In the United States, Mother’s Day is celebrated annually on the second Sunday of May. It is never too early to start planning your sales and promotions for holidays, and Mother’s Day is no different. Since we are exactly one month away from Mother’s Day, I wanted to share 4 affiliate marketing tips for Mother’s Day promotions.
1. Create Banners / Links Specifically for Mother’s Day Sales.
Creating new banners that are specifically geared towards Mother’s Day can help increase click-throughs and ultimately lead to more sales. Instead of having the standard banners, include the copy of your sale, for example, “Mother’s Day Sale – 25% Off Entire Store”. These dedicated banners will draw the eyes of the consumer because of the targeted callout to Mother’s Day.
Also, be sure to have these banners uploaded into your merchant center before sending out the newsletter. It is always best to include precoded links for your affiliates to be able to “grab” or copy and paste directly from the newsletter.
2. Send out a Mother’s Day Specific Newsletter Right Away
You do not want your affiliate program to be left out of any affiliates planning. To ensure that your affiliates know of your sales well in advance, it is important to send out a Mother’s Day newsletter as soon as possible announcing your Mother’s Day sale and that new banners are available for them to use during the timeframe of said sale or promotion.
By waiting until a week or even two weeks before, you are allowing other merchants to take up the space available on your affiliates’ website. Even worse, it could be a competitor!
Create a custom newsletter specifically for the sale. Do not just include the Mother’s Day promotions as one of five line items in the newsletter because chances are, it will be skipped over, or attention will be put elsewhere.
Keep in mind that online shoppers will need to buy your products BEFORE Mother’s Day weekend, so having the sale and promotional information to affiliates is crucial for this shopping period.
3. Activation Opportunity
This is a perfect opportunity to activate publishers who have not sent much or any traffic at all to your site. Focusing on sites that may have a niche geared towards purchasing Mother’s Day gifts can be the perfect opportunity to turn that affiliate into an active affiliate.
Provide them with the banners and any other tools they may need to ensure that the updated banners are placed and that they are promoting them. If possible, include an activation incentive for using the Mother’s Day banners. For example, increase their cookie life from 30 days to 90 when they confirm placement of the new banners.
Once they see a sale or two come through, they will become more excited to participate in future promotions, like Father’s Day.
4. Track results from Mother’s Day to start planning for Father’s Day
Just like with any campaign, we want to track the results. Here are a few things to look at:
- Did the coupon code or sales discount increase sales? (Do you need to increase it next time around?)
- Which banners performed the best?
- Which text link copy performed the best?
- Did the promotion help activate any new affiliates? (If not, then a different incentive may need to be used in the future)
Those are several of the items that you should look at after the promotion has ended, because guess what? Father’s Day is approaching right after Mother’s Day, so you can utilize the information from this campaign to figure out what to do better for your Father’s Day campaigns.
All of the above tips can be utilized for any sale or promotion, even if it is not a holiday. Always remember to have dedicated banners, send out the information in a timely manner, and track the results to make the next one even better.
Happy early Mother’s Day!
Another tip: Create a specific landing page for Mother’s Day. If you are are an e-commerce store you would also have the opportunity to get organic traffic on keywords like ‘mothers day gifts’ and so on.