The T Factor: Trust Is Everything

Merchants email loses the trust factor.

I received an email earlier today from the sales director at a pre-paid card company offering me the opportunity to join their affiliate programme. I nearly didn’t open the email because it looked rather suspicious with a strange non-title. I checked their website and that looked okay so I crossed my fingers and opened the email.

I was being offered the opportunity to promote a pre-paid credit card and I presume (because they didn’t actually say) that they wanted to include it on our personal finances site. But the email immediately made me suspicious - the fact that it was poorly capitalised, didn’t address me directly and was in about 4 different fonts didn’t help. The terms of the affiliate programme were not detailed and there was not even a link to an affiliates page.

So, I have no plans to take them up on the offer. Affiliate marketing doesn’t work if there is no trust on either side of the merchant/affiliate relationship and in the case there wasn’t any to begin with.