How to hire an affiliate

Yesterday I talked about all the reasons that using affiliate email can hurt overall delivery. In some cases, though, marketing departments and the savvy email marketer don’t have a choice in the matter. Someone in management makes a decision and employees are expected to implement it.
If you’re stuck in a place where you have to hire an affiliate, how can you protect the opt-in marketing program you’ve so painstakingly built? Nothing is foolproof, but there are some ways you can screen affiliates.

Who are they?

First step is to ask them for a bunch of information about their company.

  • What is their full corporate information: company name, address, phone number and online URL.
  • Where do people sign up for mail?
  • What domains and IPs they use to send email?
  • Do they use ESPs or manage their own servers?
  • Will they contract out your send to other parties?

Trust but verify

Next step is to visit the websites they shared with you.

  • Does their corporate site have any person’s name on it anywhere?
  • Does the corporate site mention any of their brands? Again, if they’re hiding something why are they hiding it?
  • Does the signup site link back to the parent company?
  • Is there any information about the corporate structure on the signup site?
  • Is there a privacy policy on the site?

?When should you worry?

Signs that all may not be as it seems.

  • When the vendor can’t or won’t tell you the websites where they collect email addresses.
  • When you visit the website they told you about, but there isn’t a clear way to opt-in to any mail.
  • When the privacy policy of the signup site mentions a completely different site somewhere in the text.
  • When they won’t tell you what domains they use in email.

Any one of these things signals something might not be right. But any combination of them should set off alarm bells.

Other investigative routes

Check the company and your contacts through LinkedIn. Do they have a profile and if so, how does it match with what they’ve told you? And, really, what sales person doesn’t have a LinkedIn page?
Sign up for their mail. I suggest you don’t do it through your regular mailbox, setup a freemail account on each of the major services and use that. See what happens. Monitor them for a while. The mailbox I shared in my earlier affiliate post was almost 2 years after I first signed up at a job site. It took about 6 weeks to start getting stuff that wasn’t job offers. Then it took another few months before I started getting actual spam. For that mailbox I initially signed up June 6; the first unauthetnicated and non-job email showed up September 16 (Quick Loans eLoanPersonal). The address got a mix of requested mail and spam through October 6 and then the spam floodgates opened.
One of the biggest red flags is not telling you what domains and IPs they send from. If you sign up for their mail you’ll get it. I once had a customer tell me their brands, domains and IPs were proprietary information. That’s just silly. And it reeks of the sender being a spammer and not wanting you to know they are using botnets.
Ask them how they monitor for and deal with delivery problems.
These questions and investigative techniques aren’t fool proof. But they’ll open up a discussion with the vendor. I pointed out some of the red flags here, but the crux of the matter is this is a company you are hiring to do work for you. If they do it badly you’re not just wasting money, you’re risking having to clean up a deliverability mess. Can you trust this company to value your mail and your company reputation the same way you do? If the answer is no, maybe this isn’t the vendor for you.

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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.

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Who pays for spam?

A couple weeks ago, I published a blog post about monetizing the complaint stream. The premise was that ESPs could offer lower base rates for sending if the customer agreed to pay per complaint. The idea came to me while talking with a deliverability expert at a major ESP. One of their potential customer wanted the ESP to allow them to mail purchased lists. The customer even offered to indemnify the ESP and assume all legal risk for mailing purchased lists.
While on the surface this may seem like a generous offer, there aren’t many legal liabilities associated with sending email. Follow a few basic rules that most of us learn in Kindergarten (say your name, stop poking when asked, don’t lie) and there’s no chance you’ll be legally liable for your actions.
Legal liability is not really the concern for most ESPs. The bigger issues for ESPs including overall sending reputation and cost associated with resolving a block. The idea behind monetizing the complaint stream was making the customer bear some of the risk for bad sends. ESP customers do a lot of bad things, up to and including spamming, without having any financial consequences for the behavior. By sharing  in the non-legal consequences of spamming, the customer may feel some of the effect of their bad decisions.
Right now, ESPs really protect customers from consequences. The ESP pays for the compliance team. The ESP handles negotiations with ISPs and filtering companies. The cost of this is partially built into the sending pricing, but if there is a big problem, the ESP ends up shouldering the bulk of the resolution costs. In some cases, the ESP even loses revenue as they disconnect the sender.
ESPs hide the cost of bad decisions from customers and do not incentivize customers to make good decisions. Maybe if they started making customers shoulder some of the financial liability for spamming there’d be less spamming.

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Payday loan mail

Mickey has a great story of what happened when he gave a lead gen company his email address. Over 200 emails in 2 weeks from companies that seem unrelated to the signup company.
It’s this behavior by PayDay senders that causes their mail to be filtered and has caused many, many ESPs just to prohibit that kind of mail on their systems. It’s very much the ugly underbelly of email marketing.

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