When
financial investors visit Quote.com, a Web-based online community
geared to their interests, they can click on banner ads, icons and
text links to services like one month of free trading from America
First Trader.
These services from Quote.com's partners are all prime examples
of affinity marketing.
Affinity marketing represents a major break from traditional mass
marketing, observers agree. Instead of acting on their own to
broadcast the same message to millions of customers, organizations
team together to attract customers with particular interests.
Within the world of e-commerce, the concept generally translates
into sharing referrals by using banner ads, icons and text links in
an attempt to point customers to other sites that also meet users'
individual proclivities, typically through personalization.
David Schmitlein, marketing professor at University of
Pennsylvania Wharton School, points out that affinity marketing
originated in the credit-card industry. There, it describes programs
designed to cash in on customers' feelings of affinity with groups
like universities, nature conservancies and other types of
charities. If the customer accepts a credit card emblazoned with the
name of the affinity group, the organization benefits by getting a
small percentage of the sales charged on the card.
Affinity marketing has since spread into other kinds of referral
programs, like those operated by geographically far-flung real
estate offices to locate homes and real estate services across the
U.S.
In e-commerce, where affinity marketing is playing an
increasingly important role, the purpose is to increase site
visibility, drive traffic and boost sales.
Marketing
In some cases, Web sites sell affinity links; in others, sites
merely exchange them. Affinity marketing is particularly common in
online communities such as America Online Inc. and those created by
search engines like Lycos Inc. or Yahoo Inc. Special interest sites
such as Quote.com and Siebel Systems Inc.'s Sales.com, an online
community for professional salespeople, also make good use of it.
"In many cases, organizations try to transfer an affinity you
have for a profession or hobby into loyalty to linked
organizations," Schmitlein notes. In addition, smaller sites can
gain credibility by linking to industry giants like Microsoft Corp.
or IBM, according to the professor, who refers to this as "the halo
effect."
One way that search engines take part in affinity marketing is by
selling links to keyword searches. Yahoo, for example, sells banner
ads for use with home business, business opportunities and many
other keywords. If a company buys banner ad space for any of these
keywords, its ads will come up whenever a user types in one of those
words.
Getting to Know You
As e-commerce sites continue to try to differentiate their online
communities, tools for affinity marketing are becoming increasingly
sophisticated. Some specialized tools analyze individuals' online
behavior in pursuit of personalization.
Net.Genesis, for example, provides a set of off-the-shelf tools
called net.Analysis for analyzing issues that range from how long it
takes visitors to view the home page to which sections of the site
generate the most sales, says Michael Booth, Net.Genesis' director
of business development.
Net.Perceptions, on the other hand, uses artificial intelligence
technology from Neural Applications Corp. to help "put the right Web
site ads in front of the right visitors," according to Neural
officials.
"E-comm sites have been struggling to find ways to increase
online purchasing. When you have information about online behavior,
you can customize the affinity marketing opportunity," Schmitlein
says.
Though enabling technologies such as personalization tools and ad
servers are plentiful and easy to install, an organization's
information technology specialists should be brought into the loop
early to make sure the company is selecting the tools best suited to
the affinity marketing job at hand.
Consultation with information technology is especially important
in situations where a company needs to integrate back-end systems
such as databases and transaction processing with those of affinity
partners.
Sun Microsystems Inc.'s new Sun.Com consulting service has
performed systems integration for several such sites, including
Sales.com, notes Mark Bauhaus, a Sun vice president.
Partnerships between e-commerce sites and technology providers
don't constitute affinity relationships, though, unless the
technology provider is also supplying a link to its own site.
Otherwise, the aim is generally to keep the technology used in
affinity marketing as invisible as possible to end users.
Companies also try to make the personalization experiý ence as
invisible as possible for Web visitors. Participate.com, for
example, is using in-house tools to remotely manage and analyze
message boards, live events and personal Web pages for online
communities operated by companies such as Quote.com, AT&T
WorldNet, Arthur Andersen & Co. and Careerpath.com.
Companies that develop strong relationships with their customers
through personalization are also in the best position to drive
affinity marketing, according to Alan Warms, Participate.com's
president and CEO. "And the most effective means of creating loyalty
is to learn about your customers, he says."
Emigh is a freelance writer in Boston.
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