Affiliates of Oyyy on webgains received an urgent email yesterday from a representative of Oyyy. It said they had an urgent announcement coming up and were confirming that affiliates actually read their communications, so could I please reply to them, or risk my account being suspended. I'm not terribly active on Webgains - I prefer several other networks over them and generally use them as a backup, but like a good boy I replied, asking if the announcement would also apply to their Awin programme. In this case I was even considering switching my links to webgains because Awin datafeeds aren't categorised very well for printer ink and cartridges.
If you received this email and wondered what was going on, don't worry, you don't need to reply to it.
This morning I received an email from Webgains saying that the Oyyy programme is closing on Webgains, which means yesterdays communication was just an attempt to extract affiliate contact data before they leave.
This just doesn't feel like good affiliate management to me. For one, as was mentioned in another discussion yesterday, networks do not permit affiliate data to be extracted for the purpose of moving to another network, and for two, however benign this case is, it's basically just an attempt to trick affiliates.
Personally I like the fact that the network stands between me and the merchants. As long as the network is doing its job and provides the appropriate tools to contact affiliates then the merchant or agency don't need my email address sitting in their records (and eventually being put into their newsletter database when they're having a quiet month). In this case Webgains certainly provide the tools to send communications, because they allowed the first "urgent" email to be sent through their system (when they probably shouldn't).
So for the record Oyyy, I have now removed my AWin links for your programme as well, and contacted you directly to remove my address from your contacts list. I won't tell other affiliates what to do with their links, but as ever with my rants I'd be interested to see if anyone agrees, or if I'm just being oversensitive.
this is certainly very poor behaviour - maybe they were instructed to act in such an underhand manner, don't know, but it has backfired as there's a lot of tweets about this from affiliates.
If nothing else - treat your network of almost 3 years' worth of very decent performance with some respect and your affiliates with even more.
It's normal for a merchant to move networks, but after 3 years one would expect a merchant to know who their affiliates are and already be in contact with them, rather than a last minute rush to extract details. So if for such a long time they didn't bother - will they now?
Hero Grigoraki
Head of Media Product
lastminute.com
srubin (13-05-11)
For me, i take a contrary opinion to this. I think its just a good marketing strategy any advertiser would take advantage of and for the affiliate manager that thought that up, ill give a thumb up.
My arguement is a merchant does not need to leave a network to get a list of their pro active affiliates, or to get a sizeable list of their affiliates contacts and i dont see any crime in an affiliate manager who sees an opportunity to build their affiliate userbase or follower pursuing it. A serious or enthusiastic affiliate would perhaps respond to that email and as a manager ill take note of who is who. I'll probabyly fire the manager who does not pursue such opportunity in the boardroom. Although i could fault the wordings of that email.
By the way, webgains is Just as Good as Affiliatewindow. I never sent any payment query for the past 5yrs i have been dealing with them. they are only lacking a bit in regular newsletters-Retailer specific not general network newsletters.
Building up a contact database... fair enough. Feeling they have to trick me into providing my details... Shocking. Yes, from their point of view getting as much data as possible certainly makes sense, but showing that level of disrespect is the reason this industry is struggling to remain credible at the moment.
I run one of the better ink comparison sites and I speak to quite a few ams in that arena, but if any of them act like that I'll drop them like a hot rock.
Nothing wrong with webgains - the payments work etc, I just choose to avoid them due to some very specific problems with them that I hope noone else has. The person responsible for that has left now so I suppose I should give them another chance.
lowndsy, as i have just said in an e-mail to you, i can only apologise if any offence has been caused but how many affiliates would have ignored the message had we not entered a call to action in there (at the time Webgains didn't have an issue with it either)? After we found out the terrible response rate despite the call to action, we decided that we wanted to leave Webgains and wanted to give our existing Webgains affiliates the opportunity to continue earning commission from sales they directed to us.
We had actually been thinking about leaving Webgains for some time as their software is nowhere near as good as AW's and they had dropped to our worst performing marketing channel in 2011 (AW by contrast are now our best).
I'm struggling understand the fall out from this as our intentions were nothing but friendly. We did not intend to deceive anyone at all.
Webgains were promptly informed of our decision to leave and the split has been completely amicable. I thank Seth for the time he's spent working on our account.
Hope you're not talking about me, Steve!!!!!!Originally Posted by lowndsy
Hero Grigoraki
Head of Media Product
lastminute.com
I replied to the email just out of nosiness (I don't promote them) and here was the reply... *name removed by mod*
Hi,
Thanks for responding so quickly.
We will be leaving the Webgains network very soon and would like to ask you to join our program on Affiliate Window if possible and also ensure that the links you feature on your site are AW links. Our ID on Affiliate Window is 3136.
Please click this link to join:
https://www.awin1.com/signup.php?merchant=3136
If this is a problem for you, please let me know.
Many Thanks
*name removed by mod*
I think I'll knock this debate on the head after this post - it's not going to get resolved. Suffice to say, I just don't believe that the decision to leave Webgains was based on not receiving a significant response from 2000 affiliates.
Even the newest affiliate manager knows that most affiliates on a programme are inactive - in an open network it's so easy to join merchants that people tend to go a bit bonkers. The trick is maintaining lines of communication with the active ones without alienating them, and you never know, some of those inactives might one day come back... in this case... FAIL!
thanks for your post, first of all please don't post people's full names without their express permission, i'll let our affiliate manager know that his name's been made public
also, it appears that you were contacted in the 2nd or 3rd batch of e-mails, AFTER the decision was made to cut Webgains, if you would like any more information, please contact the affiliate manager at the address he contacted you on
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