Sponsor emails: what makes you USE the tools?
 

As a sponsor (and as an affiliate) I am curious what features/factors in emails motivate you to immediately USE the promos they send you (this assumes, of course, that you actually LIKE getting these emails).

The factors I look for are:
1) links to galleries (or whatever) are included in the email (instead of making me log in to retrieve them)
2) my refcode is built in to the links provided
3) I can tell from the subject line what promo content is included (zips, free sites, fhg's, etc.)
4) I like their content/recognize the sponsor/have a crush on the person and her site, etc.

I would agree with those reasons, minus perhaps the crush part.

Other things that are important to me:
1) I only get an email when there's something relevant to let me know. Don't spam me with a newsletter just to get your program name in front of me.
2) If there are different link codes for PPS/Revshare/Console/No Console then include all of them.

If they include thumbnail previews with the links than I usually look through them. If not, I just delete them. I'd rather not spend my time clicking blind links from every sponsor email I get.

If the sponsor is sending galleries/sites, having my affiliate ID in the gallery links is a must. There's a few sponsors I use regularly because they send galleries with decent descriptions using keywords that actually describe the content.

Often I am looking for a gallery in a certain niche, or sub-niche and I search my recent sponsor emails for specific keywords to see if they have any that I can use without logging in, dumping all the galleries, then searching through that list manually myself.

In my case the sponsor's first problem is to get me to read the email. Those that don't get deleted unread need to conform to the following:

1. Any text has to be relevant, I am not interested in your sales manager's new baby or the fact that John from accounts came tenth in the New York marathon.

2. Keep it as short as possible.

3. Don't email too often. None of my sites get updated by hand daily (the sites I have that are updated daily get updated by my friend Perl, I add new galleries to my database once every few weeks and it adds a few every day), so I don't need daily updates.

4. MOST IMPORTANTLY - spread your galleries out. If I am going to use, for example, your lesbian galleries on my lesbian blog I don't want a hundred in one email then none in the next four emails. Put twenty in each email.

5. Include descriptions with your galleries, and make sure they are accurate. On some sites I use sponsor's descriptions, if you just email me links or links with random descriptions, I won't use your galleries on those. And even on the sites where I write my own description I usually use yours to see if the gallery is likely to be one I want. So if it is not there I may stop reading your emails, and if it is inaccurate, all your future emails get binned unread (I am fed up of looking at descriptions such as "teenage lesbians eat pussy", only to find a gallery of middle age women using strap-ons - that sort of thing not only gets your emails unread, it also gets you moved to the bottom of the list when adding sponsors to new sites).

Oh and send me plain text emails -- no funky html that'll trip my spam filters!

I'm the opposite - I prefer to be able to click on the links within the email since it's the fastest way to preview the galleries/free sites. (A certain sponsor sends HTML newsletters that are all mucked up, so I see the HTML code rather than the newsletter.) I also prefer to have my affiliate code already in the links, but if I like the sponsor, it's no big whoop if they aren't already coded.

I tend not to add new links right away unless I'm working on doing that at the time that I receive the newsletter, so I often save newsletters as a reminder that I wanted to add those links. Looking at my inbox, I have two past newsletters from one program and three from another. The former sends me coded links, but in plain text form. I like that program's sites, so I don't mind copying and pasting the links to preview them, but I'll more likely grab them from their admin. The latter sends me clickable links with the standard XXXXX in place of my affiliate code. Again, it's another program that I like, so pasting my aff. code is not a problem.

I don't like newsletters that are sent too often and I prefer not to have very much "news" in them, as odd as that my sound. So many sponsors create news that doesn't mean piss to me and it's nothing more than several paragraphs of fluff that I have to scroll past in order to see if there's anything pertinent in the email. Just the facts, ma'am.

Also, it's very important [to me] that the Sender in the email header is, or includes, the program name. I'm at a point where I'm scrolling down with my mouse on the Junk button and I'm only looking at the Sender field. If I get an email with a stranger's name in the Sender field, it goes straight to my McCain/Palin bin without a second look.

JK seems to use them the same way I do, UW sorts and trashes by sender the same way I do, and I agree with everyone that all I'm really looking for is the tools, not the blah blah blah.

This is interesting (and useful to me as a sponsor); thanks for sharing.

You should be able to do that with plain text emails. Any halfway decent email client will parse the links when they display them. If Outlook Express can do this, you amaze me that there is a email client out there that is even worse than Microsoft's shit!

Yep, as I sponsor I find this pretty useful.

As an affiliate I'd agree - stop sending me emails every damn week!

It actually took up a lot of my time prior to going away for 6 weeks, trying to take myself of email lists so my inbox wouldn't be chock full when I came back. The number of sponsors that don't include unsubscribe links is ridiculous. I was going to start a whole thread on that before I left but I ran out of time (time taken up emailing sponsors asking to be taken off their lists).

So... to summarise the above paragraph: GIVE ME A FUCKING UNSUBSCRIBE LINK!

You are complaining that your sponsor sends you a list every week! Count yourself lucky, I have several sponsors who send the bastards every day! And to make matters worse, one then sends me a weekly summery of all the emails he has already sent me that week!

Surely it would be a lot quicker to let them come, then delete them when you get home, that is what I usually do. You can even set a message rule in Outlook (or whatever you use) that says "send mail from xxx or xxx or xxx to deleted items" (where the xxx are the email addresses of the sponsors). Then you just have to switch the rule on the first time you access your mail account when you get home, and off again afterwards. Takes about five seconds and all the work is done for you.

Isn't that illegal? Regardless of the quantity of mail you get, I would be very nervous of using a sponsor who had such a cavalier attitude to the law.

I get plenty of the daily ones too. And a lot of my sponsor emails go to a (very old) Yahoo email address which has a limited number of filters - all of which are taken up with diverting sponsor emails into a separate folder. The number of sponsors way outnumbered my filters.

There are numerous sponsors who use the CCBill mailing system to send out their emails (and yes, Purple Dollars is one of them, although I will say we don't send out many). The problem is that there's no unsusbscribe from that unless you opt out from getting any kind of notification at all.

There are also NATS sponsors who don't have unsubscribe in their emails, you have to log in and change your preferences in the admin section.

Taking off for 6 weeks is the problem!|waves|
|couch|
|scared|

Actually I use Mail-2-Web when I'm away somewhere.|whisper|

-Plain text emails please

-My ref code already included in the links

-A link to unsubscribe that actually does what it should, which is to stop fucking spamming me!

there are a few amateurs i premote that dont sell great cause i like them, i wouldnt call it a crush but...