Further Updates to the Affiliate Email Tool for Merchants

Once in a while there comes along a feature request that’s so sensible and useful that you wonder how it stayed off the development list for so long.  In my case, this happened most recently when one of our merchant program managers asked how to send an email to all of their affiliates that weren’t actively promoting the program.  In other words, how to easily contact their inactive affiliates.  It took me a while to formulate a response as I was so surprised that we didn’t have this functionality built in, particularly since we had done a large round of updates to the email tool back in January 2010.

Well, flash forward a few days from that request and the functionality is – at long last – in place.  Merchants going to the “Tools” -> “Email Affiliates” page of their AvantLink account will find two new options in the “Send To:” list:

[Edit: A third option was added after this post, to clarify the distinction between affiliates who have never been active with the merchant program and those who were once active, but are not currently.]

• All Affiliates with recent traffic (i.e. “actives”)
• All Affiliates that haven’t sent any traffic recently (i.e. “inactives”)
• All Affiliates that have never sent any traffic (i.e. “never actives”)

So now it’s possible for a merchant program manager to quickly send an email to all of their inactive affiliates and, for instance, encourage them to use a new ad campaign or datafeed tool.  Or send a message to all of the active affiliates and thank them for their efforts.

Incidentally, our “recent traffic” metric is how we determine whether an affiliate is actively promoting a program.  If the affiliate has sent at least one click-through, or recorded a single ad impression, for a merchant program in the past 30 days then they are considered to be “active”; if not, then they are “inactive”.

I hope this feature will come in handy for many of our users out there!

-David Clark
AvantLink.com