I love to pick up a bargain and often my first touch point after finding a product to purchase online, is a discount site (affiliate site). If you are not familiar with affiliate marketing it is a marketing practise where a business rewards one or more affiliates for their marketing efforts that deliver sales.
Essentially, this means that if an affiliate drives a customer to the merchant’s site and the customer makes a purchase, the affiliate is rewarded (usually as a percentage of the sales revenue).
There are four core players involved in affiliate marketing – the merchant (also known as the retailer), the network (contains affiliate sites, merchants, and deals with payment terms), the publisher (also known as the affiliate) and the customer.
Each affiliate site uses different means to drive sales:
- Cashback sites – rewards customers for a sale by means of cashback e.g. Quidco
- Voucher code sites – provide customers with product/service discounts e.g. MyVoucherCodes
- Comparison shopping – helps the customer find the lowest price e.g. Kelkoo
- Search – utilise PPC e.g.Click Angel
- Email – send out newsletters to a targeted database Freemax Media
- Blogs – often focus on a niche area e.g. boutique fashion
The UK affiliate market is currently a £42 billion a year industry (Econsultancy Internet Statistics Compendium 2011) which looks set to grow even bigger as major affiliate sites increase their marketing spend (has anyone seen Quidco advertising on the tube?).
However, I think the affiliate area is lacking in one particular area and this is providing a personalised experience to users. It would be great to visit a site such as My Voucher Codes and be targeted with personalised offers based on my previous browsing/shopping experiences.
Currently out of the major cash back and voucher code sites in the UK, only Quidco are offering any sign of personalised content. The site has a small ‘recommended for you tab’ when a user is logged into their account.
One of the main reasons that sites are not offering customers personalised offers is that often the user does not have to be logged in to their account to redeem an offer. This makes personalising the customer experience difficult as the site will have limited customer data available.
For too long now affiliate sites have been taking the easy option of filling their sites with a high volume of offers with little thought to the requirements of the customer.
I would like to see sites taking a proactive approach; users should be required to login to an affiliate site so that the products they see are targeted to their interests. Not only will this make the user experience more engaging, it will improve conversion rates and maybe even aid in the discovery of new products and services.