Guest comment: 6 steps to optimise your digital sales network

In this hyper competitive market place it is important to avoid over reliance on any one traffic source and a great way to do this is to build up an online sales distribution network. Give your sales network the tools they need such as tracking through to sale, incentives, separate landing pages and bespoke telesales numbers to name a few, and they can fast become a significant new channel for your business.

Tracking through to sale

Regardless of whether you manage your distribution network via an agency, affiliate network, in house, or any combination thereof, the key to performance is always to provide tracking through to sale. If your partners can identify “click references” for initiatives that perform and those that don’t, they can target effectively and will focus on your products over a competitor that gives them limited visibility.

Special offers

Introductory pricing, waiving upfront costs and offering special discounts are a great way to generate interest in services that can become commoditised when purchased online. Using voucher codes within the check out process is an increasingly popular way to tailor this process and companies are switching on to using cookies to control when a voucher code box displays so they can offer discounts (or not) according to traffic channel and/or product sold.  After all, why offer a discount on a product if the user was not expecting money off or an introductory benefit in the first place? This is particularly relevant for your Pay Per Click (PPC) or direct to site traffic.

Key messaging partners

Take care not to over delegate to agencies or affiliate networks and actively engage with your larger partners to help portray key messaging via timely news stories. Some partners will have a strong media presence and you can leverage their expert opinion by communicating notable upgrades to them in advance of implementation. Key partners are also likely to produce editorial content for their users in the form of news, guides and general comment, plus they will often email direct to their registered user bases to reinforce this messaging.  Embedding yourselves within such activity is an easy win as all you need to do is keep the lines of communication open.

Flexible payment models

Cost per acquisition (CPA) tracking – payment by direct results - is common practice and rewarding sales volumes with tiered commission bands or “ratchets” is a great way to further incentivise partners. If you have a more complex product to sell, then you should consider Post Impression (PI) CPA tracking.  This is a mechanism that effectively allocates commercial value for sales process involvement, where a direct click/call to action is not forthcoming and the longer term conversion value is measured. This is a useful way of incentivising partners and driving traffic or exposure for your brand where a partner may not have provided content to support your products as it is conceptually too difficult to promote.

Landing pages

Optimise conversion by investing in landing pages that reflect your above the line messaging, remove distracting navigations to keep the focus on the transaction and minimise leakage by removing untracked call centre numbers from the sign up process. Your partners will want to know you’re doing everything you can to optimise conversion for them. They’ll often be monitoring how well your website converts against the rates they’re paying, to work out your “earnings per click” as the benchmark for how well you are able to monetise the traffic that they send to you.

Don’t forget offline

Providing key partners with tracked telesales numbers is a great way to complement your online activity. In our experience within the broadband, home phone and digital TV comparison sector, adding telesales numbers to results tables drives significant highly targeted sales calls.  Importantly, it does not erode online conversions at all; rather it taps in to a supplementary and complementary sales channel that enhances the commercial opportunity for the publisher and therefore exposure for the advertiser.

By Simon Piper

Head of Business Development

ConsumerChoices

Consumerchoices.co.uk

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