During a busy Q4 encompassing Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, Christmas promotions and New Year sales, the start of the year often comes with a sigh of relief for a majority of the eCommerce world. While Q4 can be a crazy busy period, it’s always good to capitalise on exposure, consumer spending habits and sale patterns when you can.
In our latest post, we’re on hand with an overview of what you can do to boost your sales in Q4 so that you can enter 2020 satisfied with the performance of your affiliates and beyond.
Recognising Sales Patterns
When you consider the importance of affiliate channels to online sales during Q4, you must analyse sales from the previous year. By doing so, you’ll be able to identify any trends and highlight top-performing publishers and use this information to your advantage.
While Black Friday and Cyber Monday were once stand-alone one-day events. In recent years they’ve become week-long shopping events that generate huge amounts of online sales. By highlighting sales patterns, brands can ensure that exposure and activity are planned across these periods as opposed to individual days.
Booking Exposure in Advance
The festive period is one of the most competitive times of the year for online retailers. To ensure that your brand is seen and heard over all of the noise shopping events such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday creates, you need to secure exposure.
It’s not uncommon for brands to book out exposure for Q4 at the start of the year. While it’s not too late to secure some decent exposure now, you need to act fast. Granted, it’s often more expensive for peak periods and can be hard to lockdown. However, if you’re choosing trusted publishers that have performed well for you in previous years, it’s a sound investment.
Converting Traffic into Sales
While many eCommerce sites see traffic soar during Q4, particularly ahead of Christmas, conversion rates don’t always follow suit. To ensure that you’re capitalising on the increased traffic you’ll see, you must consider how you can encourage them to convert.
To do so, you should look into on-site overlays, re-targeting display campaigns and basket abandonment emails to ensure that your potential customers reach the checkout. If you don’t already have these in place, you can rest assured that they will pay off during Q4.
Ensuring you’re Reactive
Some retailers may choose to hold off deciding on offers for Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Boxing Day Sales until they can check out what their competitors are offering. There’s nothing wrong with this approach, as long as you’re reactive during these busy shopping periods. Thankfully, with affiliate channels, you can update offers and discounts pretty quickly. However, you must be ready to make this happen in-house. If you choose to hold off on promoting offers, you must have a plan in place for when you are ready to launch and promote them.
Of course, it goes without saying that when it comes to affiliate strategies, there’s no ‘one size fits all approach. Finding what works for your brand and your goals can take a lot of planning. So, if you’ve not already started, it’s about time you did. Better yet, allow Conversion Digital to do it for you.