BuyWithMe.com Affiliate Case Study

The Campaign

BuyWithMe.com was informed by multiple affiliate networks that they were not well enough established to be able to run a traditional affiliate program. BuyWithMe.com requested that we find a way to build a successful affiliate program that would support their daily deals e-commerce website. Our challenge was to produce positive ROI based on their current business conditions.

The Challenges
When we launched the program we were limited to only four major markets to attract customers from. This limited not only the potential customer pool but also the desirability of the program from those affiliates that marketed nationally. Since we launched the program the business has expanded into more than a dozen major markets.

Some of our other concerns included potential fraud issues because the program agreed to pay on membership acquisition. The lack of traditional affiliate tools such as data feeds and coupon management systems also created non-trivial challenges.

The final hurdle to overcome was to determine how to work with aggregators in the daily deals space. We determined that it was not in the best interest of the business to work with just any aggregator. Aggregators that wanted to work with BuyWithMe.com needed to establish their own brand identities and traffic sources before we included them in our program.

The Solution
We established a traditional affiliate program using Commission Junction (CJ). We agreed that there was value in acquiring new members and settled on a fixed cost per member. We also built a sliding commission scale for sales of between 8% and 10%.

To help limit potential fraud we created rules around the acquisition of new members. We used the expected 1st month conversion percentage of other channels as a measuring stick to determine a baseline conversion percentage. We also locked out potential affiliates that share their commissions with new members to make sure that those new members that do signup were doing so because they were truly interested in what BuyWithMe.com was offering and not just the commission share from the affiliate.

Once the program was established we began recruiting affiliates into the program using not only the access we have to all of the major affiliate networks but also our own internal database which includes the top 250+ affiliates in the category. While we were recruiting we were also working with BuyWithMe.com to establish affiliate data feeds and coupon management software.

The Results
The results set is based on the initial 5 months of the programs performance.
600+ affiliates in the program
15%+ of all affiliates contributing sales on a monthly basis
Nearly 400,000 unique visitors
$100,000+ in monthly revenue multiple times
8,000+ new members
12,000+ sales

We have been able to establish an affiliate program that in the first 6 months is expected to generate nearly half a million dollars in total revenue. Over the course of the next year we expect the channel to generate roughly three million dollars in revenue.