Hello good people of blogsville. Hope you are well.

I just wanted to write a short post to see how prepared affiliates are for Mothers Day. On the whole I’m reckoning not very!

This isn’t me having a dig, moreover, I think a lot of merchants and affiliates have been caught out by the close proximity of Mothers Day to that commercial bastian of an event which is Valentines Day. Really however this is no excuse, as Mothers Day is one of the big retail occassions of the year and if marketed correctly will, in my opinion,  only be eclipsed by Christmas and Valentines Day in terms of sales.

Is this the fault of the Affiliate? Or should we, as Affiliate Managers, be doing more to help get our affiliates promotions and time table organised? I reckon it’s a combination of the both, but I certainly think there’s more Merchants can do to encourage their affiliates to launch promotions in plenty of time.

So this then leads to the next question - when should merchants launch their promotions?

Well, in my role as an affiliate manager, I try and pre-determine what I would be doing were I an affiliate. Using Christmas as an  example, if I were an affiliate I’d want to start my Christmas promotion in October at the latest, so this would give me time to optimise my pages, promote the years hot selling products, update creative etc.

Then I work backwards. If the affiliates need the creative/promotion in October and it’s going to take us a month to put together the creative/competition prizes/product sales reports etc, then we need to start the work at the beginning of September to make sure the affiliate gets their sales tools in time.

I then give myself and our designers and techies a couple of ‘extra’ weeks grace just in case something happens which delays you a wee while.

…now, I know this isn’t rocket science but it amazes me to see how many merchants and agencies actually launch their promotion a matter of days before the actual event. One of our competitors (via an agency) launched their Fathers Day promotion last year on the Friday before Fathers Day. Now, even if some affiliates had bothered to promote the merchant at the 11th hour, any customer who purchased products wouldn’t have got them prior to fathers day because the postal service/couriers don’t collect and deliver on a Saturday. In short therefore a complete waste of time, effort and dosh.

So, to conclude this, now not so short post, I think we, as merchants need to be doing more to drive promotions forward with our affiliates. Lets provide them with tools, nice and early and work with them to promote the best products for the specific occasion.

(blatant sales pitch…) and if you still havn’t put together a Mothers Day promotion then you need to be quick. Mothers Day is on the 2nd March (less than 2 weeks) and you can find details of our creative by clicking here.

Ten ten. Over and out.

 Zak.

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