Recruiting customers as affiliates? E-mail signature referrals?

[pepo]

Dear Linda,

Thank you for this forum!

I am an affiliate program manager of an online niche gift shop. I have a question that I would appreciate your advice on. I feel that it may be of interest to other affiliate managers too.

Until today we have excepted to our affiliate program only affiliates who run websites.

The merchant I am working for has a big list of customers, and we have been playing with the thought of recruiting our customers (including those who don't own website) to join our team of affiliates. Our hope is that the affiliate commissions promised will motivate our customers to refer other people to our shop. In this context, we would like to ask our customers to add to their e-mail's signature the referral url code and earn commission with every customer referred to our shop by clicking on their signature's link.

However, we are a little hesitant with the implementation this customer / e-mail signature affiliate program. Our fear here is that customers will purchase products during sessions initiated through their own affiliate links, instead of for referring friends, ending up in less referrals for our shop and more existing customers gaining discounts / commissions for their own orders.

It is true that we can include on our program terms a clause that such conduct is not acceptable (I think Amazon Associates does that), but it seems it will be very difficult to enforce such a policy.

By the way, if I am not mistaken, I remember reading somewhere that Barnes & Noble had an e-mail affiliate program offering customers to add an affiliate url code to their e-mail signature. As far as I remember this program was discontinued several years ago. Anyone know why it was closed?

I would appreciate if anyone could share their thoughts on the above mentioned matter.

Thank you in advance and all the best!

 

[Linda Buquet]

You could try it. My guess is it won't be that effective. I would take that extra effort and put it into your affiliate program instead.

Just my quick 2 cents...

 

[Blackpool55]

I agree with Linda too, this doesnt seem that effective although you can always see it as trial and error maybe.

 

[Smaxor68]

Could work but the way it would need to be structured I think would be Virally ( not sure how you spell that ). Make something cool that they'd want to show their friends and that would get them some sort of discount themselves if their friend purchased, like a % offer their next purchase. So almost like an incentivized viral mail piece. Or attach a unique link to the viral page at the bottom of the orders with some small instructions. Those are just some ideas. But I think you're going down a great track with getting your customers to promote for you. MLM is a proven business model, and fiends selling friends works. Just have to play with some ideas to parlay it into your space.

Just my 3 cents.

Smaxor