Game Changing Marketing Technology

Here at Affiliate Summit East 2009 (#ase09), I had the pleasure of moderating the Advanced Landing Pages for Affiliates roundtable yesterday afternoon.

Talking with both new and experienced affiliates alike about their challenges and successes with landing pages — and, really, the whole affiliate business model in general — two things became abundantly clear:

• Affiliate marketers are a tremendous wellspring of creative energy. Most online marketing is run by relatively insulated groups — a particular company’s marketing department, and possibly one or two agencies. While that has the advantage of maintaining control (or at least the illusion of it), it can come at the risk of creative confinement. Great affiliate marketing programs blow down those barriers, and harness the collective intelligence of an incredibly diverse range of marketers, entrepreneurs, and clever digital natives. To be sure, there are good affiliates and not-so-good affiliates, and programs should be carefully structured to reward the good ones. But if you can find a way to tap into that Long Tail fountain of creativity, you can significantly increase your reach.

• Affiliate marketing is all about trust. Affiliates need to trust merchants. Merchants need to trust affiliates. And, most importantly, respondents coming through affiliate channels need to trust that the process is legitimate, safe, and fair for them — even more so, they need to feel good about it. This kind of trust takes work, both in the structure of the affiliate program and with the actual content and marketing initiatives that affiliates produce to generate traffic. But it can be done — as just about every link to an Amazon book on the web testifies.

In our roundtable, we spent a lot of time talking about this need for affiliates to establish trust with their respondents — right from the very first page. Here are five best practices for affiliate landing pages that we discussed:

1. Pay close attention to message match. When someone clicks on a link about X, they expect the landing page to be about X. If the landing page generically mashes several different sources of traffic together, without paying attention to the different “hooks” that brought people there in the first place — simply because on the back-end they connect to the same underlying merchant program — it runs the risk of breaking that first, crucial moment of trust building. If it’s worth targeting a specific market with a specific offer — the essence of affiliate marketing — then it’s worth giving that audience its own landing page.

2. Employ professional visual design. The visual design of a page — its layout, look-and-feel, and the quality of its graphics all combined together — signals the professionalism of the page, the affiliate, and the merchant. If a page looks professionally designed, it serves as a cue of its legitimacy. Sometimes the respondent is consciously aware of this, sometimes it’s merely a subconscious “feeling” — but a feeling that impacts whether they feel comfortable proceeding. Proper use of Flash and video (but not the annoying kind!) can also raise the bar on the perceived quality of the page. Invest in excellent visual design for your landing pages — its ROI is almost always a great payoff.

3. Test for local formulas, not global ones. Sorry, there is no magic recipe of page layout, color choices, text vs. graphics, or other incantations that universally works for all scenarios. Affiliates should know this better than most marketers because so much of their value is derived from bringing out-of-the-box ideas to new markets. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel for every signal landing page, but you should treat target audiences as their own group. Doing so inevitably signals respect for who those people are, which helps build trust — we tend to trust people who perceive the world the way we do. Develop and test different landing page concepts for each particular market niche you’re going after.

4. Provide value even for non-converters. Sometimes in the rush to focus on conversion rate, we can lose sight of the fact that most people who click on links aren’t really ready to convert. They’re earlier in the process of exploring options, learning, comparing, and getting a sense of who is “good” in the market. In support of that, it’s worth making sure that your landing pages provide some value to these folks — even if it’s just basic informational content — that helps with their orientation. They’ll remember you kindly for it — and have a higher propensity to return through your channel when they are ready to convert. Don’t hold everything hostage behind a conversion event.

5. Embrace transparency as a great trust builder. Good affiliates are a legitimate channel for new customers, and as such, they should have nothing to hide about their relationship with the merchant. You don’t have to post your entire affiliate agreement online, of course, but make the flow of the process clear and open to respondents. Sometimes just a few words in your copy is sufficient to provide enlightenment and develop rapport. Having links to a privacy policy at the bottom of the page, that may need to describe more of the details, is a good best practice to follow. Be proud of the value you are bringing to the respondent and the merchant.

As Billy Joel said: it’s a matter of trust.