Don’t neglect your affiliate program during the holiday shopping season! Your affiliates are your sales people on the Internet and social media, so they need to be spoon fed your holiday promotions all throughout the holiday shopping season. Here are some great ways and essential ways to pump up your affiliate program for the holiday shopping season:
- Affiliate Banners Ads – Add fresh holiday banner ads, text links, and offers/promotions for your affiliate marketers to promote with. As we always say, “affiliate marketing is promotion driven,” and this is the time to ramp up promotions through your affiliates. On the affiliate networks like CJ.com and Linkshare.com you can swap out the current banner ad graphics running on your affiliates’ websites with holiday banners so your current banner inventory out there gets updated, without affiliates/publishers having to replace what’s currently on their websites/blogs/etc.
- Affiliate Messaging/Newsletters – Push out more frequent affiliate newsletters with deals and promotions for your affiliates to promote to their audiences during the holiday shopping season. Affiliate marketing is promotion driven, so make sure to ramp up your sending of promotions to your affiliates. Affiliate marketers love promotions. In fact, don’t expect them to promote your company without arming them with frequent, good promotions for their audiences, especially during the holidays.
- Holiday Affiliates – Recruit holiday-oriented affiliates and publishers, such as: gift site affiliates, shopping affiliates, cash back sites, loyalty portals, and other holiday or shopping related affiliates. Contact us if you need affiliate recruiting campaigns conducted, our agency is the best in the business at both recruiting new affiliates and managing affiliates to get them producing more revenue. If you need to grow your affiliate program let us know, this is one of our specialties!
- Affiliate Sales Contests – this is one of our favorite ways to get affiliates rocking for our clients’ affiliate programs. Launching an exciting holiday sales contest has several benefits including: motivates big affiliates to produce more, motivates new affiliates to get active promoting your company, and gets your overall affiliate base excited to win one of the prizes in the contest. It also shows your affiliates that we aren’t cheap with your affiliate program, which reflects well on your company. Another nice feature of affiliate sales contests is that it has a delayed effect on your affiliate program, in that you will have a higher rate of participating affiliates promoting your company, which bodes well going forward into the following year. Uplift can be as much as 20-30% increased revenue through your affiliates but running a contest, some of the boost comes during the contest period and some there after with a delayed effect. Here’s a great example of a real affiliate sales contest:
These are some essential ways to ramp up your affiliate program during the holiday shopping season. If you need assistance pumping up your affiliate marketing channel during the holiday shopping season let us know and we can give you a free assessment about what we can do for your company. Have a great holiday shopping season!
