Prepaid Phone Card Affiliate Programs

Linkshare’s Pingo Phone Card Affiliate Program Nomination For

Best Online Merchandising Campaign

Objective

Create Effective Affiliate Merchandising Campaigns to Increase Impulse Affiliate Sales

Strategy:

Build an ongoing consumer merchandising campaign that’s exclusive to the affiliate channel. Pingo has focused it’s marketing offline and online to drive the brand recognition. But used it’s affiliate partners to drive home the sales with the best “call to action” impulse sales promotions. We wanted to find unique offers that would target a wider range of consumers and affiliate partners to promote our product by tying in several products and services into this promotion to create the need carry an emergency phone card.

Resources:

To establish these goals for impulse sales, Pingo is always on the look out for interesting promotions to cross promote with other with in each other affiliate programs.

See examples of cross promotional concepts at http://www.squidoo.com/affiliatemarketingpartnerships

Pingo in the last year has established a wide range of promotions to support for its affiliates that include:

• Coupon and Discount offers for % of sale or $ amount off 
• Restaurant dinner for two certificates
• Movie pass giveaway to help affiliates market around popular movie releases.
• Gift certificates to seven leading online merchants with purchase that include cigars, flowers, steak, gift baskets, spa treatments, cookies. All to offer something different that may relate to an affiliate partners target market of site traffic.
• Really free phone calls promotion that credited the affiliate when the final sale was made.
• Relevant Holiday promotions and unique landing pages
• Free hotel certificate give-away to spike sales with travel affiliate partners.
• Provided free content from hiring article writers for affiliates to providing unique customer testimonials and reviews of Pingo products.
• SEO Advice: Ongoing support and optimization strategy develop to help partners overall sites ranking performance.
• International creative available for your key locations
• Constant affiliate incentives that include sign up, first month to in-active bonuses, to double your monthly sales bonuses to help promote targeted merchandising campaign’s.
• Monthly affiliate prize contest that were donated by fellow Linkshare merchants to get affiliates attention to promote each new merchandising consumer promotion.

As you can see, the laundry list goes on and on. But the main goal was to keep Pingo’s product fresh with always new deals and offers to drive affiliates attention to get consumers to try Pingo.

Results

 The effort put in was well worth its time invested into promoting Pingo. Pingo was able to gain additional attention in recruiting new types of vertical affiliates that wouldn’t typical promote our product by the effort put into merchandising and expanding the value that we could offer to new affiliate partners in a wider range of vertical niches. This strategy also helped to gain additional exposure with the ongoing effort put into new coupons and deals to gain multiple listings on affiliate partners sites. This was earned by its ability to create impulse sales, that earned Pingo home page to email newsletter exposure.

As for the stats, we can’t provide all the details as we are a publicly traded company that would need to make this info available to investors. But what we can publicly say, is that this strategy has paid of in new sales generating affiliates. Some of the affiliate promotions have counted for an increase of up to 40% growth with-in the affiliate sales channel. Overall Pingo’s affiliate program has seen a constant monthly growth across the board since it was first launched in Linkshare in 2006. This success could not have been achieved without doing all these online affiliate merchandising campaigns.