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Common Newsletter Mistakes & Fixes
Creating a newsletter can be complex
with all the technical variables involved in addition
to developing the content. With this in mind, you can
avoid the most common mistakes if you test your newsletters
before you send them to your affiliates.
The best way to test your newsletters is to send the email
to a few different test accounts. To do this, create a
few different affiliate accounts that have different email
addresses. Make one go to your work email, one to a Hotmail
address (since a large amount of affiliates use Hotmail
addresses), and one to a third email address, such as
a Yahoo! or AOL account. Join your offer in all three
affiliate accounts, and then assign these affiliate accounts
to an affiliate group called "Email Testing".
This will make it easy to test your newsletters by selecting
this affiliate group as your recipient without having
to remember specific affiliate ID's or user names.
Of course, mistakes can and do happen, but we cover some
of the most common mistakes below to help you avoid them.
Mistake #1 - Mis-using [SITE.CODE] to
provide customized linking code.
Use of the [SITE.CODE] field is explained in detail here.
Some of the mistakes we see in using this field are:
- Entirely forgetting to replace
the affiliate encrpyted code with the [SITE.CODE]
field
- Forgetting to replace the affiliate
encrpyted code in all portions of the linking code,
such as only replacing it in the HREF and not the
banner code or 1x1 pixel code.
- Not using the proper syntax, such
as (SITE.CODE), [site.code], or [Site.Code]
To avoid these mistakes, complete your
newsletter first, and customize your links after you are
done. When you are done, use the "Find/Replace"
tool in your text editor when you are editing the linking
code for your newsletters. First, copy your own affiliate
encrypted code from your linking code, which is the bold
portion in the code below:
http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=lMh2Xiq9xN0&offerid=38994.10000025&type=4&subid=0
Then, choose the "Find/Replace" tool and use
it to find this 11 character string and replace all incidences
with [SITE.CODE]. This will ensure you don't miss one
incidence or accidentally use the wrong syntax.
If you were to make a mistake, the consequences can include
links that don't properly redirect to your site, or your
affiliate account being credited with activity (impressions,
clicks, sales) that other affiliates generate from these
links.
Mistake #2 - Wide, wide email.
Sometimes we see emails from merchants that are very wide
and force affiliates to scroll far to the right. (If you're
not sure what this means, click here
for an example.) Why is this bad? Technically speaking,
nothing is wrong, but it's just plain bad design. It usually
happens if a merchant places examples of 468x60 banners
next to each other, so the page ends up at least 936 pixels
wide. This is about 50% wider than a web page should be,
only provide link examples one below another, unless they
are small or thin.
This also occurs when a merchant does not place linking
code within a text box. This creates a long, unbroken
string of text due to the length of the URL's in the linking
code. That's why you should use our templates that have
the "form" and "textarea" tags pre-set
for including linking code in a text box that prevent
the endless scrolling to the right.
Click here
for an example of better alignment. You can also adjust
the textarea line and row dimensions to make them taller
and thinner, as we have done in this example (7x30 instead
of 5x40). If you make a habit of testing and previewing
your emails, you'll avoid this common mistake.
Mistake #3 - Providing instructions for getting
links or updating offers instead of providing direct links.
We provide a list of URL's here
that you can customize to direct affiliates to specific
pages in the LinkShare interface to your create links
page or to update to a new offer. However, many merchants
still provide laborious steps to affiliates that can easily
confuse them. Instead, just provide a direct link that
affiliates can click that will bring them right to the
page.
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