AffiliateCashCard New Service to Drive Affiliate Offline Sales
Now here’s an interesting new think-outsite-the-box affiliate marketing concept. This company combines off-line word of mouth marketing with affiliate tracking in a unique way that sounds like it can be adapted to work with any existing affiliate program, regardless of the network or software the merchant currently uses. The unique way this model pulls everything together ensures affiliate sales get tracked. I think certain markets could do very well with this concept.
To illustrate how I think it would work, let me use the 1st company that came to my mind for this example - DentalPlans, one of my clients and a great fit for this model. DentalPlans already by the way offers affiliates offline marketing materials including brochures and flyers. The problem with offline affiliate tracking, is getting the consumer to add the affiliate ID or go to the DP site with a special URL, instead of just going to the main site and bypassing the affiliate. The AffiliateCashCard would solve that problem.
The second example that came to my mind was for SnapFish. Let’s assume some SnapFish affiliates are photo buffs or even pro photographers. The photographer affiliate is exhibiting at a local photo show or home and garden show or whatever. They hand out cards for $20 off photo gifts at Snapfish. (Or whatever the amout Snapfish would normally offer with an online coupon.) The affiliate gets paid for driving new offline customers that go online to use the card and the sale is tracked back to the affiliate who was the in-person referrer.
Intead of me writing a book about the concept, let me just point you to the web site. Here’s a press release about the new service.
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada (PRWEB) June 9, 2006 — GTP Financial Services, Inc. (dba “GoToPay”), the online payment technology company, today announced the launch of the first ever prepaid cash card program aimed at the off-net (offline) affiliate marketing arena – www.affiliatecashcard.com. A leading Internet Mail Order firm, Leading Edge Marketing, Inc. (“LEM”) recently printed and plans to hand out over $3Million USD worth of GoToPay’s AffiliateCashCards to its affiliate and customer base. LEM believes AffiliateCashCard will be a true differentiator in the hotly competitive affiliate marketing world where everyone is fighting to keep top producing affiliates happy with competitive commissions and strong affiliate support.
Online merchants, some of whom have tens of thousands of affiliates marketing their websites’ products online, need an “off-net” way of reaching new customers or driving their existing customers back to their websites. Online merchants normally use PPC (Pay Per Click Advertising), direct mail or even infomercials on late-night television. The Internet is getting extremely cluttered with millions of sites all clamoring for attention. Casual as well as experienced affiliate marketers are finding it extremely difficult to bring on new customers, and are finding that in order to be successful, their methods and operations need to be highly sophisticated and a full time effort. AffiliateCashCard cuts the online noise and enables affiliates to simply and effectively drive new customers online to receive their commissions without the new customer needing to enter an affiliate specific URL (which has been the root of the problem in off-net affiliate marketing to date).
What’s better than one person handing to a friend or new acquaintance a $50 card that is keyed to an affiliate and a particular web site? It’s about getting the new user to the web site, with the incentive for the affiliate to make that happen, all powered seamlessly by the back end engine of GoToPay’s AffiliateCashCard.
