#HowTo – Setup Future Promotions

As the end of this year approaches and you are thinking ahead to 2014, chances are you are going to be thinking of ways to grow your program and get Affiliates more involved.

One of the best ways to accomplish this, is through Affiliate promotions. Here’s a little bonus tip for you, did you know that ShareASale has a tool that allows Merchants to schedule future promotions? The program manager can essentially map out a years worth of promotions and have them automatically run. Set up your bonuses for the year and forget about it – brilliant!

If you are thinking about putting together a promotional schedule for the year, all you need to do is roll out the barrel and remember to P.O.C.A.!

Plan: First thing to do is to think about what your goals are going to be for the year. What are you trying to accomplish? The use of promotions can be a great way to attract attention and increase motivation for a specific purpose such as:

• Overall increased affiliate sales
• Diversify creative use
• Increase sales of a specific product
• Announce a new creative
• Drive sales to a specific deal/coupon
• Activate a specific set of affiliates

Organize: Once you have figured out the promotional plan, the next step should be to take an inventory of what you might need to accomplish those goals and lay out how the plan is going to be executed. Planning on spending some marketing dollars? Be sure you have budget approval. Making new creatives? Have the deadlines and specs to designer. Rolling out new deals? Make sure to have all the details and dates necessary. Once you have identified all your moving parts, you can start mapping out the plan of what will roll out when. Below is an example of what a six month promo calendar might look like. For extra credit points, if you are preparing this for your own work, you may want to include rows below each proposed promotion for items such as budget, resources needed, number of qualified affiliates, actual spend, etc.

Create: Once you have figured out what promotions you want to run and when, you will go to your advanced commission rules page to create the various promotions.
My Account > Edit Settings > Manage Advanced Commission Structures
Below, I have created the custom commission rules that would coincide with the six month example promos. As you can see, you will use the condition “transaction date matches pattern” to input specific date parameters for transactions that the rule will be applied to. Also, be sure to un-check the “enabled” box while you are drafting your rules. Please do not hesitate to contact us with any questions you may have as you build out your various rules.

Activate: Once you have looked over your rules and double checked all the conditions the ensure that they reflect the actions you intend, you can enable or activation the rules. You will check the Enabled box and click the “Save Changes” button. Once the rules are enabled, there will be an automated email that is sent to your approved Affiliates. If you build all your rules first as drafts then enable everything at once your affiliates will receive one email with all the updates. This is most likely going to be preferred by the Affiliate rather than one new email each time a new change or rule is made.

There we have it, you now know that you can build future promotions using our custom commission rules. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions about this or any other custom commission build you are thinking about implementing with your program.