PartnerCentric's innovative approach to Affiliate Program Management

As you know, affiliate marketing is really partnership marketing. It's about relationships that build over time to increase the strength of your brand and its online sales channel. At PartnerCentric, we take a pro-active approach to finding partners and building those relationships on your behalf. We spend considerable time and energy in a constant effort to gain quality partners for you.

We take a team approach to driving the successful growth of your affiliate program. Your program manager and director share a number of key responsibilities on a daily, weekly and monthly basis as follows:

Day-to-Day Duties

• Review and approve or decline affiliate applications and account changes
• Answer all email and phone inquiries promptly
• Check tracking and statistics
• Review and post on forums/blogs

Weekly Duties

• Identify groups and individuals to target for recruitment.
• Send recruitment letters to prospects with scheduled follow-up.
• Prepare Weekly Update Report with stats and trends of all the programs.
• Keep merchant visible on affiliate marketing message forums and blogs with updated news and events.

Monthly Duties

• Prepare and send HTML newsletter each month.
• Prepare sales/commission reports with detailed transaction info for all programs.
• Review audited report for accuracy and payment.
• Advertise new promotions, incentives, contests, bonuses and/or sales, deals, coupons.
• Suggest and upload new creatives.
• Deliver Monthly Status Report outlining initiatives and stats for the month.
• Test tracking and monitor datafeed functionality.
• Identify problems or competitive challenges inlcuding review of affiliates in PPC campaigns.

Continual Evaluation on both CJ and DT platforms

• Review and evaluate payment setting and metrics:
• Payout
• Cookie duration
• Other tracking mechanisms
• Sub-sales
• Referrals
• Examine all creative and suggest new banners/links/sizes/images/ideas.
• Create and update Affiliate Agreement and note the need for new policies around emailing, guidelines for newsletters, PPC strategies and use of trademark terms.
• Develop affiliate recruitment copy and sequential follow up copy.
• Retool any copy identified as needing changes.
• Personalize all outgoing copy and email.
• Blogs and new forums to post to.
• Ensure contact information is clearly communicated in recruitment copy, Merchant program front end, and DirectTrack front end.
• Implement new tools and refresh creative as necessary.
• Ensure all contact names/info are updated.
• Evaluate, review and rank existing affiliates.
• Contact each segment email activation campaigns for inactive affiliates.

Maintenance and Loyalty Building

• Answer affiliate email promptly and save frequently-asked questions to update the FAQ page.
• Remain accessible to affiliates for any special needs.
• Ensure affiliates are aware of new products by creating new product banners/links that point to the pages of these exact products.
• Set up instant page creators and datafeeds.
• Send out monthly newsletters promptly showcasing new products and bestsellers.
• Continue working with Merchant to develop new creatives, linking methods, such as content links, keyword suggestions, and niches.

Ongoing Evaluation of Performance and Goals

• Compile weekly reports and monthly reports as outlined above for 10 programs on 2 platforms.
• Consistently monitor competitors.
• Continue to suggest changes needed in site design and/or layout to enhance conversion and usability.

PARTNERCENTRIC SUPPORT, TOOLS, ADVERTISING AND OUTREACH FOR OUR CLIENTS

Our team approach to managing your affiliate program means that your program manager and director are both actively prospecting, contacting and activating affiliates who are specifically targeted for the potential sales they could contribute to your campaign. We also now use the Syntryx recruiting tool, which is a powerful tool for targeting strong affiliates in any given niche.

Our efforts go beyond recruitment, of course. We literally cross the country attending trade shows in order to spread the word about all of the great affiliate programs that we manage, yours included. We promote your programs at every major trade show within the affiliate marketing industry, including:

• Exhibit and present at Affiliate Summit twice per year, which had more than 2,000 attendees at the last show in January.
• Attend ad|Tech, which attracts more than 12,000 Internet mareketers per event.
• Attend Internet Retailer, which is attended by more than 4,000 online merchants and Internet marketers.

We also attend other related trade shows where potential affiliates can be found such as:

• Webmaster World, where some of the best Internet marketers and potential affiliates can be found
• exhibit and present at eComXpo (the 100 percent virtual trade show which last March was attended by more than 8,000 people)

PartnerCentric understands that promotion is the best way to find new partners for your program. Because of our experience and expertise, we have amassed a number of strategic partnerships in order to ensure that your program gets the promotion that brings in affiliate partners. We've leveraged our partnerships to a considerable degree. For example:

• PartnerCentric submits monthly promotions and offers to Commission Junction merchants in the "What's Hot" newsletter, which is distributed to the entire network. Additionally, all of your promotions and offers are submitted on a monthly basis to the top 50 performers within CJ.
• Your program is listed on AffiliatePrograms.com. AffiliatePrograms.com is the must-read directory of affiliate programs for savvy affiliates who want to compare, research and review the top programs. This is a direct investment that PartnerCentric makes each month on your behalf. AffiliatePrograms.com is the second largest referrer to our Affiliate Resource Center, where your programs are listed.
• PartnerCentric has invested in it's own forum on AffiliatePrograms.com in which your promotions are advertised.
• PartnerCentric has also made a significant investment on your behalf by placing special promotional content about your programs on 5StarAffiliatePrograms.com (in both the blog and the forum). 5StarAffiliatePrograms.com is the No. 1 blog in the industry and the No. 1 referrer to our Affiliate Resource Center, where your programs are listed. It brings in thousands of referrals (and potential affiliates) to our site each year. We spend $2,500 per month to have our programs, including yours, featured on this site.
• PartnerCentric sends a monthly newsletter to our 15,000 + opt-in active affiliate recipients with new contests, new programs, new promotions and news about your programs.
• We've promoted your program on AffiliateClassroom.com, which is read by more than 2,000 new affiliates and more than 35,000 active affiliates. We buy ads in their monthly newsletter regularly.
• All of PartnerCentric's programs are promoted through our relationship with JamesMartell.com, Martell's award-winning Affiliate Marketers Bootcamp uses PartnerCentric's managed affiliate programs as examples to up-and-coming affiliates in training. This was a $2,000 sponsorship. Hundreds of DVDs have been sold to affiliates at $197 per DVD.
• Program updates and promotions are broadcast on industry forums such as top-affiliate.com, revenuesource, associateprograms.com and webproworld.
• PartnerCentric has also facilitated your directory listings on affiliate directories such as associateprograms.com, affiliatescout.com, affiliateguide.com and 2-tier.com.

We foster relationships with affiliates so that your program gets new opportunities to shine. The PartnerCentric team includes an Affiliate Relations Manager who is devoted to bringing attention - and affiliates - to your programs. News about new commissions structures, bonuses, contests, seasonal or special promotions and more get shared with targeted blogs, forums and newsletters to ensure new partners are learning about your program and what it has to offer. Our Affiliate Relations Manager also shared this information about the Niche Retail programs through our internal affiliate newsletter, PC Announce, which has more than 10,000 subscribers who are actively searching for programs to promote.

Our own web site, PartnerCentric.com, offers details about your program and enables users to apply to join them. Our blog at www.partnercentric.com/blog receives thousands of visits per month and provides the latest news about your programs. The PartnerCentric site includes an Affiliate Resource Center that provides affiliate partners with everything they need to join and successfully promote your programs, including:

• Details about the latest programs.
• A complete directory of all our managed programs, including yours.
• Information about your programs' coupons (multiple listings for Niche Retail programs) through our proprietary coupon RSS feed, CouponsDelivered.com
• Access to PartnerCentric's Instant Page Creator, the most advanced product datafeed service available online. This is a $150 per month value to you.

We hope this gives you a broader view of all our services. PartnerCentric provides you th highest level of service and performance possible. We will continue to dedicate ourselves to this and will do whatever is necessary to meet your expectations.