Microsite landing page

Your microsite is the first impression that your prospective affiliate will have of you as an operator. Since “there is no second chance for a good first impression” we believe that the need for a professional looking microsite should be on your list of priorities, whether you are launching your first affiliate programme or re-launching a new one…

We provide our clients with the necessary guidelines to prepare a conversion focused microsite to make way for a profitable new affiliate programme.

We offer several options, from customisable templates to tailor-made solutions, depending on your budget and time to go live. All our solutions are backed up by years of experience in iGaming affiliate marketing and our focus for good design will make sure you stand out from the rest.

Complete 360° Branding

We will make sure that your affiliate programme’s look and feel is consistent with your brand or product as the microsite is the first step in the branding process. A consistently branded affiliate programme is often overlooked but it is extremely important as it implies trust and professionalism. Our new affiliate interface is very flexible when it comes to UI customisation, therefore any branding which is applied to the microsite can then be applied to the affiliate interface making the whole visual experience for the affiliate seamless and consistent.

Microsite Landing Page

The microsite landing page has to be striking and must clearly show the affiliate what you are offering in terms of reward plans, products, payments etc. We make use of the best conversion design techniques such as ‘The Gutenberg Rule’ to properly guide users through information and to convert leads into sales.

Displaying Reward Plans & Commissions

We provide guidelines on how to prepare your content and how to display reward plans to your prospective affiliates in the most clear and professional manner.

Reward Plan Page

Affiliate Signup

Easier Affiliate Signups

Our development team is always striving to streamline the most important aspect of an affiliate microsite – the sign up process. For affiliates to signup faster and painlessly we reduced the process to a one-page signup and we’re always exploring new ways to enhance the overall user experience.

FAQs & Templates

Our client services team will guide you on how to prepare your affiliate programme FAQs to answer your affiliates’ basic questions and make them feel welcome. Email templates will be provided to avoid unnecessary canned responses to your affiliates and speed up the communication process.

CMS and SEO

You can access your microsite content directly from your admin interface – you also have all the necessary tools to keep your microsite updated with news and promotions and to help you establish good SEO.

Yet another successful implementation – Boylesports affiliate program goes live using NetRefer affiliate marketing platform to take its existent affiliate program to the next level.

We are delighted with this partnership and look forward to a successful collaboration

Most companies that are considering an affiliate programme or company departments that are not directly involved with affiliates probably see affiliate marketing as a black box. People can see the input which is the customer activity, the banners on websites and realize that affiliates get paid commission on performance at the end of the month…but what happens in the meantime? What is involved in setting up an affiliate programme?

A lot of things take place from the signing of the contract to the first payments to affiliates… these are summarised in different phases below and are aimed at making everyone outside the main affiliate team appreciate the intricate relationship that exists between an operator and its software provider.

Phase One: Signing the Contract and planning the implementation

After a company contracts NetRefer as the affiliate software provider, the first thing the NetRefer does is to work with the operator and decide on an implementation plan. The plan involves all steps from the initial set up of a clean system, data transfer set up, system population, microsite setup, soft launch and the live launch of the system.

This full system set up can take anytime from 4 to 6 weeks and it depends a lot on the amount of effort the operator puts into getting the programme live. Once the base system is provided, this is fully customised in terms of branding and configured to the clients’ specifications.

At this stage, the data transfer protocol is decided on and the system is set to receive data from the operator. In the meantime, the initial banners are uploaded to the system and the affiliate managers start setting up the initial reward plans to assign to different affiliate groups.  These are essential elements of the programme as they affect the earnings of the affiliate.

Phase Two: Capturing Data

Once the system is live, the affiliate process is given birth. Affiliate places the banner online with promotions and offers that are set to attract prospective customers. Once a potential customer visits the affiliate site and clicks on a banner, a tag is stored in a cookie on the potential customer machine and is stored there until the lead converts into an actual customer. Upon conversion, the information is passed and stored by the operator, who on a daily basis passes to NetRefer all data relating to the registration and activity relating to all affiliated customers.

Once this data is processed by NetRefer, it will be shown to the affiliate who brought the customer to the operator. The affiliate can delve deeper and request reports and analyse various aspects of his campaigns so as to optimise his operations.

Phase Three: Calculating Affiliate Rewards

This is not the whole process yet, as at the end of the month, NetRefer together with the operator verifies the whole monthly dataset again to ensure its integrity and the final commissions for affiliates are calculated. Apart from these checks NetRefer provides the administrator with a set of warnings and reports that highlight areas that must be looked at before payments are authorised. Once these are cleared, the affiliate manager will be given clearance to initiate payments to affiliates via various payment solutions supported by the affiliate system.

In the Background:-

During all the above phases, all the systems using NetRefer are monitored 24/7 from banner serving, registrations and database performance. This is done to make sure that everything is working fine. Given that the unpredictable sometimes happens, systems are in place so that in the unlikely event that the system goes down, this is transferred to a disaster recovery unit and restored again within a couple of minutes. This ensures the smooth running of an affiliate programme and minimises the damage caused by downtime.

All this process highlights the intimate relationship that must exist between an operator and it affiliate software provider. The relationship goes beyond the supplier – client relationship as it is a partnership that is aimed at making the affiliate marketing process as seamless as possible, giving a better reputation to the operator as well as the software on which the system is run.

NetRefer is proud to announce the launch of its brand new affiliate interface, which has been completely renovated to improve affiliates’ user experience.

Yes, that’s right – inspired by affiliates for affiliates!
NetRefer has listened to affiliates’ feedback to come up with the most affiliate-friendly interface around. After all NetRefer is all about keeping your affiliates happy.

Main benefits of the NEW Affiliate Interface

	Better User Experience Throughout		Enhanced Media Gallery functionalities
	Intuitive and Easy to Use		Additional reports
	Real time Dashboard		Moving and hiding of portlets according to affiliate’s preferences
	Added graphs and clearer statistics		A new framework that ensures faster page load times
	Better skin customisation possibilities		Completely re-written from the ground up to meet affiliate needs

Some Screenshots from the new inteface

Messaging

Reports

Media Gallery

My Account

One of the iGaming industry’s largest and most successful suppliers of affiliate management software, NetRefer, has released a new interface designed to make life easier for its clients.
Read more on IGB’s website

Malta. 17 June 2010. (PRESS RELEASE) NetRefer has been crowned at EGR B2B Awarded as the Best Affiliate Software Provider for 2010.

This prestigious award recognises NetRefer’s commitment to provide the best affiliate marketing software…

The award giving ceremony, which was held at Old Billingsgate in London, saw the best of breed providers of products/services to the iGaming industry competing for awards in a number of different categories.

NetRefer CEO Raphael Arnold said: “This EGR B2B Award is a very important recognition to all the Team behind NetRefer for their effort to provide our clients with the best product and service possible. This award coincides with the recent launch of the new interface for affiliates that further reinforces our commitment to continuous improvement. One thing that we can guarantee our clients is that we are always working at improving our product to make sure they have the best affiliate marketing tools at hand.”

NetRefer would like to thank all its clients and their affiliates, for providing feedback that helps it improve the software and keep it abreast with the latest trends in the industry, and its dedicated team for leading NetRefer to this success.

Its official! NetRefer wins the most prestigious award of the year– Best Affiliate Software provider! Our team is proud and honored to hold such a trophy. We shall strive to hold and improve our standing as the best affiliate software provider. A big thank you is due to our Clients and partners who inspire and continuously challenge us with new ideas for future developments.

31 May 2010, Malta. Leading performance marketing software provider, NetRefer, has released a new and improved affiliate interface that is set to become an industry standard as it makes affiliates’ life much easier. Affiliates will now have access to more detailed, better presented reports which means less time lost searching for useful information.

NetRefer revealed that its vision has always been that of creating a system that provides accurate, transparent and timely information to marketing decision makers on both the affiliates’ and operators’ side. With the launch of the new affiliate interface, which coincided with the release of an upgrade for the operator’s system, NetRefer is making sure it provides clients and their affiliates with the best affiliate management platform available on the market today, built using the latest web technologies.

During the development of its new affiliate interface, NetRefer collaborated with a number of affiliates who, all together, provided useful insight as to how the interface should be streamlined and simplified to make it superior to any other systems they use. According to Johan Zammit, CTO of NetRefer, this has now been achieved and affiliates can now start enjoying the fruits of a system that was specifically designed for them. Mr. Zammit continued by saying that “NetRefer used all the knowledge gained during the past five years, added affiliate feedback, and came up with a new affiliate interface that is state of the art”.

NetRefer is a firm believer in continuous improvement and following this launch, it will still be looking forward to continue receiving further affiliate and operator feedback that will help it improve its product even more.

NetRefer is a leading provider of the most comprehensive and sophisticated Performance Marketing Software for the iGaming and Financial Trading industries. Its solution is capable of handling the whole affiliate life cycle from media serving, tracking, affiliate management, customer reporting, affiliate CRM and financial management including automated payments. Currently NetRefer supplies its system to some of the iGaming and Financial Trading industry’s most recognisable brands including Betfair, Unibet, Expekt, PaddyPower, PKR as well as FXClix. For more information about NetRefer please contact or click here to Schedule a Demo

Since the start of the global recession, we have seen an increase in the number of operators giving more attention to affiliate marketing. Before, it was mainly regarded as a nice-to-have, or something that one could postpone his decision on whether to adopt or not. However, as marketing budgets started to be more tightly controlled and stricter ROI (Return On Investment) analysis was introduced, pay for performance models have now became a must-have.

Large operators who were previously running an affiliate programme just for the sake of having an additional marketing/acquisition channel, started recruiting fully-fledged affiliate marketing teams and putting more pressure on achieving significant returns from this channel. On the other hand, some of the smaller operators have been focusing on affiliate marketing as their main marketing channel, given the potential returns it can provide.

So could we have possibly found the Holy Grail through online affiliate marketing?

Unfortunately the answer is no. Although this marketing channel has proven to be successful given that is based on performance-based rewards, it is reaching a saturation point and is becoming increasingly difficult to drive the needed growth. As the number of companies looking for good-quality affiliates increases, competition only gets tougher.

Where is this race for recruiting the best online affiliates leading to?

As basic economic theory states, where the rate of demand for a good or a service increases more than rate of supply, prices are naturally pushed up. We are indeed faced with an affiliate-dominated market, where good-quality affiliates who are in large demand can, to a certain extent, dictate the price that operators pay for their services. This market situation has been driven by two main factors:

1. Operators offering better rewards and conditions to poach affiliates from competitors and;
2. The fact that most operators offer an undifferentiated product (not having a visible unique selling point which compels affiliates to promote them)

Only a handful of large brand owners have been able to resist some of this pressure; however, as competition gets tougher, it won’t be easy to fight back.

What can be done to increase the supply of affiliates?

Think out of the box, use lateral thinking and try to find a solution that doesn’t leave your company dependent on one type of affiliate. At the end of the day, who said that online affiliates are the only kind of affiliate that can effectively promote your online product/service?

Originally, the move towards online affiliate marketing was a natural one as it provided the fastest call-to-action. Potential players are already surfing online, they can see an advert for a sportsbook, casino, poker room or games product on an affiliate site and with just a click of a mouse and a short signup process, they can find themselves on the operator’s site hopefully using one of the products.

Ultimately as they say, need is the mother of invention, and as the online affiliate market starts becoming more affiliate-dominated, thus leading to a detrimental effect on the programme’s profitability, other channels need to be considered. One of these is offline-to-online affiliate marketing.

Recruiting Offline Affiliates to Promote Online Companies

Let’s take the example of an established market like the United Kingdom. The recession has had a large impact on the economy with some large established businesses being forced out of business (Woolworths being one such example). This is leading a lot of companies to seek other revenue streams in order to compensate for the drop in sales which most of the outlets have experienced.

So what about the possibility of using the recession to your advantage and taking the opportunity to partner with these stores, by recruiting them as affiliates? If you think of the large amount of customer data that some of the large stores in the UK hold (such as the Tesco Club Card and Sainsbury’s Nectar loyalty scheme) you can immediately identify the potential involved (both Nectar and Tesco Club Card have more than 16 million card owners). Think about the potential in this way, what would you do if you had access to an external database of potential customers that contained all their demographic details? What about the possibility of comparing such demographic details against the demographics of your customer base and launching co-branded targeted promotions?

Defending your newly acquired affiliates

Nowadays word-of-mouth travels fast and competitors will soon learn of your newly acquired affiliates, so what can you do? Start by raising some barriers to entry! Most online affiliates, probably all the good ones, promote multiple operators, thus creating competition between operators promoted on the same site. You must thus try to avoid the recreation of the same conditions and look at exclusive deals – being the first-mover will ensure you can choose the best.

A good way of making such a partnership offer more attractive is through the use of a co-branded service offering or alternatively by providing a white-label solution. The latter option would enable the store operator to obtain more brand visibility and exposure online (the white-label not solution is an option for everyone as some companies are a bit weary of associating their names with gaming companies).

There are already a number of operators who are moving away from the exclusively-online affiliates to a hybrid affiliate model. Some operators have started recruiting sports clubs and event organisers on an exclusive basis to promote their products through their online channel.  This should not seem too strange given that even sports clubs are feeling the pinch from the credit crunch as sponsors have started to cut down on their investments. Any potential cash injection will surely be welcome.

Conclusion

Offline to Online deals are only possible in countries where the advertising of gaming activities is legal. Unfortunately Europe does not have a common legal framework when it comes to online gaming so one has to consider this option country by country. Although concluding these offline deals might be a laborious task, offline to online marketing could re-ignite strong growth, especially if the new chosen partners have an established and loyal customer base, which trusts the messages they receive from your partner.

Finally the decision on what route to take rests with each and every operator; however, as it always happens in these cases, those that make the first move have the option to choose the best fruits while the rest have to fight for what’s left.

Both operators and affiliates are in business for one main reason: that of making money. Hence their decisions are based on which strategy will lead their business to the highest possible return on investment. Given that affiliates act as one of the selling arms of an operator, it is clear that both operators and affiliates have a congruent goal, that of attracting the highest number of good-quality players to their program in order to increase the customer base and earn higher revenues.

So what strategies should an operator adopt to help high value affiliates attract and retain quality players?

Provide Accurate Relevant Statistics

As affiliates are rewarded on performance, their main aim is to attract the best quality players and get them to signup to the programme that offers the highest return for both the player and the affiliate. Given this race for the best players, affiliates are constantly seeking new ways of attracting players to their website; some offer comparison guides, others promote online coupons, while others foster an environment based on a community, where players can socialise and share advice.

Considering all these different promotional channels, affiliates are thirsty for information – information that tells them which strategies work best. Remember that what is measured can be managed. Like in any other business, including the operator business itself, affiliates need up-to-date statistics that can provide information on the performance of the different marketing channels being used in order to be able to optimize the returns from these channels.

Affiliate marketing statistics represent all the data that operators get from all of the activity deriving from affiliate marketing efforts. Such data would relate to areas as customer traffic analysis, including statistics about traffic conversion rates and individual customer statistics. These figures are an essential element of the business for the operator when assessing the quality of the overall customer base as well as affiliate performance. However, such information is also critical for affiliates themselves because as the sales channel of a company, they need information to optimize their strategies. They should be provided with statistics that enable them to take action, isolate areas where they are not performing well and hence work on improving their offering to increase the amount of sales.

So is the provision of statistics an option? I don’t think so. Such information will enable affiliates to provide players with what they need and want, and hence be able to attract better players that generate more revenue for the affiliate and the operator.

Pay for Performance Reward Plans

The provision of quality statistics is not enough to lure affiliates to sign up to an affiliate program. The reward that affiliates finally get at the end of the month is one of the most, if not the most, essential parts of the operator’s offering. It’s that element that motivates affiliates to push an affiliate program over another one.

So are we saying that we should increase the rewards to ensure affiliates choose a particular affiliate program? Increasing rewards across the board will have the detrimental effect of increasing the cost of maintaining affiliates and at the same time attracting others which are only seeking higher rewards – basically less loyal affiliates. A better strategy would be one where affiliates are seen as partners and not merely as another acquisition channel. A reward strategy should be developed based on the quality of each and every partner and it should work in such a way that rewards those who meet and exceed established targets while at the same time attract new affiliates who have the potential to grow into valuable ones.

At the end of the day motivation is the key to success. A motivated affiliate will work harder to promote your services and will make sure to devise player acquisition strategies that allow the affiliate to earn higher commissions (especially if rewarded on revenue share) and the operator to increase net revenue.

Provide innovative media and dare to be innovative

Operators wishing to attract online affiliates have to make sure that they make media (including banners and text links) available to affiliates. However at this day and age, when the internet is full of all forms of online advertising, it is not enough to supply standard banners and links to convince affiliates that your media converts better than that of other operators. It is important to think outside the box and explore methods that make your advertising stand out of the crowd.

XML and RSS feeds have become a standard feature and operators must make sure that these are made available to affiliates wishing to use such feeds on their website. However, with the world becoming more connected and customers using social networks on a daily basis, operators have to start thinking of new, effective ways that enable them to take advantage of the latest social media trends.

The use of innovative media attracts attention, which in turn leads to improved conversion rates. Providing innovative media such as dynamic widgets, online games and mobile applications to quality affiliates enables them to attract more customers to their website and results in a win-win situation, that does wonders to start establishing a long-term fruitful relationship with quality affiliates.

Conclusion

There is only a minority of good quality affiliates and as the affiliate industry continues to consolidate, the challenge to acquire these affiliates and retain them will become even more challenging. If you already have a good relationship with these affiliates, you can consider yourself in a privileged position; however, do not lay back and relax as other operators are striving to attract the same affiliates. Make sure that you are always listening to them, treat them as your preferred partners and be a step ahead of competition. Above all, be transparent as trust is paramount for business relationships to succeed in the long run. Remember that your top affiliates might be generating as much as 95% of your net revenue, hence their importance is not only an issue of status.

Keep in mind that while affiliate marketing could be a very profitable marketing channel and used as a supporting channel for the operator to increase its exposure to a larger target audience, operators still need to make sure that the product/service they offer is continuously reviewed and improved as no partner will agree to push an inferior product to what competitors are offering. The key to succeed is to make sure that you provide the products/services your end market really needs, and to work closely with your partners to help you deliver these efficiently and effectively to a wider customer base.