Clickbank Instant Notification Script: How To Greatly Reduce Your Refund Rates, Make More Sales And Save A Lot Of Time

Posted at November 16, 2009

I have quite a few PPC campaigns running and I set up new ones on a regular basis. With most of my campaigns I offer several freebies to incite visitors to buy from my affiliate link.

Now, it would be a bit cumbersome to check my sales stats every few hours and to send a thank-you email with download instructions to each customer who bought from my affiliate link.

To get around this, I use a simple notification script that does the following:

Whenever someone buys from my affiliate link, I receive an email to a specific email account (for example: clickbank-sales@mydomain.com)
This email contains all transaction infos, like: Earnings, Product Name, Vendor, Transaction Type (Sale, Refund, re-bill…) and others.
I typically put the transaction type and the Product Name in the email subject line. So, this might look something like: “SALE – Keyword Elite 2.0″
Additionally, the notification script sends a customized email to the customer thanking him/her for the purchase and indicating the download link for the bonus items. This happens immediately after the purchase.

I also realized, sending a “nice” email with free bonus items to the customer greatly reduces the refund rate.

Now, here is how you can do the same:

In ClickBank, go to Account Settings – My Site
At the very bottom of the page, go to “Advanced Tools” and click Edit
Provide a secret key: This must be ALL CAPS and can be up to 16 letters or digits.
Provide a vale for “Instant Notification URL 1″. For example: http://www.yourdomain.com/clickbanknotification.php
Click “Save Changes”.

Now you need to upload the notification script (clickbanknotification.php) to your web server.
Here is a simple script you can download and customize: Clickbank Instant Notification Script

The script mentioned above is a simple text file. So, in order to use it you need to rename it into a .php file. I decided to give you a .txt file, because some antivirus programs might complain if you try to download a .php script.

The script is fairly simple, but you still need to make some modifications: You need to provide your email address, your email messages and some other parameters you want to have customized.

Here are some indications, what needs to be modified:

Replace the value “YOURKEY” at the top of the file with your proper clickbank secret key
At ~line 70 you see: mail(”youremail@domain.com”,… - replace this with your own email address. That’s the email address where you would like to have sales notifications to be sent.
At line 88 you see: “$ctranspublisher == “PUBLISHERNAME” – replace this with the publisher name of the product you are promoting.
Line 90: $body – provide the desired email body text with the download link.
Underneath, line 93: Insert the corresponding product name and your email address that should be displayed to the receiver.
The line underneath sends a confirmation email to the email address you specify in the first attribute.
Do the same for all other products you are promoting – simply copy/paste the code block we just discussed and modify the product names as well as the details in your email messages.

ClickBank of course isn’t the only affiliate network that provides the ability to use notification scripts. The script I provided can be easily adapted to work with other affiliate programs. You will have to update the variable names at the top of the script (like: $_REQUEST['ccustname']…)

Here are again some of the advantages of this technique:

Save time: No need to send an email manually to each and every customer.
Get immediately informed via email whenever a sale, refund, re-bill… occurs.
Greatly reduce your refund rate by promptly sending a nice thank you message with free bonus downloads to your customers.

By the way, you can easily use the script above to automatically add all these highly valuable buying customers to your double opt-in email list. But that’s a subject for another blog post