While inherently stressful, preparation for the holiday shopping craze can become incredibly lucrative. Affiliate marketing is the best way to generate income this (or any other) holiday season as those who focus solely on coupons, advertisements, and flash sales begin building their own holiday shopping lists. This text will highlight a few ways you can use holidays to your advantage and expand your customer base. If you want more tips like this, be sure to let us know. We love talking about the intricacies of affiliate marketing and what it can achieve.
First Step: Remember the Important Dates
All of your marketing strategies should be fine-tuned to make sure you run successful campaigns during the holidays season. Without some sort of marketing calendar, you could find yourself last-minute with no market-leading, holiday-appropriate products in stock or with no sound marketing strategy to generate awareness and conversion. Let’s go over some major dates to help you prepare and execute your campaign:
- November 11th – Singles Day: People are expected to buy a special little gift just for themselves. Can you smell the opportunity in this holiday? This is a day that encourages consumers to buy themselves things. Some research has shown that this holiday is relatively popular!
- November 25th – Pre-Thanksgiving: You have to use this opportunity to reach your possible clients before any of the competition can. Make sure you have some new material to share and/or samples of your new holiday-approved merchandise. People really love spending money during the Thanksgiving season, make no mistake about it.
- November 25th-29th – Cyber Five: Multi-channel marketing can generate a tremendous amount of exposure, and this holiday season, you can amplify your impact with social media. Do something inventive every day and your profits will surely grow!
- November 30th – Giving Tuesday: Perfect opportunity to get your clients to purchase a holiday gift for someone in their family. This is the perfect time for promotional opportunities geared towards all family-oriented clients.
- December 26th – Boxing Day: UK’s favorite shopping holiday returns in the heart of the holidays season! Holiday shoppers can generate significant sales and achieve exceptional returns on investment.
We are barely scratching the service with all the underrated holidays mentioned above. However, let’s be honest: if you’ve got even small-scale holiday-themed affiliate marketing in your plans, you’re making the right move.
Second Step: Understand What to Offer and When
Timing and the product itself are incredibly important. The launch of a special product shouldn’t always coincide with the holiday season. We are not suggesting that you should only begin promoting products around holidays. What we are saying is that there are a few tricks that help boost the effectiveness of your promotions and encourage sales. The tricks include:
- Price variation. If you’re really trying to encourage sales during this time, a 15% price variation can create a significant profit margin for you.
- Free shipping. Don’t attempt this unless you have the necessary funds for it.
- Free gifts with purchases. Believe it or not, studies show a 45% increase in conversion whenever a gift is offered, no matter how insignificant it may be. Anecdotal evidence suggests an even sharper increase. You can’t argue with the fact that most are easily swayed by such marketing tactics… People really DO love free stuff.
- Limited-time offers. It’s one of the cheapest tricks out there, but it’s still in use only because it works. It actually works. Still. To this day. Clients are going to experience a huge fear of missing out on something worthwhile, so they will rush to purchase whatever product that is currently on sale for a limited time only. It’s the same thing that makes a big shopping day a must-visit in our day-to-day lives.
- Cashback promotions. It’s easier to justify a purchase when there’s cashback involved. People will excuse overspending as long as they feel that they have got a great deal.
These are just a few of the tricks that you can use to maximize your profits when promoting holiday-themed affiliate marketing. Once again, this is not a complete list and we encourage you to feel free to come up with your own strategies and implement them in the most effective ways possible. The ultimate goal is to boost sales for a strong holiday season, get referrals and generate additional income.
Step Three: Formulate a Clear Strategy for Your Promotion
That’s the last piece of the puzzle. When you have an idea on how you want to market products and which affiliates to use in your promotions, you need to put everything together and create a clear strategy. It’s important to dedicate enough time to explaining. Your affiliates need to understand how your holiday promotion will look and how to build a partnership with clients so that you all can get the best results. If you’re an affiliate looking to generate sales with the tactics mentioned here, then you should explain your strategy to people that are responsible for your marketing efforts.
Either way, the key to success is to present a clear and detailed picture of how your promotion will work and how the affiliates involved will be compensated. Now that you’ve planned, formatted and completed your holiday promotion, you’re ready to make a killing. By the way, you should not hesitate to use any and all software that can hopefully optimize and/or automate the process as much as possible. There are many great options out there.
