Affiliate marketing overview

laura
Industry
May 1, 2018

Most retailers have realized that sending unsolicited email is bad for their overall deliverability. Still, the idea they can send mail to people who never heard of them is seductive.
Enter affiliate email. That magical place where companies hire an agency, or a contractor, or some other third party to send email advertising their new product. Their mail and company reputation is protected because they aren’t sending the messages. Even better, affiliates assure their customers that the mail is opt-in. I’m sure some of them even believe it.
The reality is a little different from what affiliates and their customers want to believe.

Affiliate marketing is sold as opt-in

It’s been a while since I’ve taken on affiliate mailers as clients, and I routinely turn down clients who tell me ahead of time they use affiliates. Sometimes, though I’ll take on a client who is having problems with their mail and discover that they use affiliates. “Oh, we probably should have mentioned we also have this affiliate program way over there, but that shouldn’t be why our opt-in and transactional mail is failing at Gmail.”
That’s when I pull out the Google Bulk Mail Senders Guidelines and point at the very bottom of the page.

In reality, using affiliates can affect all mail from a company. I’m not sure how Google does it, but their ability to draw connections between a company’s affiliate mail and their opt-in mail is pretty good. Senders using affiliates in the hopes of prospecting without affecting their “regular” mail discover this, eventually.

Affiliate marketing is kinda opt-in

In my experience most affiliate websites are not very user friendly. Going through signups seems designed to distract and confuse visitors into clicking on agreements. This isn’t just evident in the flashy website design, but the wording on many pages seems designed to confuse.
About a decade ago, one of the MTA vendors hired me to be their in house deliverability expert for some of their major clients. One of the clients they asked me to work with was an affiliate marketing company. They were attempting to “do things right.” And, in fact, they were confirming email addresses before mailing.
However, this company was also sharing data with third parties. One of those parties started sending email to me before the actual client sent me the opt-in request. When I mentioned this to the client, they explained that the company spamming was supposed to only send direct mail, not email. They couldn’t explain why they were passing on email addresses if their partner wasn’t supposed to mail them. ?

Affiliate marketing is overwhelming

In June 2016, one of my clients revealed they were collecting addresses through affiliates. They sent me to a few different websites to sign up for mail. I did. In the 22 months since I signed up, I’ve received a lot of mail.
A lot of mail.
Yes, those are actual email counts. I’m most intrigued by the addresses with only a couple emails, they appear to be truncated versions of some of the addresses I actually used to sign up. I’m not sure what kind of horrible data processing does that, but clearly there’s something truly broken out there mangling email addresses.
Not only did the sites mangle the addresses I gave them, most of the current messages aren’t even job related. Phishing, male enhancement drugs, dating scams they’re all in there. Even the one message offering job vacancies is a work from home scam.

Want to see what one of the emails looks like? I picked CVS/Drug Mall ! Expect Something Extra, Jane Doe

Not all affiliates…

I’m sure it’s not all affiliates. But 95% of affiliate marketers give the other 5% a bad name.

July 2017: The month in email

August is here, and as usual, we’re discussing spam, permissions, bots, filters, delivery challenges, and best practices.

One of the things we see over and over again, both with marketers and with companies that send us email, is that permission is rarely binary — companies want a fair amount of wiggle room, or “implied permission” to send. There are plenty of examples of how companies try to dance around clear permissions, such as this opt form from a company we used to do business with. But there are lots of questions here: can you legitimately mail to addresses you haven’t interacted with in 5 years? 10 years? What’s the best way to re-engage, if at all?
We frequently get questions about how to address deliverability challenges, and I wrote up a post about some of the steps we take as we help our clients with this. These are short-term fixes; for long-term success, the most effective strategy is sending email that people want and expect. Engagement is always at the core of a sustainable email program.
We’ve also discussed the rise of B2B spam, and the ways in which marketing technologies contribute to the problem. B2B marketers struggle to use social and email channels appropriately to reach customers and prospects, but still need to be thoughtful about how they do it. I also wrote about some of the ways that marketing automation plugins facilitate spam and how companies should step up to address the problem. Here’s an example of what happens when the automation plugins go awry.
I wrote a few posts about domain management and the implications for security and fraud. The first was about how cousin domain names can set users up for phishing and fraud, and the second was a useful checklist for looking at your company’s domain management. We also looked at abuse across online communities, which is an increasing problem and one we’re very committed to fighting.
I also highlighted a few best practices this month: guidelines for choosing a new ESP and active buttons in the subject line for Gmail.
And finally, we celebrated the 80th birthday of the original SPAM. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you probably already know why unwanted email is called SPAM, but just in case, here’s a refresher….

What Happens Next…

or Why All Of This Is Meaningless:
Guest post by Huey Callison
The analysis of the AARP spam was nice, but looking at the Mainsleaze Spammer Playbook, I can make a few educated guesses at what happens next: absolutely nothing of consequence.
AARP, if they acknowledge this publicly (I bet not) has plausible deniability and can say “It wasn’t us, it was an unscrupulous lead-gen contractor”. They probably send a strongly-worded letter to SureClick that says “Don’t do that again”.
SureClick, if they acknowledge this publicly (I bet not) has plausible deniability and can say ‘It wasn’t us, it was an unscrupulous affiliate”. They probably send a strongly-worded letter to OfferWeb that says “Don’t do that again”.
OfferWeb, if they acknowledge this publicly (I bet not) has plausible deniability and can say ‘It wasn’t us, it was an unscrupulous affiliate”. And maybe they DO fire ‘Andrew Talbot’, but that’s not any kind of victory, because he probably already has accounts with OTHER lead-gen outfits, which might even include those who also have AARP as
a client, or a client-of-a-client.
So the best-case result of this analysis being made public is that two strongly-worded letters get sent, the URLs in the spam and the trail of redirects change slightly, but the spam continues at the same volume and with the same results, and AARP continues to benefit from the millions of spams sent on their behalf.
I’m not a lawyer, but I was under the impression that CAN-SPAM imposed liability on the organization that was ultimately responsible for the spam being sent, but until the FTC pursues action against someone like this, or Gevalia, corporations and organizations will continue to get away with supporting, and benefiting from, millions and millions of spams.
As JD pointed out in a comment to a previous post: sorry, AARP, but none of us are going to be able to retire any time soon.

Let's talk CAN SPAM

Earlier this week I posted about the increased amount of B2B spam I’m receiving. One message is not a huge deal and I just delete and move on. But many folks are using marketing automation to send a series of emails. These emails often violate CAN SPAM in one way or another.
This has been the law for 13 years now, I find it difficult to believe marketers are still unaware of what it says. But, for the sake of argument, let’s talk about CAN SPAM.