Tips & Guides — 02 Nov 2020
How to Boost Affiliate Sales on Black Friday
When is it for you when you start to count days before Black Friday? All shoppers love this day! Even those who do not usually shop a lot. They think of Black Friday as an opportunity to save on goods that they need to buy anyway.
Black Friday is a common name for the Friday following Thanksgiving Day in the United States. Today, not only in the USA but also across the globe, this day is known for its shopping deals and massive discounts. Throughout the world, Black Friday is considered the kickoff of the holiday shopping season.
The core concept of both Black Friday and Cyber Monday is about heavy discounts for a limited time after Thanksgiving. The difference lies in the channel of promotion. While Black Friday offers discounts for both in-store and online products, Cyber Monday is only about online shopping.
The earlier, the better.
Covid-19 obviously made its revisions, but in traditional terms, on Black Friday a lot of people tended to go to shopping malls, which they usually left with a number of the new goods and significantly slimmer purses. Even if they later saw attractive online ads, their decisions to purchase or not would not be the same rapid. Understanding that they already spent enough will make them less eager to make any further purchases.
It was the main reason not to wait until the sale day and start attracting customers in advance so that they are aware of a particular offer and are planning the purchase.
But…Remember the difference between Black Friday and Cyber Monday? Looks like this year it can be one prolonged Cyber Monday.
Unfortunately, with the second wave of Covid-19, Black Friday will be much different this year. And it may start earlier, depending on the region. Amazon has already moved its Prime Day to October 13-14; the rest may follow the example. With the dates changing and people shopping online, the traffic may be expensive as never during the first days of the sale period.
Also, the new lockdown will dictate the most popular goods. Unfortunately, with the general drop in eCommerce during the first Covid-19 wave, we are not expecting the same as always sales volumes for this Black Friday. Anyway, to make the best out of the situation, advertisers should emphasize the categories of goods people use the most during lockdowns and remote works.
As an advertiser, you must be already actively preparing for Black Friday. Are you? In any case, here is a list of recommendations on how your preparation should look like. Use it as a check-list when getting ready for Black Friday this year and all the following years to come.
Well-chosen Black Friday products are the foundation of the sale season’s success.
Right away comes the question: with Covid-19 influence on buyers’ behavior, what will be the most demanded goods this year?
Most likely, it wouldn’t be clothing and fashion items. People may still buy some discounted clothes, even though they have nowhere to wear it right now, but they would buy it in less amount than usual. But what will be more demanded this year are online courses, house-friendly sports equipment, DIY goods, different housewares, etc.
Interesting fact. While clothing items considered to be atop of Black Friday Sales, it is somewhat stereotyped. In 2019 depending on the region, amongst the most sold items were athletics, suitcases, computers, TV subscriptions, duvet covers, and mattresses.
As a timeless thing, you can also consider promoting different gift sets. It is the holiday season; people are puzzling over what to buy for their friends and relatives. Gift certificates and boxes never get old. Add delivery, and gift packages will be sold out immediately.
It would be best if you had new landings and creatives for the Black Friday sales. Sometimes, one landing page or one creative is not enough, and for a successful affiliate marketing campaign advertisers need several pages. Owing to Affise flexible traffic management, you can run several landing pages or creatives within one offer.
When you have several landing pages, you can also smartly redistribute traffic among those pages based on users’ data and hence their interest. You can split the traffic within one offer to see which landing page converts better and further optimize ad campaigns for the best performing creatives and landing pages. Further, you can also control ad campaign costs by specifying the percentage of traffic you would like to receive from each landing page or a creative.
Don’t forget to optimize for mobile
When creating new landing pages, don’t forget to optimize them for mobile. Last year mobile traffic accounted for 61% of all online traffic. And in sales terms amounted to 41.2% of sales. Constantly increasing online shopping and covid-19 restrictions will show even higher numbers in 2020. All eCommerce and digital advertising industries are dying to see the outcomes.
Prepare new ad banners that would draw users’ attention to your product or store. Please do not overdo it with long texts. You won’t be able to fit all your offers on banners in any way. Instead, try to be creative and come up with catchy texts.
Create a sense of urgency in your ads. Emphasize one-day Black Friday deals, temporal discounts, or a limited amount of items.
Affiliates are looking forward to Black Friday sales, not less than buyers. Publish your offers with some time in advance to attract more attention from affiliates. The same as people comparing discounts in different stores, marketers are looking for the best offers to promote.
If you feel you need more media partners go further and publish your offers in new directories. Who knows, maybe Black Friday will even help you to find new affiliates? You can take the advantage of Affise Reach, an all-in-one platform to find new partners to drive business together.
During Black Friday affiliates have a diverse choice over which products to promote. Encourage marketers to work with you and be more active in promotion by awarding your affiliates with special bonuses for achieving specific performance goals.
For example, an affiliate receives 1 dollar from every sale. You set a rule that should your partner perform well and drive you 15 sales, he would receive a bonus above the due commission.
During Black Friday, affiliate marketers understand that they will inevitably earn enough, as people don’t postpone purchasing. Because of dynamic customer buying behavior, they might be very picky about prioritizing advertisers and products. Make sure you offer attractive terms.
You can offer bonuses regardless of which partner platform you use. Though, in the best scenario, your platform provides a necessary feature, like the Affise commission tiers feature, that will fully automate the process of tracking the number of sales, calculating bonuses, and making payouts. If not, then you will have to calculate it manually.
To make sure your offers are popular and will be bought up from the start, you can consider introducing a pre-offer landing page, where you can collect leads by promising to contact them as soon as your Black Friday deals go live. In this way, you may also cut expenses on advertising, as the traffic will probably reach the peak price right away on Black Friday day.
Timely social media updating is the most basic, but yet important thing to do. Customers will be checking your social media several times before the sale kick-starts. Make sure you also start advertising your special offers on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter with time in advance.
We hope you will have a profitable Black Friday this year! If you have any questions about managing a partner program, running ad campaigns, and tracking campaign performance, let’s have a chat!
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Yulia is a Content Marketer with a love to a great story and an eye to small details. Carrying a voice and delivering an accurate message - that’s what Yulia believes content marketing is for. Looking for thorough research and long-reads? You came to the right person. Her goal is to produce content that educates and entertains, and most importantly, has an impact. Challenges and something that is yet to be explored are her main motivators.
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