Podcast: Download (Duration: 28:53 — 26.4MB) | Embed
Merchant ABCs hosts Deborah Carney and Vinny O’Hare joined Kim Salvino, Amy Ely, and Jeannine Crooks of buy.at to talk about preparing for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Topics include:
· Important information affiliates need to promote your Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals
· Considerations when designing a Black Friday/Cyber Monday deal
Key takeaways:
· Plan and send Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals at least 4-6 weeks in advance so affiliates have time to prepare.
· Communicating with your affiliates is very, very important. If your deal details won’t be available far in advance, tell your affiliates if you’re planning to run a deal at all – this way they can prepare their sites. If you send them a deal a few days before or on Black Friday, you’ll likely be out of luck.
· Don’t try to pass off a standard promotion (ex. Free shipping on orders over $50) as a Black Friday/Cyber Monday deal if it’s something you already offer regularly. Your customers and affiliates will find out and be disappointed if you’re trying to pull the wool over their eyes, and might take their business elsewhere.
· If you’d rather not discount your entire online store, offer a special on one or a handful of items to drive traffic to your site, and keep the remaining items at regular price.
· Ensure you have ample stock of the products you’re featuring for the deal, and if the stock runs out, be prepared to redirect the page to a similar item with a deal.
· When sending affiliates (and/or your network) deal details, we strongly recommend providing all of the following information:
- Offer title & details
- Official deal start date & time
- Official deal end date & time
- Specific landing page URL
- Required coupon code (if applicable)
Helpful statistics:
· Black Friday online sales totaled $595 million in 2009 and $648 million in 2010
· The largest online sales day in 2010 was Cyber Monday and the peak week was December 5-12th
Find us on Twitter:
Vinny O’Hare
Deborah Carney (a.k.a. Loxly)
Merchant ABCs
Geekcast.fm
Learn more about buy.at:
Visit the buy.at blog
Facebook Fan Page
Twitter: @buyatUS
Thanks to Geekcast.fm for hosting our podcasts, check them out for lots of other great podcasts about affiliate marketing and marketing in general.
