What is an affiliate?
Affiliates are the single most important source of new customers for most online businesses, and many offline as well. Affiliates have the ability to expose your business to prospects that otherwise may not have found you, and top affiliates also provide your business with immediate credibility.
Why should we have an affiliate program?
Affiliates form an integral part of your sales-force, and do so with little overhead or liability. Unlike a media buy where you do not know your return on investment (ROI) in advance, and have the potential to lose money on a specific campaign, your affiliate program costs are predominantly based on results. With the exception of personnel and program marketing/incentive costs, all compensation for the business generated is a percentage of what is earned. This is the only area of your business where you can truly say that the more you pay your affiliates, the more that your business has made.
Do you provide affiliates for every type of business?
Clients include both gaming and non-gaming retail and service companies, and affiliates come from both the online and offline sectors. CanAffco has an extensive database of active affiliates from all industries.
How do you provide our business with affiliates?
Affiliates are exposed to new clients whose products parallel the interests of their traffic, and negotiations are undertaken with each qualified affiliate to have them promote our clients’ services.
CanAffco initiates and maintains relationships with all of its affiliates, keeping them abreast of our clients’ offers, promotions, and incentives.
How do affiliates find out about CanAffco?
Existing affiliates receive weekly newsletters with new merchant notifications, and news from current merchants.
To attract new affiliates, CanAffco represents its’ clients at all of the major affiliate conferences and conventions, including the Affiliate Summits, Casino Affiliate Program (CAP) conferences, Casino Affiliate Conventions, PubCons, and more.
In addition CanAffco advertises with all major affiliate organizations.
In times of intense competition, how do you attract and retain affiliates?
We liken it so having a small hardware store and having a Home Depot open a few blocks away. The only way to remain viable in your business is to either offer niche products, or great customer service. What we do is similar – we look for what is unique about your product and site, and focus on your features, advantages and benefits. We also work with you to develop unique promotions and incentives.
And of course we service the hell out of our affiliates!
What happens if we have an existing affiliate program in place?
While we welcome and encourage members of the operators’ team to be involved, and we are happy to share our knowledge, we are not a resource just to provide a few affiliates – we need to be able to help form policy, develop the communications, and ensure that reporting and payments are correct and done on time. We guarantee these things to the affiliates that work with us.
We will work closely with your existing team to ensure that we all provide the same information, offers and incentives to the affiliates, and provide support at whatever level you require.
We will need administrative access to the affiliate’s player reporting to be able to perform our functions properly.
Do you recommend we develop our own affiliate program reporting software, or use one provided by a 3rd party?
Unless you have an existing program already in place, that provides affiliates with comprehensive traffic reporting, as well as the ability to manage their own programs, we recommend using a software program provided by an outside company.
Using a 3rd party software can help with the trust and credibility of your program, especially when it comes to the financial and payment reporting.
We can work with whatever software your firm uses, as our services are independent of the software and reporting – our role is to attract affiliates into your program, and build relationships with them to maximize their value to your organization.
Why do you charge a “program integration fee” to new merchants?
This charge covers the necessary time for us to receive product knowledge training on your product(s) and site(s), work with you to develop program marketing strategies and to develop the initial affiliate program – including terms & conditions, program parameters, payment decisions, incentive promotions, creative strategy, tournament strategy (if applicable), recognition and rewards program, communications vehicles and schedule, as well as any other necessary information.
Do you offer any other services to merchants?
In addition to affiliate recruitment and management services, CanAffco is pleased to offer a full suite of marketing services, including;
- Customer Acquisition, Conversion and Retention Programs
- Media Buying – Canada, U.S., and International
- Creative Services – Online and Print
- Television and Radio Commercial Production
- PR Distribution
- Search Engine Optimization – SEO
- Pay-per-Click Program Management
