It’s clear that the holiday season presents many opportunities for creative content marketing for affiliates to capitalise on, but in order to take advantage of seasonal events you need to be prepared.
Here are some of our top seasonal tips to help you to get ready for promoting seasonal campaigns and making an impact first time round
1. Think about the Offer and Product messages you want to promote
You should have a fair idea of what you want to promote already but this time. `big seasonal offers would have been started by now, but don’t forget to take a look at the news to check for any new brands that might be launching around this time, as they might have quite aggressive seasonal offers, which you can take advantage of. Because they are new to market there is a fresh factor to conversion from usual brands that customers could be already immune to seeing. Do you have the promotional content or a calendar from operators to see what they are offering around holiday time? If not – be sure to ask for it. This will help you keep abreast of what’s coming in the pipe and where you can take advantage of offer messages that won’t be widely spread or promoted elsewhere online. It’s also a good idea to make sure that you have already negotiated a good affiliate deal with the brands you are featuring to get the best ROI during the period.
2. Clean up your Email Database
It can be all too easy to fire out emails to the same database pushing out operator deals, but if you don’t manage your lists effectively – it can hinder their performance which isn’t what you want at this time of year. Make sure you remove any users who aren’t being responsive or opening their emails. This will allow you to get a better measure of the success rates of your promotional marketing efforts. It’s a good time to judge whether bonus promotions or offers are working best with your target audiences. So don’t forget to AB test your combinations and record the data to analyse after the event. Since contacts will receive an influx of emails in their inbox at this time of year – they are much more likely to report spam rather than simply unsubscribe.
3. Theme your offers around the season – not the holiday itself
When strategising your offers, don’t forget to theme them around the season instead of focussing on the religious or traditional holiday themes. You want to stand out from the noise so think outside the box if you can for that extra boost. For example, if you are pushing a deal with a particular operator over Christmas – use a promotional code that reflects the discount but won’t exclude members of your audience who don’t celebrate Christmas for example. You can also send them to an optimised landing page with imagery that doesn’t follow a traditional theme but rather plays on comic value or denotes a present or gift versus a traditional holiday theme. People love seasonal sales – and you may also want to think about developing your content calendar, so you are creating more regular content that is pushing out the promotions on site.
4. Have a Look at your last year’s stats
By looking at the stats from the year before, this will allow you to effectively improve your campaigns. You will be able to know what deliver, what didn’t – and alter accordingly. It could be that you did some email marketing on a specific date or time – that didn’t convert as well as you’d hoped or that you can either optimise or choose not to re-run. Use this as a guide for you to create the best marketing campaigns possible and capitalise on learnings from the previous year.
5. Add something extra to Incentivise your audiences
The Christmas season is a time where people look for gifts for loved ones – so if you have a good relationship with your affiliate manager, it could be that you discuss creating some incentivised campaigns by adding a physical gift to a welcome offer – new iPhone, or gadget or games consul could work well with players. This means instead of sending out standard bonus offers; you can personalise things a little more which is much more likely to create a better conversion rate and create a pleasant user experience on your site.
The point is you need to be creative to stand out so think outside the box and try new things to get ahead of the noise. We hope you are ready to create some holiday season campaigns the drive great revenue results!
If you want to take advantage of our Seasonal Sale – head on over the the Affiverse Bootcamp and book your affiliate seat with a whopping 50% Discount until 31st December. Tickets are limited so get yours quick!
