4 Tips for Affiliates to Get Ready for Black Friday & Cyber Monday
Q4 is coming… no, scratch that… Q4 IS HERE! That means the frenzy is on for retailers and the thousands of affiliates, like you, that they’ll depend on to drive sales in these all-important final months of the year. Retailers are busy now developing campaigns, setting their shipping deadlines and choosing goals and thresholds that will determine whether or not and when certain sales will kick in.
As an affiliate, the start of Q4 can be a stressful time… mostly because you’re in waiting mode. You’re waiting for merchants to make their decisions, send you promotions and then change their minds and send you new promotions.
So, I went on the hunt for some advice from affiliate managers who have weathered Q4 and have seen what really works for affiliates. I asked them what an affiliate could do NOW to get ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday… over a month in advance. Here are the 4 steps they suggested.
1 – Get Creative and Flexible
Joe Sousa, Affiliate Coordinator at Fanatics.com suggests getting creative and flexible with your product and promotion choices:
Be sure to hit a wide variety of price points. Your shoppers are looking for gifts for all sorts of people. Maybe they wouldn’t mind dropping $500 on an autographed football for their husband, but will they spend that for their cousin they see once a year? Probably not. They will need something in the $10 range. And then they will also need a $40 sweatshirt for their son or daughter. So don’t be afraid to target people ready to spend some big money, but also be sure to include some mid-range and less expensive items for small gifts, stocking stuffers, etc.
Why I Love This Tip
I talk to affiliates all the time that ask questions like, “How do I find the products that pay the highest commissions?” Using Joe’s example, you could earn a great commission off of an autographed football… but if none of your visitors are interested in dropping $500 for it… you’ll earn nothing. Throwing out a wide net ensures that you won’t be missing out on 20 $40 sales just trying to land that one $500 sale.
Once you get to know what your visitors are looking for and what your readers are buying – you can focus more on one product, category or price point… but keep your options open by scattering in those other price points.
2 – Engage Merchants with Data Driven Pre-Planning
Speaking of getting to know what your visitors are looking for, Wade Burkholder, Affiliate Program Developer at VMInnovations.com has some suggestions on using your historical data to plan for this holiday season. But first, he suggests you make a connection and engage your merchants so you can work one-on-one with them throughout the quarter:
Let merchants know ahead of time how you can help them and what they can do to best help you. As most merchants and affiliates prepare for their busiest time of the year, now is a great time to start sharing any offer or giveaway calendars you have going so that merchants can plan accordingly.
Let your merchants know what kind of other unique holiday offers will be available for them to participate in. If you haven’t worked with a merchant frequently in the past but would like to become more involved with them, the holiday season provides a great opportunity to become more active by offering new partnerships.
For the seasoned Black Friday and Cyber Monday veterans—provide merchants with an outline of your past promotions and what worked best historically. The more information you can provide us with, the better we can choose offers to help your promotions succeed. Let us know what products had the most past success so we can tailor similar offers those that have historically worked. Also feel free to make suggestions to merchants on what you think will work well. If your last Black Friday special produced great sales on Legos, suggest or ask for what newer models or products are expected to sell well in 2014.
Why I Love This Tip
The Performance Marketing space really is all about relationships – those relationships work best and yield the greatest results when both sides are coming to the table and sharing plans, ideas and past results. Often times, affiliates can get into the “head’s down” mode – you put together your plan and you put your head down and go to work. Sure, you can get a lot done that way – but before you do that, stop and talk to your merchants to be sure you’re working on the most effective promotions and products.
3 – Plan for Plans to Change
Joe Sousa, Affiliate Coordinator at Fanatics.com gave me another great piece of advice to share with you… plan for change:
Be ready to act at the last minute. Planning ahead of time is great but it isn’t uncommon for one of your merchants to drop a new promo or markdown or coupon at the last minute so you need to be ready to pounce on those opportunities. Many times these last minute deals will be a reaction to a competitor, or maybe the merchant was very careful to not leak the info early, but these can be some great deals to promote. If your competitors aren’t on the ball they will miss these deals, but if you are ready to act on them it can give you a leg up.
Why I Love This Tip
Aside from the fact that it embodies the Heraclitus’ philosophy that change is the only constant – this tip offers some insight into the tedious work it takes to keep an affiliate website up to date with the latest promotions and offers. Regardless of how amazingly your copy is written, how click-inspiring your page is formatted and how well you drive traffic to your site – getting the latest promotions and offers on those pages can be a big job. This is especially true in the fourth quarter when sales at other stores, un-anticipated popular demand for products (remember the instant Furby hysteria in 1998?) and internal goals have retailers changing the plan every other day.
Affiliates have to be ready for these kinds of changes with dynamic content strategies and by employing tools…
4 – Utilize Tools for Automatic Updates
This leads us to our last tip which comes from Chad Waite, Marketing Manager at AvantLink. He suggests employing tools that help you stay ahead of changes and ensure that you are always promoting the latest offers:
With a dynamic tool like AvantLink’s Dynamic Deal Feed, any time a merchant creates a new ad campaign that is sales-oriented, that ad will automatically be aggregated out to the affiliate’s site in a customizable feed. It allows affiliates to instantly receive the latest sales-oriented banner or text ads on their site without any manual work on their end, which is very valuable in Q4 as the special events, sales and promos offered by merchants are always changing at a quick pace.
Why I Love This Tip
(Do I get out of this plug shame-free since he brought it up?) Datafeeds are the ultimate solution for staying on top of changes and ensuring you always have the latest offers, promotions and content from the merchants you’re promoting.
If you have the technical know-how or resources to employ datafeeds – start now. Choose a network-specific feed like AvantLinks’ Dynamic Deal Feed, or an aggregated feed like our Premium Feed (AvantLink is one of the 19 networks we tap into for our enterprise level datafeeds that have constant updates from over 8,000 merchants.). By Black Friday, your site can be set to automatically show the latest deals and promotions from your merchants – while you kick back with some Thanksgiving leftovers.
If you don’t have the technical know-how for datafeeds… you don’t have to give up your holidays to manually copy and paste the thousands of deals your merchants will be releasing. We’ve got a solution for you that’s powerful, yet low-tech and budget-friendly. It’s called FMTC Pods. Simply choose a merchant (and/or other criteria if you want to get fancy), and through our WordPress plugin (or a few lines of code for non-Wordpress sites), drop the “Pod” onto a page, post or sidebar widget on your site. We’ll keep the spot up to date with the latest offers from your merchants. It’s all of the automation of a datafeed in a user-friendly tool.
Only 51 Days Until Black Friday – Start Now
Big thanks to Joe, Wade and Chad for these tips. I’m sure they’d all agree that whether you take one or all of these steps to get ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday – it’s important to start as soon as possible. Affiliate Managers have more time now to work with you one-on-one than they will come mid-November. So, be first in line knocking on their doors to get your plans ready before they are swamped with reporting and updates to give you the information, advice and feedback you need.
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