Last Friday I went along to an affiliate get together in London that was organised by Richard, the Affiliate Manager at trendy fashion retailer oki-ni, and Ken from agency and network Altogether Digital .
I turned up more than an hour later than planned and confess to being a little nervous - weird meeting up with a bunch of people you don’t know - especially as I am a little new to this whole thing. However, that worry was totally unnecessary as Richard and Ken could not have been more welcoming and made a great point of introducing everybody and saying what they did.
So ended up chatting with people from all areas - other affiliates who are also relatively new to all this, a PPC affiliate, one or two merchants, network people (good to meet my contact at Affiliate Window - hi Edwyn!) and a couple of agency folks too. Nice mix of talking shop and chatting about general stuff.
It looks like this will be a regular event so hopefully more and more people will come along in the months to come. In particular, if there are any new kids who didn’t fancy it I would encourage them to be there next time as it is very very worthwhile.
Thanks are due to Richard and Ken.
Very few things wind me up - but I really cannot stand rudeness.
I got an email today from Flowers Direct. This is the first paragraph…
You have have been suspended from the Flowers Direct (mid:189) affiliate
programme. Please do not respond to this automated email, if you would like
to discover the precise reasons for the suspension please contact the
affiliate manager direct from your account.
Was there really any need for that? Why could they not have started the email with ‘Following a careful review we regret that we have taken the decision to…’ Short of putting swear words into the email Flowers Direct could not have been rude. Maybe their agency or maybe Affiliate Window wrote this - maybe it is just a ’standard’ email - but whatever, the result is the same.
I actual fact I don’t promote Flowers Direct and even if I did I don’t have enough traffic to create the tiniest blip on their sales - but that is not the point. I might want to promote a flowers merchant in the future and I might become a super-duper super affiliate!
At a push I can see why they might want to dump affiliates who do not promote them (although I am not totally sure that it can be that much of a pain to have 1 more record in their database) but I really cannot understand why they have to be so rude!
Rant over!