Whether you’re preparing for winter holiday sales or releasing your summer catalog, seasonal marketing is all about timeliness.
As a result, holiday success is frequently a crucial role in fulfilling (and exceeding!) sales objectives.
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If you have an affiliate program, you already have a strong network that can reach you in increasing sales and acquiring new customers. Taking advantage of seasonal trends is a great approach to take things to the next level and give your program a boost.
In this piece, we’ll define seasonality and show you how to make the most of your affiliate program throughout high purchasing seasons. Let’s get started!
How Does Seasonality Affect Your Affiliate Program?
Seasonality in marketing refers to how consumer purchasing behaviors tend to shift dependent on seasons, holidays, and the like. Predictable annual events, such as Christmas or Black Friday, can have a significant impact on Business.
Consider the healthcare industry. In autumn and winter, a health and wellness store is likely to experience increased purchases of vitamins, probiotics, and other products advised for immune support.
This means that seasonality will have an impact on the performance of your affiliate program. Some products will naturally be in higher or lower demand at various times of the year. Fortunately, you are not merely at the mercy of this phenomenon; you can actively use it to assist your affiliates in driving additional sales.
Seasonal promotions have the power to make or shatter your marketing efforts. When affiliates are unable to provide content for sale in a timely time, they can cause frustration.
Alternatively, they can create excitement and give your affiliates plenty of time to convey your sales to their audiences and share the excitement. Here are four pointers to help you make the most of seasonality.
1. Create Entertaining Seasonal Promotions
Seasonal promotions that are appealing to your customers can help you accomplish your sales targets and set your affiliates up for success. Fortunately, there are numerous methods for creating this kind of promotion.
For example, “rotating discounts” are a great method to build excitement for your major holiday sales. During a specific event or season, you might offer tiny weekly promotions. This also allows affiliates to pick and choose which sales to focus on based on what works best for their audiences.
Another idea is to offer a way freebies and other presents to commemorate special occasions. This can help to create awareness of new products and let customers try out what you have to offer without risk.
You can even run these as affiliate-exclusive specials with your best performers, allowing them to offer additional incentives to their audiences and motivating customers to promote your products through word-of-mouth.
2. Announce Sales and Discounts Clearly in Advance
Holiday sales are limited, and many businesses offer promotions (and sometimes exclusive products) only once a year. However, urgency is a significant sales driver, and it, combined with timeliness, is a potent tool that your affiliates may utilize to convert their audiences.
However, affiliates may become dissatisfied if they are frequently forced to scramble and develop material for your seasonal specials at the last minute. As a result, you’ll want to disclose all of the specifics regarding your seasonal sales ahead of time.
Your affiliates will have more time to prepare and focus on providing great content as a result. You can reach them by email or make this information available through your affiliate dashboard (or better yet, both).
3. Provide Affiliates with Seasonal Marketing Materials
Another strategy to ensure your affiliates’ success is to supply them with banners and social media photos to promote your products. After all, the start of a new season and the weeks preceding big holidays are already extremely busy times for content makers.
Having marketing materials ready to go that are prepared with the current season and promotion in mind saves your affiliates time and allows them to focus on advertising your product. Furthermore, it ensures that their efforts are aligned with your overall brand and your own promotions.
Easy Affiliate, fortunately, makes it simple to build links and banners for your affiliates to use:
It’s a good idea to provide both “default” branded graphics (those you want affiliates to use all year) and seasonal and holiday stuff. This keeps things interesting and draws attention to limited-time sales.
4. Provide additional affiliate incentives over the holiday season.
Affiliates are still customers, and they like to be rewarded for their efforts. With that in mind, you can do a few things to boost engagement and get your affiliates interested.
Seasonal competitions are a great approach to motivate affiliates to go above and beyond. In addition, you can provide a little more reward to top performers, which might offer from a new laptop to a package of your own products. This motivates affiliates to work harder at critical moments and contributes to the positive perception of your program.
You might also try offering a bonus for all sales made within a certain time limit. For example, you may offer a 10% increase in commission on all sales during the month of December. If a general increase does not align with your income objectives, you can also offer it only for the products you want affiliates to promote the most.
Conclusion
Don’t forget to take seasonality while creating your annual marketing calendar. Making sure your content and promotions correspond to how and when your audience prefers to buy is a great approach to increase your affiliate program.
What are your favorite methods to interact with your affiliates around the holidays? Please share your thoughts in the comments box below!
Last Updated on September 30, 2020
