Affiliate Tracking—Telephone Orders

How can you take telephone orders and still be fair to your affiliates?

Affiliates marketers hate the telephone. When customers call in an order, instead of clicking a link on the site, it breaks the normal link-tracking mechanism which affiliates count on for their commissions.

If a merchant's site offers phone ordering, the only usual way an affiliate can get a commission is if the merchant asks the customer if the link they used to find the site has a code number in it. That's awkward and confusing. And impossible if the affiliate has used cloaking software to hide their affiliate links:

Affiliates sometimes cloak or obfuscate their identification code to prevent piracy or losing commissions if someone modifies the link.

Without cloaking: http://www.merchant-domain.com/affiliateid?345
With cloaking: http://www.your-domain.com/product.htm

But of course, relying entirely on web sales is not always the best way to sell certain products and services. Sometimes the telephone is necessary.

So how can affiliate programs and telephone point-of-sale work together in the best interest of both the merchant and the affiliate?

There are three options. . . having one of these methods in place will go a long way towards providing affiliates what they want to see in a program.

Use Cookie-Based Special Offers (Cookies are harmless bits of computer code that most affiliate software uses to track visitor's activity). The cookie is used for tracking but it's power doesn't have to end when the phone is dialed. A merchant can use a cookie to display a special offer to the customer.

This special offer will use the affiliate's ID number as a 'Bonus Code' that the customer needs to mention in order to redeem it. Basically, the affiliate link pulls up a special page that displays the bonus code next to the offer. The customer mentions the code and gets a discount or special promotion—it's not some arbitrary number that doesn't benefit them. Also, affiliates are treated fairly because the merchant is not offering this savings to everyone, only to customers referred by affiliates. If the link is not from an affiliate, the bonus code is not displayed, and the order proceeds as normal.
Use a Phone-back Form. Instead of displaying your telephone order line directly on the site, ask visitors to fill out a very brief phone-back form which would include their name, phone number, and email address. In this form you can include the affiliate ID as a hidden field, so when you receive the form you'll know if they've been referred by an affiliate (or not). You could incentive this form by stating that all customers that use it are entered into a draw or receive a special offer.
Using Your Existing Telephone System. If your existing telephone system can handle it, then you can use affiliate ID numbers as telephone extension codes. The people who answer the phones can record that information in the customers file so the affiliate gets the commission they are owed.