Welcome to the holiday season—the busiest, noisiest time in the affiliate world! Every program out there is cranking up their promotions, their recruiting, their emails…and let’s be real, it can feel like trying to shout over a crowd of holiday shoppers. So how do you make sure your affiliate program doesn’t get lost in all the holiday clutter? In today’s episode, I’m breaking down exactly what it takes to make your program stand out this season. Let’s cut through the noise and make this your best holiday season yet!
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy
7 Keys to Successful Affiliate Management During the Holidays
How to Help Your Affiliates Write Better Emails
7 Affiliate Management LIES That Will Kill Your Program
How to Get Hired as an Affiliate Manager
The MASSIVE Shift in Affiliate Programs is Here: Are You Ready?
How Great Affiliate Programs Stand Out in the Holiday Clutter
It’s the holiday season and that means there’s a lot of clutter in the affiliate world. Every program, it seems, is ramping up their promotions. They’re ramping up their recruiting, ramping up their communication. So how can your affiliate program stand out this holiday season? Today’s episode will show you how. let’s get started. I’ve said it before and I’ll continue to say it probably a million times. I said it a couple of episodes ago, right. Getting noticed today is easier than at any point in human history. But standing out is harder than ever. That’s especially true for affiliate programs this time of year. Like, if you think about what’s going on this time of year, there’s more sales, there’s more promotions, there’s more emails.
Affiliates are getting more emails than at any other point in the whole year. There’s more offers to join programs. Right. In part, this is because of the increase in sales. Like the holiday shopping. More people are buying, more people are going to spend. I don’t know what the percentages are, but I’ve heard that from retailers. I shared this in the last episode. About a third of their sales come in this one month stretch. So that leads me to believe that the average customer is spending about four times more in this one month stretch than any other month of the year. So that’s, that’s part of it.
You know, there’s just a lot more going on in part because of year end goal deadlines. You know, I’m not speaking for every affiliate manager, but a lot of them kind of spend all summer fiddle farting around and now they’re like, oh crap, we’re, you know, we’re 22% under for the year, but if we do just a little bit more this, you know, in this month period here, we can make up for that.
You know, the reality is that for the average affiliate program, if, you know, again, assuming they’re not like in the back to school niche or, you know, they’re not like huge around Father’s Day or Mother’s Day or something like that. But for most affiliate programs, a 10% increase from Black Friday through December 22 is worth more than a 50 to 75% increase in May or August, you know, so it’s an opportunity for them to really push. It’s also in Part because of these natural built in reasons to promote. So those are some of the reasons why it’s so hard to stand out right now. It’s just hard to do so. So how do you get your affiliate program to actually stand out from the clutter? Well, first big key here, you need to focus on your existing affiliates. All right?
This is not the time to go out and try to recruit a ton of affiliates. It’s tempting to do that, but as tempting as it is to try to round up tons of new affiliates in the lead up to Christmas, it doesn’t work. Visibility is key during this time and in theory, if you have an increase in quantity of affiliates, it will translate into an increase in sales. In theory. Yet this is the problem. The holidays are a busy time of year for everyone. And so communicating with brand new affiliates who aren’t used to getting your emails, they’re not really super familiar with you. They also, by the way, have 17 other people emailing them. It can be really difficult this time of year. And so I do recommend, say it’s wise to identify some great new affiliates who maybe will help you reach into some unique niches.
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Don’t spend a lot of time and energy trying to improve reach into areas that are already covered. Okay? So normally I recommend as much for depending upon where your affiliate program is at, as much as 70% of your time is spent on recruiting. Now if you’re more of an established program, you got a couple thousand of affiliates, it might be as low as 20, 25% week in and week out this time of year I think it’s probably more like 5 to And if you are going to do it, it’s like now through Monday of Black Friday week. And that’s it. That’s it. That’s absolutely the end of it.
The holidays are already busy enough without spending a bunch of time trying to recruit new affiliates. And so this allows you to really focus on standing out in the clutter and capturing the attention of the affiliates you already have. Second, you gotta start now. You cannot wait until the week of Thanksgiving to be like, oh crap, we gotta start our holiday stuff. Like we’re gonna stand out. No, you gotta start now. So here’s the thing. Get to know your affiliates now. I mean the best time to do this was like in September.
But get to know them, right? Get to know where are their revenue or their traffic sources, what are their stats, you know, study the stats. Study the heck out of the stats. Identify affiliates who could dramatically increase. You know, we’ll Talk about this in the next key as well. But what are the affiliates that maybe you look at and go, wow, they could really increase, you know, if you are going to reach out to new affiliates and you know, focus on that, then do a two week sprint now, like I said, so you can wrap that up in time to focus on your current affiliates. So it starts now.
If you’re going to reach out to new affiliates, you’ve got to be doing that for like two weeks. That’s it. You need to be planning your promotions now, planning your contests. We’ll talk about that more in a moment. What do you need to request of your marketing department? Think about, like, what do you need to ask your marketing department for? You know, hopefully you’ve already got your Black Friday stuff, but what do you need from them for the first and second weeks of December?
What do you need from them for that Hanukkah promotion or that free shipping day promotion or that last shipping day before Christmas promotion? What do you need to request from your tech team? What do you need to request from your graphic designers and your copywriters? Like, I don’t know your company. So you think about all the different people.
You have that touch the affiliate program. What do you need from them? Start telling them now, you know, get that from them now so that they’re not going, I can’t get that to you. And I’m, this is the second week of December, dude, I’m too busy to get that to you. Start planning it all now. Like if they wait, this is the cool thing, at least in most companies I know with us, like if they wait till the last second to get it to you, that’s on them. Oh, really? You’re up at 11 o’clock at night working? I assigned that to you three and a half weeks ago. Tough. I don’t care that you’re up at 11 o’clock at night. That’s your fault.
You have three weeks to get this done. So what do you need to request of other people on your team and in your company if you’re, you know, if you’re not the business owner, are your holiday promotions actually optimized? Are there special checkout pages? Are they working? Like, make sure that if there’s special products that are available only during the holidays or maybe, you know, I know for us, sometimes we don’t like to use discount codes. So what we’ll do is create separate products that are 20% off or 40% off. Are those actually working?
Does it work? Do the checkout pages Work? Are they functional? Are they optimized? Does it have something on there? Does it have language on there? You know, that maybe it shouldn’t. Does it have pictures on there that it shouldn’t, you know? Did you update the packaging? But the products are the old packaging. That’s kind of weird, you know, that’s. There’s a disconnect as people are gathering more, you know, this year. I know last year there was a little bit of sensitivity to like putting large family gatherings on pictures on sales page. We’re mostly past that.
Get out and test things, make sure that everything’s working. That’s a big, that’s an important thing, you know, like actually get out and test the stuff right now. So number two is like, start now, start now. Thirdly, study the competition. What are they doing promotion wise? Look like sign up for their affiliate program. And look now, are they communicating now?
Maybe you can just beat them by being faster. I’ll tell you right now, like if we’re two weeks from Black Friday and I’m picking a promotion and it’s between two programs, I’m picking the one that’s already ready. Okay, so you offer a 40% commission, they offer a 30% commission, but they’re ready. I’ll take 10% less. I mean, that’s a simple thing right there. You know, look at your affiliate payout, assuming that they are doing the right things. Are they offered a 40? But you’re a 30?
That’s a problem. Maybe you need to bump up to 40 right now, cut into your margins a little bit to dramatically increase your sales. What are they doing promotion wise? What are they doing in terms of competitions and incentives? We’ll talk about that more in a moment. But are they running specific contest or incentive programs? What kind of creatives are they providing?
We’re going to discuss creatives and graphics more in episode four of this series, but go ahead and look at what they’re doing. Wow. They’ve got 10 different Facebook sized graphics and they’re all really good and holiday themed. Well, we probably need to have at least five. Maybe we don’t need 10, but we can’t have two because they’ve got That’s a problem. So be looking at your competition. What are they doing in terms of communication? How often are they reaching out, you know, to affiliates? Do you find that? I mean, here’s a great example we found this is many, many years ago, almost 15 years ago, we had a competitor that they always sent their affiliate their weekly affiliate communication out on Tuesday afternoon. You know what I started doing? Sending hours out Wednesday morning.
So that I could be able to react to theirs and look and see what they were doing. Then what I started doing later is I moved ours up to Monday so that I was first. I figured, you know what, we’re actually more creative, more adept than them. Let’s just beat them to market. And the guy that ran the affiliate program for that company at the time, years later, we actually ended up working together.
He worked for a company that I consulted and he told me just how frustrating that was for them. And it took him. I mean, I was like, kind of made fun of him a little bit. I was like, dude, it took you six months to figure that out? Like, it didn’t, it didn’t. The coming in Wednesday and then like one upping them was frustrating enough. But coming in on Monday and one upping the thing that they were all. He was like, it looked. Honestly, he thought we had a corporate spy. He’s like, you always seem to know what you’re doing. I’m like, no, I didn’t. I just. You were predictable and I knew how to beat it.
Like, I was always better than you because I knew how to beat you in advance. So those are the type of things, like if you notice a pattern, you can be first to market first you can beat them or you could react to them. You know, those are the type of things you want to do when you study the competition. This is also a great time of year number four to look for, for inactive affiliates, affiliates who haven’t made any sales yet, you know, in say in the past month or two. Reach out to them. You know, we did a Facebook Live recently about activating inactive affiliates.
I’m gonna, I’m gonna link to that in the show notes but also make sure to get my email templates. If you wanna learn how to activate affiliates, just go get my email templates. I got the best ones in there. MattMcWilliams.com/Bestemail. We’ll put the link there in the show notes as well. Go grab that because I’m going to show you exactly how to activate affiliates. I’ve got all my proven templates that took me more than a decade to figure out. But here’s the deal. What you want to do is look for those affiliates who are down a little bit year over year.
Who are those affiliates that you look at? You know, we’re going into the busiest time and you’re looking at their sales, say since July 1st of this year. So we’ll look at July 1st through end of October 2021 versus 20, 20, and they’re down 54%. So you reach out to them and say, hey, last year from Black Friday through December 20th, you did 100,000 in sales. If you beat that by even $1, I’m going to give you a $10,000 bonus.
Now remember what I said, they’re $54,000 down or 54% down. And last year, you know, again, miraculously, they did exactly $100,000 during that stretch, you know, so that means they’re only scheduled to do $46,000. And yet if they hit, if they more than double that expectation, you’re going to give them $10,000. Now, that might not work for your numbers, but it might very well work.
If it’s a digital product, maybe it’s $20,000. You think, well, I’m giving up $20,000 for 54,000 in sales. First of all, no, nobody’s going to hit 100,000 in $1. Exactly. They’re either going to bust through it and they’re going to hit And so you really got an extra, you know, whatever, 60, some odd thousand dollars for 20,000 or they’re going to fall just short. They’re going to bust it and hit 89 and you got an additional $40,000 in sales for no extra cost. But you can’t do that if you don’t know those stats. So look for those inactive affiliates and see what are they doing, what do they need? So we’ll reach out to those people. We’ll talk more about this in the one on one communication part here in a second.
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We’ll reach out to those people and we’ll look for those affiliates that are down year over year, maybe 20% or so. And we’ll challenge them to hit last year’s number to beat last year’s number by $1. And if they do, we’ll give them some outrageous bonus. Then we communicate with them more frequently and separately. And I get on calls with them and I strategize with them and I work with them one on one to develop a plan to win during the holiday season.
Number five, this is key how you stand out. Over communicate. This is going to be a theme throughout the series. Over communicate. Remember, you are not the only affiliate program that they are in. So over communicate the dates and the promos. Over communicate what they should be doing, over communicate their links and where to get resources like swipe copy and graphics and promotional strategies and things like that. Just over communicate with them. Look for any ATM that you possibly can, an ETM is an excuse to mail.
So look for any ETM that you possibly can think of. You know, whether it be an upcoming holiday or an update to a product, a stat that came out, something you saw on the news where it’s like, you know, wow, holiday spending is going to be up You know, anything that you can possibly find over. Communicate as much as possible. That’s how you can stand out. If you send five emails, you’re more likely to stand out than somebody who sent one.
You know, send one email with a very specific thing, one, maybe two things to do in each email. So Instead of sending one email with 10 things to do, no, send five emails with two, or better yet, send like seven with one or two. Some of those should only have one call to action in the entire email. All right? Number six is one on one communication. One on one communication. It’s not easy, but it is worth it, okay? It is absolutely worth it. It cuts through, through the clutter so much more than just mass, you know, mass communication. Oh, wow, I’m one of a hundred thousand people getting this email or 5,000 people or 200 people getting this email versus that. One on one communication. Using things like Facebook messenger and Instagram DMs and Voxer and text messages, you know, those are things that are typically one on one. In finding ways to work as much one on one communication as possible is a great way to break through that clutter.
Sometimes it’s just as simple as a quick Facebook message. You know, you can’t do this if you have a thousand affiliates. You can’t do this with every single one of them, but do it with the ones you can that are going to move the needle. Hey dude, I just sent out an email with an update. It’s got your links for the upcoming promo and some swipe copy. Let me know if you need anything else. And it could be a copy paste thing. That’s, you know, one of the great things I’ve known.
I pretty much call everybody bud or dude, hey, bud. Hey, dude. You know, I don’t really say man a lot. Amen. I don’t really say that. So I say dude typically. So if it’s a male, I can copy and paste the exact same message. And no, none of my friends are like, you called me dude and you didn’t address me by my first name because I never would say hey Chris to a friend, to a male friend. I address females by their names. You know, that’s just my habit.
So I would actually need to change that and you know, hey Leslie, blah blah, blah, sent you an email, you know, go check it, so on and so forth. Right. Seventh Way to stand out. Physical mail, physical mail. I mean, I know for me, if you think back to like late 90s, early 2000s, when you heard the ding, we still got dings. At least I did up until like 2003 probably we got like a ding.
When I got a new email and I was like, I got a new email and I’d run in and I’d be like, oh, I haven’t checked the mail in four days. It’s different now. I check the mail every day and I get really, oh my gosh, I got a, I got a book in the mail or I got a letter from so and so, I got pictures, I got junk mail. I’m gonna read this versus like, I don’t know if I’m gonna check my email this week. A little extreme, but I only check my email three times a week now. So physical mail stands out. You could spend $1,000 to send a holiday guide to 500 affiliates. Could be the best investment you make.
So if you sell, I don’t know, you have a few different products. Putting together a holiday guide, putting together a save the date card. I mean, the holiday guide said you spend a thousand bucks to send it to 500 people. You could print a five page guide at Office Depots or Staples for about a dollar each. And then a little bit over a dollar probably, if it’s going to make it nice in color.
I’m trying to think. We spent 24 cents a page, so five pages would be a buck 20 on the high end. That’s really nice. And then, you know, that size, it’s probably about 80 cents to ship or to mail. USPS, two bucks a person, thousand dollars. You stand out to 500 affiliates. You only have a hundred affiliates. You could stand out to those hundred for $200. Like, don’t be cheap on this stuff. Do a save the dates card where you do those dates that I shared in the last episode and what you have going on, maybe a weekly postcard with reminders.
So let’s go on, you know, from the average affiliate program that listen. Average person with an affiliate program that listens has about I’m just going to go with 500. I’m going to go high. If you sent four postcards to 500 affiliates, $2,000. That’s printing and postage. Maybe on the high end, 2,500 bucks plus the guide, $3,500. If you have 500 affiliates and they’re producing enough sales, $3,500 is an investment in adding a zero to your affiliate program this holiday season. It’s a win, huge win. Stand out. Send some physical mail, okay? And then lastly, you can stand out with prizes and incentives. Remember I said earlier, watch what your competition’s doing. Use that potentially as inspiration to beat them or to make notes for next year.
But run all kinds of different contests. Run sprints around specific dates and run sprint contests around specific products. Do a Hanukkah, you know, the eight day Hanukkah promotion like I talked about in the last episode. Do a free shipping promotion. Do a discount on just this product or bundle three products for the price of two. You know, put together different deals, different bonuses. Run all kinds of, you know, contests and deals. Other incentives that you can think of, prizes. You know, I mentioned this earlier. If you hit a certain threshold, you get X. If you make 100,000 in sales, you get $20,000. Now here’s the key.
Those need to be individualized because if I go out and say anybody who hits $100,000 in sales, he gets $20,000. I’ve got seven affiliates who are going to do that without any extra effort. I want to know who’s going to hit 162. Who’s projected to do 162,000 if they don’t really go out of their way and I want to incentivize them to hit 200,000, I want to get 38,000 in additional sales and I’m going to pay them $20,000 to do it, plus their affiliate commissions.
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So it’s like 38. I’m not making a whole lot of money. But again, they’re probably not going to hit exactly 200,000. And if I can incentivize them now to push, they’re going to keep pushing long term. So that’s just an example. I might not do that at 162 to 200,000. I might not do a $20,000 thing or I might lift it. You know, if you do, you know, last year you did 162 and they’re maybe they’re running 10% ahead this year. So they’re projected to do 178. So I say, okay, if you do 225, I’ll give you $20,000, something like that, right? You got to kind of play with the numbers. But do those individual prizes? Offer some contests, do some stuff to get them excited. Do some drawings for your smaller affiliates. Hey, if you make one Black Friday sale, you’re entered to win this thousand dollar product or $1,000 prize. You know, if you do five sales between, you know, December 1st and December 10th, you’re entered to win this prize.
Get creative with it. Do some fun stuff. So number one, focus on your existing affiliates. Don’t try to go out and find a bunch of new ones right now. Secondly, all of this starts now. Everything I talked about, it starts right now. Third, study that competition and learn what they’re doing so you can pivot. Fourth, look for inactive affiliates and like we talked about earlier, identify those inactive affiliates or those affiliates that are down and work with them. Fifth, over communicate like crazy.
Sixth, focus on that one on one communication that really cuts through the clutter. Just like number seven, physical mail. A couple thousand bucks goes a long way with that. And fifth or eighth, sorry, prizes and other incentives. Get creative. Have some fun with it. And if you want more holiday tips, I want you to do three things. Number one, make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode in this series. You just don’t want to miss any of the upcoming episodes because they’re amazing.
Number two, check out the past editions of the Ultimate Guide to Holiday Affiliate Promotions. I’ll put a link in the show notes for that. You can go listen to all my past episodes and live lessons and all kinds of stuff there on promoting holiday affiliate offers. And third, you can learn how to warm up your audience. This is the third thing I want you to do is learn how to get your audience warm right now so that when we hit the holiday affiliate promos that are coming up here in a couple of weeks, they are scorching hot and ready to buy, ready to take action.
So go grab my warm up guide. It’s totally free. Mattmcwilliams.com/warmlist we’ll put a link there in the show notes as well and you can go grab that and like I said, subscribe so you don’t miss the upcoming episode that I have, how to stand out as an affiliate during the holiday season. So we’re going to turn it, turn it around. We’re talking about how to stand out as an affiliate over these next, you know, few weeks here, these few crazy, clutter filled, chaotic weeks. So make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss any of these episodes and I’ll see you in part three.