Diorex

First things first, what is a white label program?

It is where you host all aspects of the conversion process on your own site prior to handing the customer off to your partner only after the sale has been completed. It will work for just about anything other than retail. It is especially conducive to lead generation or subscriptions.

A lot of people host the landing page and then redirect the customer to the affiliate landing page. Google considers this a bridge page, and in many competitive fields this will get you removed from Google listings.

Why would you want to go to this extra hassle?

Conversion - You control the conversion thus you can optimize to the desired result. Many affiliate landing pages may be optimized to upsell or to crosssell products, or they might not be optimized at all. Is a green button better than a blue one? What about sales copy or images or even how many steps in the order process. All of these things and more will affect your conversion rate, and conversion rate is what makes you money, each conversion rate increase you see will result in a direct impact to your bottom line.

Marketing - If you host the entire process you have the ability to re-market to customers using pixels the same or similar products. Re-marketing is the best ROI of any paid marketing I have ever seen. What about shopping cart abandonment? If you control the process you can reach out to that customer and possibly save the sale. If the affiliate program does that, rest assured that you are not getting paid. You collect the email address and other pertinent data and as long as it is disclosed properly, you can monetize that information both on and offline.

Leverage - Say your affiliate partner starts trying to lower your payout or another company wants to offer you more for the same conversions. You have to do nothing other than change the back end. You already have all the data and are just sending it someplace else. You already have an optimized site so you can hit the ground running. You can negotiate knowing exactly what kind of volume you can drive and how much it will cost you. If you have a site seo’d you dont change anything, thus you do not risk your rankings.

Getting Paid - The 10-20% the affiliate networks keep might not seem like that big of a deal, but it is. Assume you are getting paid $9 per conversion and the affiliate network is getting $1. If you are driving 1000 leads per month at $7, your profit is $2000. By cutting out the network and going direct, you have just increased your profits by 50%. Furthermore, you know exactly how many leads are being sent because you have a database of the leads. No more server hiccups or cookie stripping or other shenanigans which can strip as much as 1/3 of your total sales. Assume it is just 10% of sales that are ‘not counted’. If we assume the same scenario as above, you will earn an additional 100 sales per month at $1000. So by keeping 100% of your sales and 100% of the revenues from those sales, you have doubled your monthly profit by just cutting out the middleman. Your mileage will vary, but our experience suggest that all these numbers are low. To top it all off, you can get paid much faster, as often as daily by wire transfer, rather than having to wait weeks for the network to get paid then pay you. Especially important if you are spending millions each month on paid search.

Metrics - By controlling the whole process you will get a much better handle on your metrics. You have the ability to track everything to the keyword and even individual ad copy level. This will help you to identify areas you could raise your bids and areas where your campaigns are bleeding cash.

There are many other reasons why you should push for this. Experience suggests that just about any company is willing to bypass the networks if you have sufficient volume. Your first step is making contact with someone in the company you are working with. Attend conferences or tradeshows or pick up the phone and call the company’s main office. It is well worth the effort and easier than it might seem from afar.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 30th, 2007 at 3:15 pm and is filed under affiliate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.