Jonathan's Secrets Revealed

Many vendors have encountered this problem: affiliates start out strong, with high motivation and great sales, but their enthusiasm for your products fades over time, and your revenue stream shrinks. This article answers common questions about affiliate fatigue and teaches you how to run retention campaigns that help affiliates spark sales, benefiting your bottom line and their affiliate business.

Why do some affiliates stop promoting my products or services?

There are many reasons affiliates might stop promoting your products or services. The affiliate may have left the affiliate business, found a similar product with a better commission, or simply run out of good ways to promote your product. In order to combat affiliate fatigue, every successful affiliate program must conduct a series of retention campaigns to maintain a close relationship with power affiliates and give them ways to sell actively.

How should I relate to my affiliates?

The most successful affiliate programs rely on intimacy. Being in close contact with top affiliates is crucial to retaining them, helping the relationship move forward, and mending any issues that might arise. Don’t put yourself in the situation of “reacting” to a problem, but be proactive: keep your affiliates happy with your product and let them know if something is about to change.

What matters most to my affiliates?

Start by finding out what factors affiliates consider when choosing a product to promote, since these will be the main drivers of their behavior on an ongoing basis. According to the AffStat 2012 affiliate survey, the key drivers for affiliate retention are commission (cited by 19% of respondents), merchant reputation (13%), brand awareness (10%), and affiliate program reputation (9%). Other elements can also make a difference when comparing similar affiliate brands and products, such as ad unit availability and optimized landing pages (2%) or payment terms and methods (5%). Knowing  what your top affiliates need from you will help prioritize ways to improve your program and retention campaigns.

How do I craft retention campaigns?

Let’s use each of the key affiliate drivers listed above, plus a few others, to create some effective retention campaigns:

The above ideas are just a few examples of retention campaigns. The important thing to remember, above all, is to understand what drives your top affiliates, communicate with them constantly, and keep them actively engaged.

After all those ideas, I’m curious to hear from you. How do you make sure your affiliates don’t leave your program?

We are all looking to enhance customer experience, engage with clients in the context of their usage, where and how they want to interact. How do you bring commerce into the equation? How can you engage AND transact at every touchpoint and, going beyond this, be consistent across touchpoints and channels?

This is what the latest release from Avangate is about – helping software and cloud services companies unify siloed cross-touchpoint commerce experiences. Although it sounds complicated, it really is not. With more flexibility and control brought into the platform, you can take mobile to the next level, make better use of integrations via API, enhance customer support and interaction with partners to fuel extra revenue.

Transact at Every Touchpoint

Fully Branded Mobile Shopping Cart

Adapting your engagement strategy to keep up with touchpoint diversification requires a mature set of tools designed to power customer experiences that can be accessed on any screen. Avangate’s advanced mobile shopping cart not only enables you to reach smartphone and tablet users, but to increase conversion rates with tailored mobile shopping experiences. You’ll be able to use a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editor to personalize the mobile cart, or write your own CSS and JavaScript code for full customization.

Enhance billing flexibility with API updates

Avangate continues to invest in the evolution of our ecommerce API, providing you with a constant flow of enhancements designed to ensure that no touchpoint is unreachable. Using the Avangate API, it’s now easier than ever to extract product info based on stock keeping unit (SKU) details, retrieve subscription information, access payment data for shoppers, and resend invoices, even in multi-refund scenarios. In addition, the API supports the seamless transition of customers from the Avangate myAccount to your own shopper hubs, creating a superior experience that boosts sales.

The API enhancements also simplify other tasks, like monitoring subscriptions as they evolve through billing and contract cycles, tracking orders by source, managing multiple refunds, and even extracting complex ordering data stored by the Avangate system.

Salesforce.com Connector multi-currency and bundle support capabilities

Are you using both Salesforce.com and Avangate? Then why not use the two together? With Avangate’s Salesforce Direct Connector (SFDC), you can extract data from the Avangate system and send it into Salesforce.com automatically. The latest update to the SFDC delivers extra support to global businesses that sell in multiple currencies. Avangate handles advanced localization and more than 139 currencies, and now your international organization can take advantage of these multiple currencies for Salesforce’s opportunities, forecasts, reports, and more.

Selling your products or services in bundles? Then you’ll be happy to know that Avangate – Salesforce integrations now break down bundles and report order data for each product or service that actually reaches customers. This fine-tunes your analysis of what’s most popular with customers.

Drive Successful Interactions with the Avangate Customer Service Solution

Refund management expands to include partial refunds

Support customer loyalty by leveraging out-of-the-box assisted service functionality at your disposal with the updated Avangate platform. The latest upgrades empower customer service representatives to deliver the kind of superior support that increases user satisfaction. We’ve expanded the service resolution process with Extended Refund Management, offering you more control over resolving issues related to reimbursements. Total and multiple partial refunds can now be managed more efficiently, helping you deliver personalized service that meets customer needs.

Easy invoice management: resend invoices from the control panel

To enhance customer relationships further, Avangate produced assisted service enhancements that optimize invoice processing. On top of the automation options already available, new on-demand invoicing capabilities simplify the process of manually transmitting and re-transmitting invoices to customers so you’re working with consistent information.

User Activity Insights

The Avangate system has been enhanced with new self-service functionality, simplifying the tracking and logging of key actions performed by your cPanel users. This helps provide advanced insight into the activities of users such as customer service representatives. The new user activity reporting capabilities enable you to monitor a complex range of activities performed in the Avangate cPanel, segmented by cPanel user or action type, while enjoying data portability functionality for the info logged.

Grow Sales – Any Channel

Combine sales efforts across touchpoints with powerful, optimized distribution channels that diversify your reach and build new revenue streams.

With Customizable Partner Portals, Avangate is upgrading your channel commerce capabilities, enabling you to create branded, personalized experiences when selling to partner companies.

Even as partner relationships grow, it has never been easier to leverage the Avangate network of 37,000 affiliates. We’ve just introduced Enhanced Affiliate Newsletters that support advanced brand communication through customizable HTML messages. And to improve your relationships with affiliates, new cookie-less tracking capabilities ensure that your partners are rewarded for the sales and revenue they generate for your business.

Avangate is always ready to lend a helping hand, as illustrated by Outsourced Program Management (OPM) for Affiliates. Essentially, you’ll be able to tap Avangate experts for fully managed affiliate services, both multi-network and in the Avangate network, effortlessly building your partner base.

Express Payments Checkout Flow

Avangate has upgraded its collection of ordering flows with a new purchase process focused on streamlining payments. The new optimized payment flow minimizes billing data entry, and specifically facilitates high payment volumes through PayPal.

We recommend that you test the compatibility of existing shopping cart templates with the ‘Express payments checkout’ flow to ensure smooth purchase experiences for customers.

Sell More with Avangate Platform Enhancements

• Automated campaigns for upselling and cross-selling: Subscription commerce is just a part of what Avangate offers. A healthy consumer base can be monetized well beyond the recurring payments that come from subscription renewals, with only minimal investment. Upselling and cross-selling provide excellent opportunities to create revenue streams that not only offset any subscriber churn, but also drive profits. New automated campaigns for upselling and cross-sell ing provide additional flexibility in offering your customers appealing ways to buy more.
• Upselling with trials: Avangate’s upselling capabilities now include free trial offers for which payment details are collected. Whether used for promotional purposes, incentives, or as a spin on the traditional upsell, upselling with trials helps increase your revenue. Offer shoppers free trials of one product when they’re purchasing another, while also supporting seamless conversion to paid status at the end of the trial.
• Promotion enhancements: Speaking of incentivizing shoppers, order promotions and multi-currency discounts are also live, reflecting Avangate’s continuous commitment to providing the right tools to convert users into customers and support localization efforts.
• Direct Debit for Netherlands: To simplify payments even further, customers in the Netherlands can take advantage of a new way to pay for products. Avangate now supports Direct Debit for the Netherlands, having previously supported this payment method in Germany and Austria.

We hope you enjoyed reading about the new features in the Avangate 2013 Spring Release. Now it’s time to try them out! To get started, explore our documentation of these new ways to engage with customers and grow your sales.

At least ChannelBiz boldly commented along these lines – pointing to research that proves channel critics wrong – in any case, those “who have longed for the day when resellers are cut out of the equation”.

It’s a fact that power is shifting into the customers’ hands and purchasing habits are changing due to “online-first”, while the channel ecosystem is struggling to adapt to the new cloud challenges. This may make it seem like the only way to distribute SaaS products is to sell direct.

Yet a recent Forrester research, commissioned by Avangate, contradicts this assumption: 66% of software vendors surveyed say that channel partners are of strategic importance to their SaaS revenues. The channel is here to stay, although it is and will continue to undergo major disruptions as the software industry shifts from on-premise installation to SaaS delivery and from perpetual licenses to pay-as-you-go subscriptions.

In the next Avangate webinar, on April 16th, we are attempting to answer this question: “Are Channels Any Good at Selling SaaS and Cloud Services?”, together with Peter Sheldon, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. More than this, we’ll look at what it takes to develop and optimize your channels to increase SaaS and cloud sales. As software companies need to work harder than ever before at retaining their customers, it is critical to leverage the power of the channel to increase retention rate and reach further out in the market. Coverage of the topics below will help you get started using channels for customer acquisition and retention:

• Partner performance: Challenges your peers face enabling channels to sell SaaS products
• Revenue mix: Upcoming shift of the revenue mix between direct and indirect channels – how that mix (and your channel strategy) differs based on target market
• Channel tools: Technology investments, such as self-service tools, necessary to support channels and equip them to build long-term relationships with end-customers (and how to prioritize these/ benefits of partner order and revenue management)

All webinar participants will receive the supporting whitepaper “As SaaS Goes Mainstream, ISVs Invest in Channel Support Tools” conducted by Forrester Consulting (and commissioned by Avangate), which reflects the importance of channel sales to SaaS.

Sign up now to learn how channels can revolutionize your SaaS revenues. Feel free to share from your experience, or ask a question for the presenters below.

Like traditional installed software vendors, software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers are often interested in selling their products through a network of affiliates. But can the affiliate model, which traditionally focused on download portals, work for SaaS companies? This article explores that question in depth.

What is SaaS?

Before we establish what SaaS affiliates actually are, and what makes them different from “traditional” affiliates, we need to understand SaaS.

Software as a service (SaaS) is a “software delivery method that provides access to software and its functions remotely as a web-based service.” Consequently, SaaS affiliates must promote a service, rather than a physical or digital product or software license.

Usually delivered as a subscription on a cloud-based web (and/or mobile) application, SaaS represents a shift from traditional software licenses and products that must be downloaded and installed, than accessed from anywhere using the web. This change in delivery mode can affect the sales model as well.

Does SaaS emphasize the service offered or the software delivery method? 

Let’s use the example of PadiAct, a SaaS-based email subscription optimization tool, to answer this question. With the SaaS model, PadiAct users enjoy full access to their email services immediately after registering an account and choosing a pricing plan. No download or installation is required.

What SaaS affiliates are promoting and marketing to the end customer in the case of PadiAct is the attractive service provided by the merchant—that is, the email lead optimization tool for websites—rather than the (less important) fact that is offered via web-based software. In short, SaaS sales emphasize the unique service, not the delivery method.

Who are the SaaS vendors and SaaS affiliates?

In order to answer this question, we need to look closely at the SaaS merchants that want to grow their business using affiliate marketing.

As previously mentioned, a SaaS vendor is any merchant that offers access to a remotely hosted software application that lets end users access a value-added service. Because SaaS primarily changes the delivery model, not the need to sell software, many SaaS vendors still want to use affiliates to expand their business.

Thus the question becomes: which of today’s proven affiliate models are most likely to convert from the current model to the SaaS model?

Taking the example of the B2C shareware software world, we can confirm that traditional affiliate selling points centered on download portals, once the favorite channel for any software company interested in starting the mass distribution of their product.

How can the download portal be adapted to SaaS?

At a first glance, we might think that the portal model will not work for promoting SaaS products, mainly because the download portals are built around the idea of promoting software products designed for specific purposes—such as security software, video editing software, or PC optimizing software—instead of promoting services.

However, the shift to SaaS-friendly “download” portals is already happening. Adapting the download portal affiliate model to SaaS has given rise to the app portals or app stores that we already see appearing all around the web. Whether these app stores will be as successful for SaaS affiliates as download portals were remains to be seen, but at this moment the shift from download portals to app stores is already taking place.

In consequence, when we are looking at SaaS affiliates, we are looking at any website that is capable of promoting one or more niche services and referring qualified leads and sales to the merchants while being remunerated accordingly. The nature and quality of the service (formerly the product), not the delivery method, is what truly matters to affiliates, who can promote both traditional and SaaS software using appropriate channels.

Ecommerce websites inevitably have issues with shopping cart abandonment. As a result, companies invest major resources in finding methods to recapture the attention of buyers who don’t complete purchases. Just think about the number of people who visit your website every day, download your free products, add items into their carts, and then go into the checkout page and leave without purchasing. You’ve probably already come up with many ways to ask these visitors to come back and purchase, perhaps even offering a small discount to incentivize them to buy.

Our experience shows that using remarketing with Google Analytics is the best way to recapture the attention of customers who abandon their shopping carts. With remarketing, you get maximum exposure for your brand and products at a low cost, and also increase your shopping cart conversion rate by bringing in people who already engaged with your brand and are very likely to convert.

If you’re not convinced, look at the numbers: 20% of cart abandoners return to make a purchase after receiving remarketing messages, and these visitors spend about 55% more than those who do not abandon the cart. These statistics speak loudly enough for me to want to implement remarketing lists right about… now.

Getting Started with Remarketing Lists

Since last year, Google remarketing works with your Google Analytics account, so you don’t have to use separate remarketing codes for your web pages. This makes it a lot easier to implement remarketing lists and keep them updated over time. You can now see Remarketing Lists in the Admin section of your Google Analytics account.

Remarketing Prerequisites

Before setting up remarketing lists, you’ll need to do the following:

• Link your Google AdWords and Google Analytics accounts.
• Set up ecommerce tracking for your Avangate Cart in your Google Analytics account and ensure you are receiving accurate data.
  • If you don’t have ecommerce tracking set up yet, this step-by-step guide will show you how to use Google Analytics for high-performance analysis of your Avangate cart: Analytics Mini-Bible.
• Set up Avangate Cart Transaction goal.
• Update your privacy policy on the website.
• Decide who you want to target: all visitors who abandoned the cart, visitors who added multiple items, or perhaps even visitors who made a purchase and may need a related item.

The 4 Steps to Setting Up Remarketing Lists

After your prerequisites are in order, you can set up remarketing lists for shopping cart abandoners by following the 4 steps below.

Step 1: Update your tracking code

First, update the Google Analytics tracking code  inside your Avangate shopping cart template. This will enable the remarketing lists to track your shopping cart abandoners properly.

Replace the following Google Analytics code from your Avangate shopping cart template

…with the new code highlighted in the example below.

Please keep in mind that you must make the same update to the rest of the Analytics code existing on your website.

Step 2: Create your lists

Now that you’ve updated your Analytics code, start creating your remarketing lists. To get started, click on +New Remarketing List in your Google Analytics account. You will see the following options:

As you can see, you have the option to target all of your site’s visitors or visitors who have viewed a certain page of your site. However, you also have two more options: target all visitors who have completed a goal that you have previously set up in Google Analytics, or create your own remarketing type using Visitor Segments (which is similar to setting up Advanced Segments). For our remarketing list, we will use the final option: Visitor Segments.

Note: It is best to define who you want to target before setting up your remarketing lists. If you haven’t already done this, spend a few moments with your team identifying the top 3 remarketing lists (other than shopping cart abandoners) you’d like to create, according to your business needs. You’ll want to choose the list name, select the criteria for the visitors that will be added to that list, and define the length of time visitors can stay on that list. Pay particular attention to the name of the list; it should be descriptive enough so that you will remember its structure in the future.

To re-engage buyers who abandoned the shopping cart, start with the list of users who visited the checkout page but did not make a purchase. To define the user profile that collects the visitors you intend to target, select “Create my own remarketing type using Visitor Segments”:

Then, create a special Visitor Segment for the users who visited the Avangate checkout page but abandoned the shopping process (did not complete any transactions). The following image shows you how to define these visitors using filter criteria.

Congratulations! You’ve just created a sequence filter that will help you identify shopping cart abandoners and send targeted messages to convince them to re-engage with your brand or product. Here’s what the finished filter looks like:

Other options: In addition to filtering for visitors who accessed the shopping cart but didn’t complete any transactions, other lists of highly qualified prospective buyers could include:

• Visitors who purchased a product that are qualified for cross-sell or up-sell products.

• Visitors who purchased a product with a short lifespan.

• Visitors who downloaded free products.

• Visitors who signed in to your site.

Step 3: Collect user data

Once you have defined your remarketing list, you will have to wait to collect enough data for your remarketing campaigns. After 100 users meet your remarketing criteria (that is, 100 people abandon the shopping cart), the list of these users is automatically sent from Google Analytics to Google AdWords. After the list has been sent over, you can start remarketing to those visitors with Google AdWords.

Step 4: Remarket using AdWords

Steps one through three get lists of qualified leads into your AdWords account. Now, you can create and run custom ad campaigns for these visitors using Google AdWords. The creative materials for these remarketing campaigns should have specific messages that match the list of target users. For example, you might attract shopping cart abandoners with a message like “Finalize your purchase order! Get your product now with 30% off!” Have no worries, your targeted remarketing messages won’t be shown to people who are not on the remarketing list.

That’s it! In just four easy steps, you are remarketing using Google Analytics!

But wait, there’s more…

A few final remarketing tips & tricks that show the many possibilities out there:

• Create lists with visitors coming from different traffic sources (PPC, organic, etc.).

• Create lists with visitors who have engaged with your website in depth (based on time on site).

• Create custom offers for your lists based on previous behavior such as product/service interest or technology used.

• Offer promotional prices/discounts/bundles to your remarketing lists.

• Address users with a seasonal message (New Year’s, Easter, etc.).

A great complementary remarketing tactic that will make your remarketing efforts complete is setting up the Lead Management module available in Sky Commerce. This will allow you to set up follow-up emails for unfinished payments (with recovery rates up to 40%), abandoned shopping carts and free trial downloads. And it’s up to you to decide how many to send and how often.

Remarketing has proven to be a very powerful tool for increasing conversions by targeting engaged prospects who have already visited your site. Integrating remarketing with Google Analytics provides more power and may even transform abandoned carts from a liability into an asset for your company.

Like any other sales channel, the affiliate part of your business needs plenty of attention in order to grow. The way you provide that attention depends on your company’s current status, goals, and perspective on affiliate marketing.

When it comes to affiliate management, there are two main options to explore: an in-house affiliate program manager or an outsourced program manager (OPM). When determining which solution is the best fit for you, focus on these 5 points:

You shouldn’t evaluate these 5 elements separately, but rather take them all into consideration when evaluating affiliate management. Here’s a brief analysis of how each of these 5 points affects the two approaches you take to affiliate program management.

Cost

When it comes to cost, having an in-house affiliate program manager is typically more effective than hiring an OPM. However, as the program scales up and you need to get additional people to do the work, you may reach a point where it becomes more reasonable to hire an OPM agency.

If you’re a start-up company, you should definitely go with an in-house affiliate manager to develop an understanding of how affiliates can work for you. If you’re an established company, the extra cost of an OPM will also reflect the greater results you can get and the shorter ramp-up time for the program.

Recommendation: Dependent on your company’s budget and maturity.

Experience

You want the people that take care of your affiliate program to be as seasoned as possible and know the affiliate marketing business very well. Whether your affiliate program is just starting or your goal is to optimize and grow an existing program, you definitely want to have an experienced person to take care of matters. Unless you prefer to do it yourself in the beginning to develop an effective affiliate model specifically for your business, there’s no doubt about it—you will be better off with an agency’s expertise.

Recommendation: OPM agencies have experienced affiliate managers that can get the best results.

Relevance to your business

Suppose your company sells B2B software services. When having to choose, would you rather hire an affiliate program manager or OPM that only handled physical goods, or would you go with one that has at least some experience in the software field? I think the answer is pretty straightforward.

Recommendation: Find an in-house affiliate program manager or OPM agency with relevant experience.

Connections with affiliates

This is a very important aspect of your affiliate model, and appropriate connections should come along with being relevant to your industry. If the affiliate program manager or OPM has previously worked with companies that offered similar products to yours, then they’re bound to have strong connections with affiliates in that area. But just having the relationships is not enough. Try to determine the strength of these relationships with affiliates. This is important because it will determine the program manager’s ability to influence possible power affiliates to promote your products.

At the same time, keep in mind that some affiliates promote almost any kind of products –- discount websites, online catalogues, etc. These affiliates and their managers may be able to help out by expanding your reach, rather than your quality of relationships.

Recommendation: There’s not a clear choice here. Make your decision based on individual program manager or agency relationships.

Scalability

Once your program gets bigger, you will need to increase the amount of effort put into it. This can ultimately mean getting more people on the job. If you have an in-house program manager, then at some point you should consider complementing their efforts with an OPM agency. Or simply start with an OPM agency, after finding out how they can scale to run your program at the desired performance parameters.

Recommendation: OPM agencies are more scalable than in-house affiliate program managers.

Conclusion

To wrap up, I would say that in the final run you should always have at least 2-3 options to choose from, whether that’s different agencies or different in-house candidates. Choose your most important criteria from the list above, and then see which approach has the most strengths for your business.

For the seventh straight year, Avangate will be participating in CeBIT (March 5-9, 2013 in Hanover, Germany) the leading international digital conference, this year under the keynote theme “shareconomy.” You’re welcome to visit Avangate in Hall 6, Stand K18, throughout CeBIT 2013.

This year’s shareconomy theme focuses on “sharing knowledge, resources, and experience to create new forms of collaboration”, all possible due to the proliferation of Cloud services and increase in user trust. The theme aligns perfectly with Avangate’s focus as an agile SaaS-based service provider. Avangate offers the tools that help companies grow their revenues and reach new customers and segments in the shared economy.

At CeBIT 2013, Avangate will host a series of talks designed to communicate the value of establishing an “eCommerce Infrastructure” as the basis of a shared economy:

In addition to these expert talks, Avangate invites you to meet us over dinner at 6:00 pm on March 6 in the eCommerce Park. You need to register to attend. The first 100 appointments get free CeBIT admission, so sign up today! We’ll also give away an iPad mini.

By participating in CeBIT 2013, Avangate hopes not only to spread the word about how its products and services can help software and cloud services vendors accelerate their sales worldwide by embracing new business and revenue models, better engage with customers and increase retention, but also hear about vendors’ needs and goals for making their products a more integrated part of a shared economy where all members of the ecosystem benefit from one another.

Affiliate Marketing Works When Done Properly

Are you looking to increase Affiliate Network sales and not sure how? Have you connected to several affiliate networks and sales are still not picking up? Don’t have the additional staff to manage affiliates day in and day out?

If you are confronted with any of the above, or have just started in affiliate marketing and not sure how to go about it, don’t lose heart. Affiliate networks do require day-to-day management and support in order to be successful.

Of course we take pride in the number of affiliates we have attracted in the Avangate network, recently passed the 35,000 milestone and growing. But just being connected to many partners is not the recipe for success. What holds valid is that with the right tools, counseling, and guidance, the effectiveness of the affiliate channel is increased.

We have spoken about these issues with many people involved in affiliate marketing – on the vendor side, the affiliate managers, on the affiliate side as well as with experts in the field. And all of them emphasize the same key things: relationships & communication. Here’s what Marius Motohon, Affiliate Manager at Bitdefender, provider of innovative security solutions, commented on the subject: “It takes time to find the right partners and then you need to communicate with them on a constant basis. Automation and mass campaigns have their value, but the larger the deals, the more important it is to have one-to-one relationships, and this is what Avangate facilitated for Bitdefender.”

And just to prove this with hard core numbers, here are some results that Bitdefender obtained with the help of the Avangate Affiliate Doctor & affiliate managed services:

Read the full case study on the Clients section from our website.

Have you got a similar affiliate success story to share?

No, we’re not trying to jump the Valentine’s Day bandwagon and slap a heart atop talk about software and SaaS – although we do love the space and our role in it.  What we did want to share was something we see across ISVs worldwide as they work to gain “customer’s love” … that immeasurable goal so often the driver behind the more standard metrics of customer satisfaction, customer traction, and growth … and ultimately revenue.

eCommerce + ? = LOVE

Online, Pervasive, Customer Facing Systems – Expanded

What does this all come down to? In life, as in the business of software … well, love cannot be forced. Yet, a customer will be willing to try a product for free, read a peer review, ask a question on social media, watch a demo, and yes, even read the occasional marketing material.  With the average consumer touched over ten times before engaging a sales person or making a buying decision, vendors have to rethink how they respond to any customer signal and enable every touch point to either transact with, or to service the customer.  There is a reason Gartner calls eCommerce the 4th leg of CRM – the need to be able to extend eCommerce to when and where the customer wants is fundamental.  At the same time, eCommerce alone is not enough to drive LOVE.

eCommerce + Subscription Billing = LOVE

Subscriptions Extended To the Touch Points

While we all hear of the new revenue models (e.g., freemium, trial, and subscriptions) pushing vendors to have to first earn the right for customer love, as well as engage in a longer-term customer relationships, the commerce platform plays a key role to support the business implications of these revenue models. eCommerce coupled with Subscription Billing enables vendors to engage and service the customer across the life of the customer – from quoting, ordering, through to provisioning a new subscription or delivering new licenses for a downloaded product – enabling customer ordering (ecommerce, billing) and servicing within the context of the customer need (billing, support, channels).

This, in turn, will lead to strong, on-going vendor-customer relationships, increased retention rates, keeping brand consistency across channels, as well as empowering channels themselves (distribution) to support end-customer relationships beyond the first sale.

eCommerce + Distribution = LOVE

Sometimes You Need A Little Help From Your Friends

Building direct customer love is certainly critical, but with over 55% of revenue for technology companies still driven by their channel partners (Forrester Survey, 12/11), protecting your future revenue growth as your business models change requires you to build some channel love.  With revenue via channels actually increasing, not decreasing … affiliates directing ever more traffic and guiding buyer intention, resellers and distributors rapidly changing their own business models and becoming app stores for their niches, vendors who can effectively leverage the new world of eCommerce to enable their resellers to not only sell, but to grow end-customer use over time will certainly find long term and defendable customer love.

… but where does that leave us in our discussion?

Commerce = eCommerce + Subscription Billing + Distribution

The Whole Is Greater than the Sum of Its Parts

To this point, we are big believers that successful commerce requires bringing together eCommerce infrastructure and services, billing and distribution.  Why does it make sense to have it all under one roof?  Having the speed and flexibility to quickly launch new products supporting new revenue models, deploy new business models, and scale globally is critical in the very dynamic world of software and Cloud Service companies. Focus on what makes you loveable, increase your attention on your customer and not on your IT department supporting stitching together multiple systems that make up an increasingly complex business system.

There’s More Honey in the Pot

Stay tuned as we continue to explore other synergy aspects of a full commerce platform on this blog – starting from capabilities such as supported business models, integration tools, globalization and more.  In the meantime, we’d like to hear your thoughts on how you view the connection between customer satisfaction and retention and your commerce or billing platform – pros and cons, best practices.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

In mid-January 2013, Avangate attended the Affiliate Summit West 2013 conference in Las Vegas. As always, it went very well for Avangate, especially in the context of expanding our affiliate team and finding new business opportunities. But this year, more than any other, we saw proof that people recognize Avangate as a critical player in the software & cloud services vertical, both for its distribution capabilities and eCommerce features.

Affiliate Summit West 2013

We had lots of visitors during the Meet Market, including the well-known blogger John Chow. Then, on Sunday evening, Avangate hosted a dinner event with great turnout and fascinating conversation. On the educational side, Tuesday featured our session on affiliate program KPIs.  

We shared our knowledge in this field, developed through direct experience with our merchant partners. If you missed this session, don’t worry—you can attend our webinar on February 19th, 2013 (more updates coming soon), which will go over these affiliate insights once again.

Following the last shows, we saw an explosion of interest in monetization solutions for free software products, including bundling, toolbars, and even simple pay-per-install or download wrapped in an installer. Lately, we have seen lots of free software apps being launched, so I guess this is a growing trend. Do you have any success stories related to monetizing free software products? I would love to hear some of your thoughts, as we are currently exploring this opportunity ourselves.

Featured in The Blue Book Top 20 Affiliate Networks

I mentioned above the general feeling that Avangate is among the top solutions for software & SaaS distribution. We’ve also received official recognition of our status, as Avangate was recently ranked #14 in the Online Advertising Blue Book among the Top 20 Affiliate Networks. This is a great acknowledgement of the effort spent building our affiliate program over the years. If you look at this list from the software & cloud services perspective only, you will discover that we are among the top 3 solutions, which is fantastic!

To conclude, I would say that we have great plans for 2013 in terms of both the Avangate platform and the services that we offer. Of course, any feedback from your side is always appreciated, so don’t hesitate to contact us.