daily basis. Depending on the content you write the social media sites tend to move up a lot quicker in the natural search rankings, giving you first page ranking on topics your customers are searching for. You can use these sites to promote your business by sharing upcoming events, updates and information with readers. Remember, users of these sites will pass your SEO content on to others.

By utilizing social media to distribute your content, you will become more widely recognized in your industry. Regardless of what you are marketing, you can get better exposure, increase your web traffic and develop a stronger brand with the kind of free word-of-mouth advertising found only on social sites.

Today more and more companies are emerging to help companies develop and manage their social media marketing strategy. If you have not implemented a social media strategy to communicate with your customers and improve your brand, then I suggest starting to experiment today with these tactics. And trust that our competition already has.

For the last year and a half, I have been a part of an amazing charity organization called Walk With Sally, which is a mentoring program for children whose parents/siblings have suffered from or died of cancer. 

It’s based out of Los Angeles and just had its 3^rd Annual White Light White Night charity event, which consists of hundreds of guests, silent auctions, musical performers, and local bars and restaurants that donate food/drinks. 

Most of the companies we ask to sponsor or donate to the event are very generous and easy to work with and overall thrilled for the opportunity…. mostly to help a great cause, but also donating to charity is an opportunity to promote their brand, show customers how great and unique their product is, and eventually increase their sales, and benefit from the tax breaks. 

That’s why I don’t understand why there are still those few businesses out there that decline when you ask them to donate …  because really, they have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

That lead me to think about how this relates to my day to day task of screening promotions to place on our affiliate network.  For every offer I screen, I always ask the advertiser for 3-5 selling points that would make their campaign a top revenue generator for our affiliates. I tell the advertiser that I need these points to help me “sell” the offers to our affiliate managers, who in turn, highlight the offer to our affiliates. You’d think that this would be easy information for advertisers to provide, right? I mean, doesn’t it make sense that an advertiser would know the selling points on why consumers would want to buy their product or service out of all the others? Truthfully, it’s been quite a challenge.

So I’m asking you, my advertiser friends, help me help you. We are giving you free reign to have YOUR offers promoted the way YOU want to our affiliates. Take advantage of this opportunity to be the voice for your offers and help us all live together in advertising harmony. 

A long time ago and far far away, before my life in affiliate marketing, I worked at a direct response advertising agency. We made TV shows, radio spots, print ads, catalogs, and a lot of direct mail. While assuredly the least sexy of the direct response channels, direct mail was by far my favorite of my pre-AKMG days. A confessed numbers geek, I enjoyed analyzing list and creative test results.

One of my favorite tools employed was data modeling, in which we would look at our current data file that responds again and again, and creating a “model” of how “look” (demographics, how many lists they are on, etc.). We would then use that model to score the individuals on our new mailing lists we rented to assign people to different sub groups, or deciles, from 1 - 10 based on how likely that person is to respond due to how close they fit that model. This way, we didn’t loose money sending to people who don’t fit our profile and thus not as likely to respond.

Did I lose you yet? Stay with me.

One year we tested mailing deep into deciles that usually aren’t mailed into on account that they don’t match our model. To all of our surprise, they performed quite well! Which actually makes sense, doesn’t it? The people that aren’t getting bombarded with mail from you and your competitors will respond better than the people that do? Just as in affiliate marketing, less is more.

Application to affiliate marketing? Perhaps older legacy data that no one is mailing to deserves a chance every now and then. You may find them to be more responsive with higher clicks and open rates since they aren’t targeted a lot. I’d love to hear your thoughts mailers!

The Mamasita de Mailing,

E

If you’re an emailer, you are already familiar with suppression and opt-out management services provided by UnsubCentral (click here to visit their website).  You may have noticed that instead of the usual process, which involves downloading readable text-based suppression files to scrub your send-to lists against, they have implemented a slightly different process involving encryption.

This method of suppression works like this:
- You visit the advertiser’s Unsubcentral suppression management page
- Download the MD5 encryption utility and encrypt your list.
- Compare the encrypted lists on your machine
- The resulting list, with a pair of unencrypted records, is the cleaned list.  (you’ll just strip out the delimitated column that’s not encrypted).

(See a more comprehensive breakdown of the process HERE)

The only issue with this is that, although it takes a lot of resources and runtime to complete, MD5 is broken and can be decrypted (albeit record for record, which would take a reallllly long time to decrypt a sizeable amount of data).

I spoke with Josh Janicek at UnsubCentral yesterday, and he informed me that they are making a move very soon to offer  SHA-256 encryption as an alternative to MD5 encryption, to ensure clients’ lists are protected.  This alternate encryption algorithm has been declared safe by the NSA for the time being.

What are your thoughts on encryption and suppression processes?