How to migrate an affiliate program
Wednesday, December 27th, 2006The big mistake most advertisers make is that they don’t communicate enough to their affiliates and sometimes even to their account managers at the affiliate network. Timely and relevant communications is the key to any migration whether it’s moving the program to another network or bringing it in-house. Make sure that everything is set-up in the new program long before you migrate the first affiliate - don’t forget the behind the scenes work like application acceptance and rejection emails. Typically you should forcast a 10-20% dip in your revenue during a full program migration. What mitigates this loss is a plan to first move key affiliates over by “hand-holding” them. Don’t think that you can accomplish this thorugh emails only! Phone calls and even an in-person visit would be in order if they drive $10MM/year let’s say. Even before you make the migration decision, make sure that your key affiliates are ok with your program’s new home. Invite them into the process and two things will happen - there will be less risk that one of them will drop your program and secondly, they will thank you for involving them in a decision which affects their commission check.
After the key affiliates are migrated and you’ve walked them through all the new reports, payment structures, affiliate agreement and whatever else you may have changed next you can start migrating over your top 20-25. Still big revenue drivers, you want to still give your personal attention to their moves. Keep in mind any one-off special (read:manual) report extract you may have done for them - the devil is in those details.
Next you’ll want to email the entire affiliate base to notify them that the program will close and migrate to the new platform. Giving them 8 weeks is a good guideline. After 3-4 weeks, you’ll identify some stragglers of course. Some may have never actually received your email but others have and will just get to it when they get to it. For those affiliates, I recommend something that the ebay affiliate team did back in 2003 (if memory serves). They sent a second email to this segment stating that if they moved over within the next X days, their new accounts will be credited X dollars. After this stage, you can’t forget that you actually have to go through the rest of the process of closing your program! Send that last email to any remaining affiliates actually telling them that the program is closed and all commissions are now forfeit. I don’t want to get into the discussion here but ask me why you wouldn’t want to send out commission checks for amounts under your payment threshold….
Anyway, the worst thing that you can do typically is not keep both your old and new programs running for 3-4 months during this migration. I’ve been through several instant “cut-overs” as they’re called where contractually the advertiser is forbidden to operate a second program by their existing provider (read: Linkshare). Therefore, you contact the new provider, build the second program in secret, send the termination notice in the dead of night to their existing affiliate provider and literally later that day emails are flying out to affiliates notifying them that their existing links no longer work and to pick up new links (& agree to a different affiliate agreement, etc). Can you imagine the frustration here? It’s not pretty and it’s one of the reasons why affiliate program managers get the big bucks. 