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Continue Reading →5 fast tips to help your affiliates prepare for a sale event
Helping your affiliates be their best is always a worthwhile pursuit, but this is especially true come sale time!
Running a sale event isn’t a passive process. It requires plenty of preparation and marketing to be truly effective – and if you want to make the most of your efforts, it’s important to factor your affiliates into the equation. After all, they’re the ones on the front lines!
So, how do go about helping them prepare for a sale event? In this post, we look at 5 fast tips to give you some ideas!
1. Allow them enough time
The first thing you want to do is give your affiliates adequate notice. How can they fully prepare if they don’t have the chance?
Letting your affiliates know when sales events are happening well in advance allows them plenty of time to get acquainted with the relevant promotions, ask questions, and weave affiliate deals into their own content.
2. Equip them with plenty of creatives
Making affiliate creatives is always an important part of running an affiliate program, but since sales happen over limited time periods, properly equipping your affiliates is key.
Affiliates may only have a few days or weeks to promote your products, so give them plenty of diverse materials that allow them to get creative and keep their audiences engaged.
The last thing you want is for your creatives to be seen as stale and redundant! That’s a surefire way to get ignored and tuned out in the marketplace.
If you’re having a holiday sale, it’s worth noting your affiliates will be busier than usual with other engagements. So, think about how you can make your creatives more fun, more interesting, and better quality in order to keep your affiliates motivated to promote your products.
Remember, you’re the leader of your team, so help your affiliates help you!
3. Inform them and anticipate their questions
When it comes to enabling your affiliates to do well with your sale events, being proactive is the name of the game. Anticipating their questions and concerns can stop any potential slow-downs and setbacks from occurring in the first place, and it helps your affiliates become knowledgeable enough to effectively promote your products.
Consider creating an FAQ page just for your team. This is a great place to address all of the important details they need to know, and make sure they’re fully informed about your brand, your products, and any sale event specifications.
The basics include:
- The name of the sale
- The date(s) of the sale
- The promotion specifics (which products are on sale, percentage or dollar amount off, savings, special offers)
- Where to find creatives
- Who to contact with questions
- Any special incentives
- What language, phrases, or slogans to use (or to avoid)
If you’ve segmented your affiliates, you can custom tailor your communications to each individual segment. Maybe you want to have certain segments promoting specific products or using certain creatives, for example.
4. Give them extra incentives
To make your affiliates want to prepare for your sales event in the first place, you have to inspire them – and what inspires affiliates the most? Sweet incentives.
Whether it’s a special cash bonus, physical prize, higher commission rate, or non-monetary reward, giving your affiliates extra incentives during sale time is an effective way to get them moving. This is especially true since sale periods are time-sensitive and they give affiliates a limited window to act.
5. Facilitate good communication
If you don’t already have exclusive communication channels for your affiliates, it’s something worth looking into! Facebook groups or Slack channels work particularly well if you want your affiliates to have a convenient place to interact with you and with each other.
This not only cuts down on the amount of direct support you need to provide; it also creates a sense of community and exclusivity, both of which are motivating for your affiliates.
Affiliate newsletters are also helpful when it comes to keeping all of your affiliates in the loop, on the same page, and regularly engaged with you and your brand.
To recap
If you want your affiliates to perform well during your sale events, there’s plenty you can do to make that happen. Remember, the better they do, the better you do, so don’t be afraid to invest some time and effort into helping them out.
To recap our 5 tips:
- Allow them enough time. This helps your affiliates get all of their ducks in a row before sale time hits, including getting familiar with the relevant promotions and preparing their own content with your creatives ahead of time.
- Equip them with plenty of creatives. The more you give them to work with, the more they can market your products in a unique and compelling way.
- Inform them and anticipate their questions. The best affiliates are knowledgeable affiliates who are confident in what they do.
- Give them extra incentives. Rewards are the most effective positive motivators out there!
- Facilitate good communication. Engaging your affiliates and giving them an exclusive place to talk with other affiliates creates a sense of community and relieves some of your support burden, too!
What have you found to be most effective for helping your affiliates get ready for sale events? Did we miss something in this post? Chime in and let us know in the comments below!
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