Traditionally, successful jewelers have served as both fashion counselor and gem educator to their loyal customers who come searching for just the right gift. As one of the largest, most respected online jewelers, ICE.com attributes its growth and success to carrying on this tradition with its’ online customers. Recently ICE.com won the 2008 Publisher’s Choice Award at the LinkShare Golden Link Awards. I sat down with Paresh Vadavia, Affiliate Program Manager at ICE.com, to discuss the key to the success of their affiliate program.
The online jewelry space is very crowded. What makes ICE.com different?
People like ICE.com because of our wide selection of jewelry. Our merchandising team does an excellent job of discovering and staying on top of the latest worldwide trends in fashion. We bring those to our customers.
Another aspect is convenience. For purchases over $150 we offer free shipping and during the holidays we also offer a variety of enhanced shipping options for our customers. Let’s say it was the holidays and a customer wanted to get an item before Christmas. We usually run promotions that will allow them to get their purchase the next day.
The quality of our customer service also distinguishes us. We go out of our way to focus on customer service and make sure our customers are happy. We are committed to providing them an extraordinary shopping experience. We want to help them find the perfect gift and part of that is helping educate them in differences on such things as clarity, color, cut and carat weight. Our customer serviced apartment is very adept at managing the consumer’s questions about things like the four C’s.
Is it difficult to for ICE.com to get name recognition compared to more traditional jewelers?
Our PR team has done a great job of getting us out there in front of the consumer and improving our brand recognition. We were featured in the Matthew McConaughey movie “Fool’s Gold” and in the bridal comedy film “27 Dresses”. With our growth and our listing in the Internet Retailer Top 50 our visibility is growing.
Why should affiliates choose ICE.com?
I find it one of the key things affiliates look at is who we are as a company. When we start working with new affiliates we attempt to let them know who ICE.com is as a merchant so they feel comfortable sending their members or customers to us. They want to know that they are working with a solid company and that we will convert the traffic they send us to sales. They want to know what our ratings are on consumer sites like BizRate and other quality monitoring sites where people leave feedback. It is important for affiliates to feel comfortable with who we are before they send customers to us.
Our affiliate program experienced 64% growth in sales in 2007, and we have a very good conversion rate. We have a very competitive commission at 15% and a standard discount offer of 20% that we give out to affiliates so they can give their consumers an incentive to shop.
In terms of an affiliate team, we provide dedicated support focused on building relationships. It is that support and focus on relationships that they seem to really appreciate. I go through our affiliates’ sites personally attempting to provide them tips on what would work better on their sites when it comes to promoting ICE.com. We also do have the advantage of being on two networks with ICE.com on LinkShare and with our sister company Diamond.com on Commission Junction. It gives us overall more time to work with affiliates in our niche.
Since customer education is so important we give affiliates a link to the section on our site where we maintain a customer education center. I often hear affiliates ask whether they can use that content there to build out education pages of their own. We are okay with them using our content to help their customers become more knowledgeable about jewelry.
What’s more important to affiliates Commission or Conversion?
I think affiliates look at the conversion rate as probably the most important. Internally I do as well. I expect a certain conversion rate from traffic from all of our affiliates. If an affiliate is not converting at a certain rate I reach out than to them by taking a look at their site and approaching them with ideas on improvements that can be made.
More importantly beyond the commission and conversion rate is the quality of the relationship. Relationships really grow the program. Sure at times, an affiliate might make a few extra dollars on the commission rate somewhere else but they know that in myself and my team they have people dedicated to helping them grow their business. We watch out for them. Sometimes we’ve found that affiliates will mistakenly place non-affiliate promotional codes they’ve picked up from our other channels onto their site. In those cases they are still sending us traffic but it isn’t being tracked properly through the affiliate channel. We work with them to put the proper tracking in place. It’s not only for links to ICE.com. If I am looking at an affiliate site and see any issues with the site, say broken links for instance, even if they are not are links to us I will let the affiliate know about them. I think at the end of the day the quality of the relationship is the defining factor.
How has the so called “Amazon Tax” in New York impacted you?
It has been a tough ride. Initially when the law was announced there was the knee jerk reaction in upper management about possibly removing New York affiliates. I was totally against it. I know first hand that it’s taken a lot of time and energy to build those relationships. If you send out the message that you are leaving New York affiliates behind other affiliates from other states would not appreciate that move.
After lots of discussion and taking a look at what other merchants were doing we came up with two things. First was to update our terms and conditions so that affiliates in New York State are not allowed to do paid search and e-mail marketing. It does limit what they can do but it is a good compromise as opposed to having to have them remove all the links. Second, since the focus of the new law is that you’re not allowed to pay commissions on sales, we decided to extend New York affiliates out a CPC deal for traffic sent to us. We want to give each affiliate a proper CPC deal as compensation. There is a lot of manual work involved for us to look and make sure that affiliates who are sending more traffic are properly compensated. But I think that is the best route to maintain these important relationships.
As soon as we made these changes we hear from New York affiliates who came to us and said they really appreciated us taking the time and effort to be creative in looking at another avenue to work with them.
As a Golden Link winner what do you find different about LinkShare than other networks?
We got a lot of positive feedback this year from publishers letting us know though that they’ve appreciated of all the time and effort we have put in to helping them grow their business. It is nice to win an award that represents recognition for all the effort that we have put in to the program
One of the strengths specifically with LinkShare is the support that they provide, especially by having an account rep that is up-to-date with our program and up-to-date on what’s happening within the affiliate industry. The support we get from LinkShare from our weekly calls to the ability of our account reps to help us reach out to new affiliates is great. They do a great job.
I am really looking forward to seeing what LinkShare does with the new merchant interface. I know that affiliates have been very happy with the new publisher interface and I am looking forward to seeing some of the tools that I hear the new interface will allow merchants to use. It should be very interesting.
What changes do you see in our industry over the next year?
There are so many things that change in our industry. The way the New York law suddenly appeared is an example that can radically impact things. This is really one of those industries where you don’t know what to expect and you just have to be up-to-date in order to anticipate which direction things move.
I’ve noticed a lot of new innovative affiliates in the space who are trying new things and developing a business models that are new to our industry. This last Affiliate Summit in Vegas was enormous and tons of new affiliates were there. I think the industry is still thriving.
One of the things that we’ve been testing is the use of video and widgets. Out of our top affiliates I’m not sure how many have adopted the use of widgets or video technology but I would definitely like to see more use of that technology. We can create widgets quickly on our end but we do need the affiliates to use the technology so we can refine what works and what doesn’t and improve on the technology itself.
What can we expect from ICE.com over the next year?
On the consumer end we are moving to a new e-commerce platform that allows us to do more in terms of promotions, including short-term one day sales events. It will help the whole company from merchandising to fulfillment to run more smoothly. The old system has basically been part of our company from the start, with us adding components and patches of work to it over time. The new system is a complete overhaul and is far more robust, allowing us to create offers and unique specials which we couldn’t do with the old system. For the consumer the site itself will look the same, just the backend functionality will have changed.
We are also working on a microsite for our affiliates to make it easier for them to learn about the program and give them faster access to copy and creative. Our newsletters will be archived on the site and we will highlight new technology like our video and widgets. My goal is to create the microsite so things are really less of a push method where we are pushing information to affiliates and instead we are creating a location for them to learn and grab the resources they need to be successful.
You’ll see ICE.com building a lot more brand awareness with TV, radio and print spots. As the company expands we will be testing different avenues to raise brand awareness. As active as we’ve been in the affiliate industry there are lots of publishers who still don’t know about us or not working us. I think raising consumer awareness will help open a door toward working with new publishers.
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New affiliates are getting a big incentive this August and September 2008. 
. A member started a thread about it and said the following :
