An Advertiser’s Guide to Utilizing an Affiliate Program Contents

3 Introduction 4 Email 6 Affiliate Programs 10 What is Email Compliance? 11 The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003

The Email Opt-Out 14 Management Process 17 Conclusion Introduction

Electronic mail was first invented in 1965 as an elementary system of communication between computers. The first email blast was disseminated over a decade later in 1978 by Gary Thuerk, the commonly denoted “Father of Spam.” His promotional email blast was sent to only a few hundred people via ARPANET—a precursor to the —but the return on investment (ROI) was significant. Fast-forward to 2019, email marketing remains one of the most cost-effective and popular forms of .

DISCLAIMER: The authors of this white paper are not lawyers and none of the contents should be taken as legal advice. As with any legal matter, we would highly recommend that advertisers seek professional legal counsel about any compliance topics.

An Advertiser’s Guide to Utilizing an Email Affiliate Program 3 Email Marketing

Broadly put, the term “email marketing” refers U.S. email regulation, which provides guidelines to utilizing email to develop relationships under which email can be sent to recipients who with customers or clients, often in the form have opted in, as well as those who have not yet of promotional offers, calls to action, or other subscribed. As email marketing continues to grow engaging content. Email marketing specifically in popularity, advertisers should keep in mind the denotes that are sent in mass quantity to regulations that apply, a topic that will be covered an advertiser’s target audience. extensively in later sections.

Outlined here are the best practices for optimizing an email affiliating marketing program. One key aspect of email marketing is its ability to target both current customers and subscribers, as well as a prospect audience. This is made possible largely due to

image(cut out?) with blue overlay

An Advertiser’s Guide to Utilizing an Email Affiliate Program 4 Popularity

While email marketing has existed since the 1960s, its popularity greatly increased as the internet became influential to consumer behavior. Moreover, it is one of the most utilized forms of communication, and consistently the preferred method of business communication worldwide. The Radicati Group estimated that there are over 3.8 Billion active email accounts as of March 2018—a number that is increasing each year.

While this affordable, easy, and effective method of marketing is popular for many reasons, there are four in particular that have garnered attention from advertisers across the globe.

Quality of Leads Email marketing campaigns are often distributed to people who have actively requested or agreed to receive marketing material, so the quality of the leads will automatically be of a higher caliber than other types of efforts. Given this opt-in, the audience typically has a preexisting relationship with the advertiser.

Additionally, those who open the emails represent a demographic of “warm leads” that can be further targeted with follow-up emails. By engaging the viewer directly based on their prior interest in receiving content or promotional material, it increases the probability of generating qualified leads.

Incremental Volume Email marketing can also bring in a different subset of affiliate marketers offering incremental opportunities as the reach of audience increases. This kind of exposure is incredibly beneficial to any marketing campaign. With an affiliate marketer, the advertiser creates the content and the affiliate helps to bring exposure in the identified target markets by mailing to their own prospect lists. This not only builds , but creates opportunities for clicks and conversions in greater volume due to the expertise of the affiliate.

An Advertiser’s Guide to Utilizing an Email Affiliate Program 5 Consistency of Leads Email marketing is exponentially more efficient than direct mail or other types of given the data collected about the audience’s reception. Affiliates who specialize in email marketing analyze open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, conversions, and more. In this data-centric era, this information is vital in perfecting the and increasing the consistency of lead quality and volume through better defining the audience.

User Intent User intent is a hot topic within marketing currently. With user-centered content, the goal is not to garner as much traffic as possible, but rather target a very specific and interested audience to gain high-quality leads. The user intent of emails tends to be higher for a number of reasons. Given the quality is typically high due to a prior relationship with the brand, the advertiser should already have a sense of who their target audience is.

By understanding this population and building a profile of their ideal customer, the advertiser can then tailor the content of emails to that specific audience. While this may seem obvious, many advertisers can overlook the preexisting insight they have when disseminating email marketing campaigns. The ability to personalize and tailor these emails is ever-increasing due to affiliate programs and technological advancements.

Affiliate Programs

Many advertisers outsource a portion—or all—of their email marketing efforts to an affiliate program. Performance marketing companies like Clickbooth pair advertisers with a product or service to sell with affiliates who drive traffic to their ads.

There are affiliates who specialize in email marketing and are experts at sourcing and converting high quality leads. For the advertiser, this alleviates the burden of managing email marketing themselves and allows them to attract a more diverse targeted audience through the help of these affiliates.

An Advertiser’s Guide to Utilizing an Email Affiliate Program 6 Benefits of Affiliate Programs

While there are numerous benefits to utilizing an affiliate email marketing program, there are three in particular that stand out:

Cost Effective One key benefit of utilizing for an email program is that it is cost-effective. Most affiliate programs work on a Cost-Per-Action basis (CPA), meaning that the advertiser does not pay unless the desired event (click, conversion, etc.) is achieved. Investing in affiliate marketing is a low-risk endeavor $ with typically positive results. Using an affiliate marketing program ensures an advertiser’s money is well spent, making it a much safer investment than other avenues for email marketing.

Easy to Track The ease with which marketers can track emails is one of the channel’s most important benefits. With an affiliate marketing program, advertisers can view campaign data like click-through rates, conversions, and more. Working with an established and reputable affiliate program ensures that the affiliates are high quality, will yield consistent traffic, and will increase the advertiser’s brand visibility. Moreover, many affiliates will invest time into analyzing the data received to better define the best audiences to target. Given the CPA basis of affiliate marketing programs, this tracking and analysis is vital for the success of affiliates and saves the advertiser both time and resources.

Scope of Exposure A quality affiliate program vets only the best affiliates, ensuring that their past experience and skill sets match the caliber of the advertiser. Access to these affiliates can increase an advertiser’s scope of exposure given the affiliates are experts at identifying and driving high-quality leads. Moreover, they can help develop branding and can even introduce products and/or services to a wider targeted audience based on past data of successful email marketing campaigns.

An Advertiser’s Guide to Utilizing an Email Affiliate Program 7 Keys to a Successful Email Affiliate Program

Whether an advertiser creates their own or outsources an email affiliate program, there are certain keys to success.

Structuring Subject Lines HTML Performs Best A subject line can “make or break” an email campaign. While Given the malleability of its design, HTML emails tend to have many marketing companies will utilize all caps, exclamation higher rates of success. An advertiser has greater control marks, click-bait lines, and more—these are all best avoided. over the content and can implement more features including Instead, an advertiser should focus on creating value for images, links, headers, call to action buttons, and more. the target audience through thoughtful subject lines that Having an interactive and aesthetically pleasing design will attract genuine interest, rather than ephemeral curiosity. likely increase both click-through and conversion rates.

A/B Testing Promo Driven As with many types of promotional material, split testing— While general updates and informative emails are a good or A/B testing—is a good method by which an advertiser way to keep an audience engaged, having an effective call- can determine the best content to use, the most successful to-action is necessary to drive conversions. Promo-driven subject line to include, the dissemination time that yields content that is both high-quality and authentic tends to high open-rates, and more. It is best to change one aspect convert the best. By delivering semi-frequent promotions, at a time—a single variable that is easily tracked. After an advertiser can retain interest without overwhelming their time, the data accumulated from the email campaign will potential client with spam-like emails. provide insight on best practices.

Personalization Limit the Characters When most advertisers consider personalizing their email The attention span of an email audience is short—many can marketing, they think of a personalized greeting, demographic- attest to the fact that people rarely read emails, especially specific content, and more. These are all great ways to directly long ones. Recent research shows the ideal length of an engage the audience; however, there are lesser known ways to email is between 50 and 125 words. Focusing on quality target individual recipients. By changing up landing pages, an over quantity of content will increase engagement and, advertiser can better target users who might have previously therefore, the success of an email marketing campaign. clicked through, but not converted. Keeping the content fresh, updating graphics regularly, and tailoring the content based on the data retrieved in previous email campaigns can also aid in creating personalized campaigns.

An Advertiser’s Guide to Utilizing an Email Affiliate Program 8 Choosing an Affiliate Program

In choosing an affiliate email marketing program, advertisers should ensure their chosen affiliate network aligns with their values. Buying email traffic on a basis ensures that an advertiser is only spending money to drive real customers, but they must first vet and choose a program that suits their needs. There are also many legal ramifications of email marketing that an advertiser must comply with and understand. There are two areas in particular to assess when deciding on a program:

Quality of Traffic Quality of Literature Affiliate Email Marketing programs utilize affiliates to Every affiliate email marketing network will have set determine the target audiences and drive traffic to content, literature and regulations governing their affiliates. It is promotions, and more. However, depending on the network, important for a network to have a dedicated operations the quality of affiliate can vary. In choosing a program, team available, and for the network to be in compliance an advertiser should speak with the network about how with the laws regarding email marketing. When vetting selective they are with their affiliates, how frequently these a network, an advertiser should fully understand their affiliates are monitored, and the quality of traffic provided. existing literature and approach to email compliance. Quality Traffic of

Quality of Literature

An Advertiser’s Guide to Utilizing an Email Affiliate Program 9 What is Email Compliance?

As an advertiser begins adding email to their affiliate marketing program, there is a vitally important area that needs to be addressed—Email Compliance. As with every digital marketing channel, there are a number of laws and regulations that provide a set of rules for email marketers to follow. In the U.S., there happens to be one law that was enacted specifically to address email marketing.

An Advertiser’s Guide to Utilizing an Email Affiliate Program 10 The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003

Any company using email marketing to reach individuals in the U.S. must follow the rules set forth in the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. While complying with the law is fairly straightforward, when email is added to an affiliate marketing program, compliance gets a bit more complicated.

Here are some of the highlights of this email marketing regulation, with a focus on how they impact affiliate marketing programs.

Opt-Out/Unsubscribe Method

The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 requires, “that your email give recipients an opt-out method”. In simple terms, this means that every email sent by an advertiser or on that advertiser’s behalf (by affiliate marketers) must include a method for recipients to opt-out of receiving future marketing messages from the advertiser. Today, this is largely done by including a link within every email that any recipient can use to submit that opt-out request. This can be fairly straightforward if an advertiser is simply sending marketing messages to their own customer list. Email platforms typically include an opt-out link in every email sent from their platform that is tied to the advertiser. Recipients who unsubscribe are then added to what is called an Opt- Out or Suppression List on the platform that is used to suppress those users from future mailings.

However, when affiliates are mailing on an advertiser’s behalf, they must also include an opt-out link to allow recipients to unsubscribe from future emails related to that advertiser. The opt-outs generated by every affiliate mailer must also be collected and suppressed from all future email marketing campaigns.

An Advertiser’s Guide to Utilizing an Email Affiliate Program 11 Honoring Opt-Out Requests

Once an opt-out request has been received, an advertiser has 10 business days to process and honor that request. After that 10 day period, no commercial/marketing messages may be sent to that email address by the advertiser.

The law also states that, once an opt-out request has been received “you cannot help another entity send email to that address, or have another entity send email on your behalf to that address”. This means that if an email recipient opts out of an email that an advertiser sends out, that request must be honored by the advertiser and any affiliates working on the advertiser’s behalf. Additionally, if a recipient opts out after receiving an email from an affiliate marketer for an advertiser, the advertiser, that mailer, and all other affiliate mailers must honor that request equally.

Additional Aspects of CAN-SPAM

The law contains a number of additional rules that all email marketers need to follow. Here are just a few of those guidelines:

It bans false or misleading header information. A marketing email’s “From”, “To”, and routing information‑including the originating domain name and email address‑must be accurate and identify the initiator of the email.

It prohibits deceptive subject lines. The subject line cannot mislead the recipient about the contents or subject matter of the message.

It requires that commercial email be identified as an advertisement and include the sender’s valid physical postal address. The email message must contain clear and conspicuous notice that the message is an advertisement or solicitation and that the recipient can opt out of receiving more commercial email from the sender/advertiser. It also must include a valid physical postal address.

An Advertiser’s Guide to Utilizing an Email Affiliate Program 12 Penalties Under CAN-SPAM

Like any regulation, CAN-SPAM doesn’t just create a set of rules, it also includes potential penalties for companies that send out non-compliant email marketing campaigns. The fines have been increased over the years since 2003 and now “each separate email in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act is subject to penalties of up to $42,530.” That is per non-compliant email sent, not per campaign. So, the potential cost of non- compliance can be extremely high.

Most importantly for advertisers who use affiliates or other third parties to mail on their behalf - if the mailer is found to be non-compliant, not only that mailer, but also the advertiser can be fined for non-compliance by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). This means that advertisers must be diligent in monitoring their affiliate mailers and doing everything possible to ensure compliance.

As mentioned previously, the CAN-SPAM Act contains more provisions than are covered in this white paper. For more information on CAN-SPAM, visit the FTC website.

Affiliate Marketing Compliance

As mentioned above, the foundation of CAN-SPAM compliance for an advertiser hinges on the collection and storage of all unsubscribe requests and making sure those addresses do not receive any future marketing email messages. For an advertiser that manages all their email campaigns internally, this may be fairly straightforward (although if their email program is complex, managing their opt-out process may be as well). However, once the element of third parties emailing on the advertisers behalf is added to the mix, the process grows in complexity.

Leveraging email in an affiliate marketing program creates two key challenges for the advertiser: 1. 2. Collecting the opt-outs generated Distributing an up-to-date Opt-Out by every internal mailing, along with List to every affiliate mailer before all affiliate mailers and adding them they send out an email campaign to the advertiser’s overall Opt-Out on an advertiser’s behalf. List (which is then redistributed).

An Advertiser’s Guide to Utilizing an Email Affiliate Program 13 The Email Opt-Out Management Process Opt-Out Collection & Storage

Collecting unsubscribe requests is typically handled with the inclusion of an opt-out link within every email sent. The link takes users to a web page where they can submit their opt-out request or otherwise manage their email preferences. When an advertiser uses affiliates for email marketing, they need to ensure that every one of those email campaigns includes a valid opt-out link. Opt-outs are collected from every email campaign and the associated email addresses are added to a database of unsubscribes.

One key to remember is that this database needs to remain persistent and obviously grows over time as an advertiser continues to receive opt-out requests. An opt-out request doesn’t expire, so unsubscribe requests from 10 or even 20 years ago still need to be honored today and going forward.

QUICK TIP: While a single opt-out link could be used for all campaigns, there are many reasons to create a unique opt-out link for every campaign and/or affiliate marketer. By creating separate opt-out links, the advertiser gains more insights into where opt-outs are being generated—from which campaigns and which mailers. This can also be a way to identify a potential issue with a single mailing (such as if a mailing was somehow missing an opt-out link).

Suppression List Management

The updated opt-out database is then used as a suppression file when future email marketing campaigns are executed, to ensure all opt-outs are removed from the mailing list prior to the campaign being sent.

When using affiliate marketers, advertisers need to distribute the most current suppression file to every affiliate, prior to every email campaign being sent. Because advertisers can be held liable for an affiliate’s non-compliance, there is a strong incentive to make sure that affiliates are properly suppressing every email address on this suppression file.

This task of list distribution (as well as the need to collect and process opt-outs from every affiliate mailing) adds a layer of complexity that every advertiser and affiliate mailer needs to navigate in order to successfully execute email campaigns while maintaining their compliance.

An Advertiser’s Guide to Utilizing an Email Affiliate Program 14 Additional Aspects of Email Suppression List Management

For many advertisers, suppression list management starts and stops with users who have opted out of receiving future messages. However, advertisers with extensive experience in email marketing will often leverage multiple suppression lists beyond opt-outs, as an important part of their overall audience targeting strategies.

In such cases, suppression files effectively identify audience members that the advertiser prefers not be marketed to via email. If email marketing is so profitable and such a high performing marketing channel, why would a brand want to exclude a viable recipient from an email campaign, other than due to a prior opt-out request? Here are a few suppression list strategies that advertisers can use to enhance email campaign performance—both campaigns managed in-house and those undertaken by affiliate mailers.

Current Customers As consumers, we are all familiar with receiving marketing messaging that Advertiser Benefits: promote special introductory offers, big discounts, or other deals designed • No payouts to affiliates for driving to attract new customers. These are fairly common and effective promotions sales from current customers. to drive customer acquisition. But, another common aspect of the customer acquisition offer is that it is not available to current or previous customers. • Lower risk of lost revenue by exposing current customers to Plenty of us have had the experience of seeing an ad from their current cable or aggressive acquisition offers. satellite TV provider promoting a subscription package that is far less expensive than their current subscription. When you call customer service to request the lower rate, you are told it is only for new customers. As a current customer, you are annoyed that the company values a new customer’s business more than yours. The end result—an ad campaign designed to drive new sales has created an unhappy current customer. Your next step might just be to go shopping for an alternative service from a competitor.

With this being the case, many companies take steps to avoid sending customer acquisition offers to current customers. While it’s probably impossible to ensure that a current customer won’t ever see an acquisition offer, advertisers can ensure they don’t receive an email about it from the company or any affiliate mailing on the company’s behalf. This can be accomplished by using a list of current customer email addresses as a suppression file for all acquisition email campaigns and implement it just like an opt-out suppression file.

An Advertiser’s Guide to Utilizing an Email Affiliate Program 15 Non-Responders Over a period of time, email lists will eventually include email addresses of Advertiser & Mailer Benefits: recipients who received multiple messages but never engaged with any of • Reducing overall email marketing them (opened, clicked, converted, etc.). After some number of emails sent—or costs by removing addresses of perhaps a long time period with no response—campaign performance data recipients who are highly unlikely to ever respond—and generate revenue. may show that it is no longer cost effective to continue mailing a recipient, since they are highly unlikely to respond to further email campaigns. In these • Improving email campaign cases, advertisers can build a list of these non-responders and use it as a performance metrics like open rate, suppression file for future campaigns. Suppressing this particular group of click rate, and conversion rate. lower value prospects may also deliver other campaign benefits to both the • Having a positive impact on overall advertiser and its affiliates. deliverability and sender reputation with different email platforms.

Past Recipients When advertisers use affiliates or other third-parties to email on their behalf, Advertiser Benefits: they are often focused on customer acquisition within those campaigns. In • Enabling a higher level of control these cases, removing current customers is an important part of an effective over campaigns designed to reach marketing program. It may also be beneficial to ensure that new email campaigns net-new prospects. are only sent to recipients who have not received previous email offers—or • The ability to create offers designed perhaps only specific offers. specifically for a net-new prospect audience. In this case, another suppression file could be created with every email address that has been included in prior campaigns over a certain time period, or every address that has received a particular offer, but has yet to receive another (like a sequential campaign). This type of strategy might also be customized to suppress recipients of a certain type of offer, or possibly any recipient from the last 12 months, etc.

An Advertiser’s Guide to Utilizing an Email Affiliate Program 16 Conclusion

Email Affiliate Programs can be incredibly useful and low-risk for advertisers. Email management can be a complex, multi-layer process, usurping time, money, and resources from a company. By outsourcing email marketing to an affiliate program, advertisers ensure that their budget is cost-effective and that their campaigns are efficient.

Whether it’s B2B or B2C marketing, emails are a unique method of directly engaging the target audience. While this method is highly popular, the regulations surrounding email marketing are strict. An advertiser should be well-versed in these regulations prior to engaging in such a program. However, the necessary suppression list management techniques can provide unforeseen opportunities. The concepts presented here are just a few ways in which suppression files can be used above and beyond compliance, to actually optimize campaign performance.

To learn more about email To set up an affiliate email marketing compliance, visit Optizmo program, contact Clickbooth

www.Optizmo.com www.Clickbooth.com

An Advertiser’s Guide to Utilizing an Email Affiliate Program 17