Every e-commerce business should be prepared for Black Friday. As data indicates, customers are more likely to visit online stores and spend money on Black Friday and Cyber Monday than at any other time of the year. Why? Many of these people plan to buy Christmas gifts and novelty items they’ve been saving for, for lower prices.
Black Friday is the first Friday after Thanksgiving, and let’s not forget that Cyber Monday comes at the start of the following week. So the last days of November are an excellent time to boost your sales, and you should do your best to capitalize on that opportunity. How can affiliate marketing help you with increasing sales? We have some tips for you.
Prepare your offer
Prepare a suitable offer. The performance of affiliate marketing doesn’t solely depend on the affiliates and their activities. It’s also strongly related to the products you choose to promote. So take a closer look at your offer and, if needed, make appropriate adjustments.
Black Friday deals
First things first. Black Friday means discounts. Work on them in advance, think about which products should be discounted, and highlight them appropriately on your website. Remember that when leveraging affiliate marketing, it is worth using affiliate links to measure the performance of your activities.
Special offers
Take advantage of special Black Friday deals. As an example, you could bring back a successful bestseller that sold out previously.
Regardless of what kind of offer you decide to promote, affiliate marketing will come in handy. Let’s suppose that a blogger or an influencer promotes information about one of your bestsellers coming back on Black Friday. Potential customers will visit your website out of curiosity even before the big day, and maybe some other products will catch their eye. Remember to allow your customers to add products to their wishlist, as this makes subsequent purchasing easier for them.
Gift ideas
Providing gift recommendations is also a good idea. Did you know that 60% of shoppers decide to buy Christmas gifts in November? At the same time, only 26% of users complete purchasing their gifts before Cyber Week. These stats combined indicate that Black Friday is when most consumers do their Christmas shopping.
Introducing gift ideas also makes your affiliates’ jobs easier. They can refer customers to specific subpages with recommendations and create separate content for each gift idea category. This solution also creates more opportunities to cooperate with various influencers.
Prepare your staff
Not only affiliates need to be active during the end of November. To make affiliate marketing work, all employees should put their best foot forward. You need to be sure that your employee engagement is up to 100%.
Rely on proven collaborations
Do not experiment during challenging times like Cyber Week, and don’t start too many new affiliate partnerships. Why? Because you cannot predict what effects new co-operations will bring, but you will still need to invest time and energy into onboarding new affiliates.
If you want to get the most out of affiliate marketing during Black Friday, rely on proven partners – you know what to expect from them and their campaigns, and thus sales results are therefore likely to increase. Sounds like a perfect scenario, right? The only thing you may want to change is the form of promotion or its frequency. But remember to start negotiations about this with affiliates in advance. Otherwise, you may not be able to establish any new terms of cooperation before Black Friday kicks off.
Ensure good communication between teams
If your teams do not communicate with each other well, your marketing simply won’t work. At such a busy time, it is worth organizing a few meetings and assigning tasks so that everyone knows what to do.
It is also a very good idea to create a team or appoint a person (depending on the company’s size and the number of employees) who will be in touch with affiliates. To create a bullet-proof strategy, and to make sure that your affiliate marketing will deliver the expected results, invest in dedicated software. Post Affiliate Pro makes it very easy to manage all of your partnerships. Thanks to this tool, you can be sure that all of your affiliate marketing initiatives will be under control, and not only during Black Friday.
Customer service as the key to clients’ hearts
Providing top-level customer service during Black Friday and Cyber Monday should be your priority. You will almost certainly receive more questions than usual at this time regarding specific products or processes, such as shipping details. That’s why it may be a good idea to hire more customer service agents before Black Friday. You could also create a dedicated hotline or email inbox specifically for questions about Black Friday deals.
It would also be nice to organize a Q&A session on Instagram. This is where affiliates come in handy. Instead of starting by promoting specific products, your affiliates can start by talking about your Black Friday-related customer service channels.
If your company operates globally, 24/7 customer service is a must. Because customers shop in different time zones, Black Friday will actually last more than 24 hours. This is why your customer service agents should work in shifts to ensure they will be available until Black Friday and Cyber Monday end in all timezones.
Prepare your website and social media
Your website is your business card. Ensure that the visitors your affiliates bring to your website will land on a page that meets their expectations and provides all of the necessary information.
Ensure your website loads quickly
First and foremost, it is worth ensuring that your website has the quickest possible loading speed. Did you know that 1 in 4 users leave a page if it fails to load within 4 seconds? Remember that Black Friday brings a lot more traffic to your website than any other marketing campaign, so your website’s infrastructure should be prepared for that. If your affiliate marketing strategy works as you hope, your website will be popular. However, its popularity will be wasted if it loads slowly or if your website hosting servers fail.
The design should be Black Friday-centric
By design, we mean not only site colors or visuals used on landing pages, but also the right navigation or the way banners and pop-ups are displayed. Users should know where to click to check the best Black Friday deals right after landing on your website. It should also be easy for them to find information about shipping costs and support payment methods.
This matter may not seem particularly related to affiliate marketing, but it’s similar to the page loading speed. If affiliates work hard to send potential customers to your website, but then the visitors have no idea where to click to find the products recommended by the affiliates, it’s a wasted opportunity. The customers are likely to get frustrated and exit your page without purchasing anything.
Social media should be ready
Don’t forget about social media platforms. Affiliates may be doing their jobs, but you need to do yours too. This means providing the best possible content to promote Black Friday offers. Do not rely on your affiliates only. Craft your own strategy and make sure all of the necessary information is available on all of your channels. Show your best side on social media to prove that affiliates recommend you because you provide the best products and services.
Conclusion
To make the most of affiliate marketing during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you need to cover many details. Even if your affiliates are doing the best jobs they possibly can, don’t rely only on them to bring you the best results.
Think about improving every possible aspect of your e-commerce store and the marketing communication surrounding your Black Friday deals. While affiliate marketing can help bring traffic to your website, it is your job to convert potential clients and provide great customer service, as well as after-sales support if necessary. Good luck with your Black Friday campaign!
