Building an Affiliate Program from the Ground Up that Exceeded

Yowza Fitness is a factory-owned manufacturer of fitness equipment, offering a direct-to-consumer distribution model to provide top-quality, commercial-grade ellipticals, treadmills, and other fitness machines at over 50 percent off comparable traditional retail prices.

Yowza Fitness approached iMarketing Ltd. at the very early stages of the company's launch – before its full web site even went live. Yowza was on a fast track to get its business up and running, and knew that it wanted a strong marketing program in place right out of the gate. The company wanted to implement an affiliate program that could demonstrate immediate results. This was especially important as affiliate publishers tend to stop adding clients in the late fall, when the busy holiday season bogs them down administratively. Yowza was working quickly to build out its web site with product descriptions, informative videos, and more, but recognized the urgency of starting on the affiliate outreach before the site was fully complete. Yet with little more than a URL featuring a photo and a "buy now" button to start, earning the trust and commitment of affiliate publishers – who need to take on full risk upfront and want to see proof of a web site's sales volume and viability – posed a major challenge.

Yowza knew it needed an agency with a transparent approach – one that understood the unique challenges that existed, was tuned into the specific needs of its business, and could deliver results. Enter iMarketing.

Knowing that time was of the essence, iMarketing launched an aggressive recruitment initiative in November 2009 to the web's top affiliates, identifying thousands of possible sites within the fitness vertical to earn their loyalty and get their buy-in to the program. With the Yowza team still adding content to the web site, iMarketing knew it needed to tap into the key needs of the affiliate network in order to win their trust. Building on its years of experience working with thousands of affiliates, iMarketing put a heavy emphasis on its ability to provide publishers with a one-stop resource and always-available partner for everything and anything they might need along the way. This was incredibly important in setting the tone, and convincing affiliates who might otherwise be concerned with the amount of work it typically takes to build a relationship with a new and as-yet-untested site. As Yowza continued to build out its web site, iMarketing continued to pursue more affiliate publishers, now with content in hand. The firm showcased the added benefit of a fully functional, dynamic web presence including in-depth product details, useful buying guides, product comparison tools, and of course, sales traffic.

• Within two months, iMarketing achieved the impossible, signing more than 500 affiliates to the Yowza program, with approximately 40 actively sending clicks and impressions to the site. Because iMarketing had focused on partnering with the most relevant affiliates in the fitness category, these 40 publishers alone exceeded expectations, driving in 92 sales by January – nearly 20 times the number of sales anticipated for such a young program that had launched with little more than a single image on its web site.

• In July 2010, one of the biggest publishers on the web sent Yowza its first link, reinforcing how far the site's reputation (and publisher relationships) had come. Yowza's affiliate program now boasts more than 2,000 publishers, with nearly ten percent of them active – a milestone that takes some brands years to achieve. According to Commission Junction (CJ), the leading network for affiliate marketing, Yowza is number one in the fitness category and is 12th overall for EPC (earnings per 1,000 clicks), which reflects a publisher's potential earnings through the site – a key factor in making the program an attractive one for affiliates. Yowza's affiliates include nearly 100 of the top publishers in the CJ network, and close to 1,000 of its publishers are ranked as 4 and 5 bar partners by CJ, putting them in the top two tiers of publishers based on earnings per month for the network. As a result, the Yowza program continues to grow, even in what are typically considered the slower seasons for fitness equipment sales. And as it gains momentum, iMarketing's affiliate team remains hard at work, continually recruiting new publishers to join in the fray. This growing publisher base has increased the exposure of the Yowza brand, taking it from about 100,000 impressions per month to over 500,000 per month.

• The success that iMarketing has achieved to date has also created an even stronger partnership with the Yowza team itself, with the client actively participating in the recruitment efforts by flexibly responding to affiliate needs and requests – whether it's calling publishers directly to talk about the program, or flying them out to test the Yowza equipment first-hand and generate their own content to increase search placement. This has provided Yowza with a tremendous competitive advantage and further improved its relationships with its affiliates. Yowza's continued enhancements to its web site has also taken it from a .6 percent conversion rate in its first month to a year-to-date average of 2 percent – considerably higher than the average affiliate program.

• As Yowza launches new products and adds new brands, iMarketing will be able to tap into its existing affiliate relationships to maximize traffic, while minimizing client costs. The firm also regularly fine-tunes Yowza's affiliate partners with contests and other incentives to allow for a more consistent balance of sales from both smaller and larger publishers over time.