The Ultimate Black Friday + Cyber Monday Guide for Merchants – Part II

This season, especially Black Friday and Cyber Monday, are all about the deals. We know that you got them, so input them into our database so that the Affiliates know about them too!  Make your deals competitive, creative and irresistible!  Above all, don’t forget to add them to our Deals Database: Black Friday/Cyber Monday Edition.

Helpful Resource:

Coupons & Deals Database Best Practices

Running a seasonal or product-related incentive can be a great way to jumpstart your affiliates, get them engaged and activated. Offer them bonuses for reaching specific sales goals or upticks in commissions are both great ways to get them excited about your program during this busy shopping season! An important thing to remember is not all affiliates are made equal – tailor the incentives to each affiliate segment, make them realistic and consider both long term and short term incentives.

Using the Advanced Commission Structures you are able to create custom commission rules that will help you automate any promotions you may be planning on running this quarter. Based on your editorial calendar, you can set up rules ahead of time and have them scheduled to run on transactions for a specific time period. Save yourself the stress of remembering later, just schedule the promotions out right now!

If you are looking for a little extra exposure, consider taking out a listing in ShareASale’s Holiday Center. There are several Q4 categories to choose from such as Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years Eve, Hanukkah, and Winter Season. If you have products targeted to any of these holidays, it’s a great way to gain some extra exposure for your program.

Double check that the landing pages for your creatives are working and correct. Keep in mind that deeper landing links tend to convert better than those directing to the homepage. Especially if the banner reflects a specific section or category of your website. If you are an apparel retailer for example, consider creating a banner specifically for your Jackets category that lands on the Jackets page, Dresses banner on the Dresses page, so on and so forth.  Make sure that your banners are well-organized by using category names such as promotion, holiday, season or occasion, product-specific, etc.

Double check that your datafeed is up-to-date with in-stock products and ensure that all images, landing pages, and prices are listed correctly. I would also consider automating your datafeed uploads but utilizing FTP access. This will allow you to schedule and automate the file upload process. Submit a ticket if you’re interested in uploading your datafeed via FTP.

There’s no doubt you may be releasing a ton of deals this shopping season. You can save yourself the time of logging in and adding each deal to the database but utilizing our API. With the API you are able to upload coupons and/or creatives, as well as edit any current banners, text links, or deals. Hooray timesaver!