Five Focus Channels for Black Friday

To help you prepare for your Black Friday Sales campaign, we have picked out five channels you can focus on for your affiliate program, and explain how our preferred partners can help you optimise each one ahead of Q4 sales.

Content & Review Sites

When considering content, aim to target the savvy shoppers who are already creating their Black Friday wish-lists. Put out plenty of material about your product catalogue and your brand’s USPs and tailor your product launches, listings, and category pages to specific customer profiles. Pushing a variety of content, both organically and through your affiliate partners, is a sure way to catch their attention early and hook them in for later updates.

Top Tips:

1. Get your product listings right, make the descriptions as comprehensive and clear as possible, and highlight your best deals, old favourites, new lines and gift-focussed products in listicles and category pages on your site.
2. Add comment widgets and social sharing buttons on your Black Friday offers pages to stretch the reach of the content you produce – and ask your content affiliates to do the same.

Grow Recommends: TheTop3 – Part of the Just Media Group, TheTop3 publish in a variety of article formats which compare different brands and/or different products in bite-size, specialised articles which are great for product discovery and engaging with niche search terms.

Creative & Cashback Partners

Special seasonal landing pages which include features like countdowns, sneak peaks or opportunities for VIP access can be cleverly set up to be included in internal newsletters or to be promoted through different affiliate channels. A consistent, well-equipped, creative campaign will allow you to get the message out to buyers in advance.

Top Tip: Update your banners and text links with your links to your special Landing Pages or specific discounted product lines. Set up all your upcoming vouchers on your program, too, to prepare your Black Friday campaign well in advance.

Grow Recommends: TopCashback and Quidco are two top performing UK Cashback sites. They can create dazzling profiles for your brand, providing you supply them with the right creative! Make sure your Hero banners and program descriptions are attractive and engaging and if you need to update them, contact them directly (or via Grow Support) early so their teams can set this up.

Price Drops & Voucher Partners

Black Friday is, of course, all about flash sales and discounts – but how should you structure this? 2022 is likely to see shoppers prioritising the price of a product over the saving from the RRP. Consider how you can showcase the bestsellers and old favourites in your stock and offer deals on products that may already be tried-and-tested, and for which you still have high stock levels, rather than focussing on the newest, trendiest lines of products.

Top Tip: Check out the tips in our earlier article about different types of discounts and vouchers and how they meet different sales goals.

Grow Recommends: Network, an organisation that manages Closed User Group sites including Health Service Discounts, Charity Workers Discounts, Discounts for Teachers and Discounts for Carers. Their aim is to promote discounts that are exclusive to these member-only websites giving back to UK keyworkers. All they need to set up is some tailored creative and an exclusive discount – plus they have a specific category if you are a Local or Independent retailer, if this interests you.

Shipping Policy & Tech Partners

In an age of convenience, consumers are on a quest for hassle-free, low-cost purchases, so shipping costs can be majorly influential in a buyer’s choice and can be perceived as a nasty add-on which damages a user’s loyalty. According to Nosto, and estimated 38% of shoppers won’t shop somewhere if the brand isn’t offering free shipping.

If this is tricky, consider offering free shipping to shoppers who hit a specific basket value. You could also partner with affiliates who can set up alerts for customers on your website at the point of purchase and make product recommendations in order to hit the limit. You could also create tiers such as priority or fast-tracked shipping which you could award as exclusive vouchers for specific affiliates.

Top Tip: If this is already standard, shout about it! Make sure you have clear messaging about expected shipping windows, too, for guaranteed gift delivery.

Grow Recommends: Beyable and Intent.ly can provide technical tools for your website such as basket overlays which incentivise people either to prevent them from abandoning their cart, or to make additional purchases. For example, they can dynamically provide product recommendations or basket amount alerts to encourage them to meet the minimum amount to qualify for free shipping.

Customer Experience & Data Partners

Make your sales funnel as smooth as possible by doing an audit of your website pages and your payment process. Be sure to check the functioning of your site across mobile devices, too. Streamline the user journey and be sure to address any points that slow the site down or are confusing to navigate. Make sure your servers are all working properly, and your stock databases are updating efficiently to ensure that you can cope with higher traffic levels. Ultimately, positive customer experiences allow you to retain loyal shoppers beyond the Black Friday period.

Top Tip: Use analytics and traffic insights in order to see which pages have high bounce rates, so you can address what is putting people off early and guide them back to site (we’ve written a blog about this, here.)

Grow Recommends: Retargeted.ai & BSmart Data are specialists in retargeting traffic that is not converting well on your site, using display advertising campaigns. They will also be able to recapture and reveal which audiences are most (and least) receptive, as their campaigns mature – so set up their campaigns early for maximum insights for later in the year.

Any questions? Reach out to Grow Support for more information or advice.