Affiliate Moguls Blog
About Affiliate Moguls
Founded by Meghan Damico and Ryan Alarid, Affiliate Moguls is a consulting business that specializes in hiring, training, and optimizing affiliate and email media buying programs.
With over 15 years of direct response marketing experience, they bring a wealth of experience and connections to each partnership.
10 Tips For Your Business When #TimesAreTough
Written by Meghan Damico on April 1, 2022
Most of my blog post ideas come from real life situations.
Whether it’s coaching our current clients, reliving past successes or failures, or just connecting with other people in the industry.
Lately, I’ve been hearing that traffic and revenue is down for a lot of folks this quarter.
If you’re in the wellness space, this is particularly concerning as Q1 is historically a strong quarter.
If you’ve been in this business long enough, you know this volatility is par for the course.
The health of the direct response industry is dependent on a lot of factors: What party is in office, the state of the economy, COVID concerns, Big Pharma, FTC/FDA regulators, and display/native network guidelines to name a few.
Tough times are inevitable in business. And when my colleagues and I were going through them we’d get by with grit and a little humor (we dubbed 2019 #timesaretough). So here are 10 monetization and acquisition tips for when #timesaretough:
1.) Publish a flash renewal
This is the quickest and easiest way to make extra money. This can be a buy-one-get one offer, a holiday specific promotion, free shipping, etc.
2.) Slap a deadline on a product
Special deadline price, for example.
3.) Be more open to 3rd party sends
If you haven’t tested outside offers to your email list, now is the time. You can make just as much money, and sometimes more, selling other people’s products than your own.
4.) Host a live event or webinar
This is more time intensive, but can pay off big time if the audience gets deeper access to the guru and the content is valuable and relevant.
5.) Bundle products
Take more than one product and sell it as a bundle to your best buyers.
6.) Cut the “fat” in your marketing budget
Outside of salaries, a DR business's biggest expense is marketing. Transition to CPA or guaranteed partnerships only. Cut your testing budget.
7.) Assess LTVs
Know what you can afford to pay and adjust, if necessary.
8.) Focus on NEW buyers
There is a 15% - 20% overlap of email addresses in our industry. If you don’t have a way of knowing if you’re bringing on new buyers, find one! You don’t want to be paying publishers to advertise to people you can advertise to for free.
9.) Get rid of extra inventory
When you have a surplus of premiums or “old” products from past promotions, create a new, special promotion to sell them at a steep discounted price.
10.) Review autoresponder series
Ensure your best selling products are introduced early on to the subscriber. People are more likely to purchase another item after they just purchased something.
Some of these should be done regularly, not just during #timesaretough.
But, many of these basic things fall between the cracks because we’re so busy working on the next “big thing.”
In the end, some money is better than no money at all.
And it may be just enough to dig you out of a dangerous hole.
