How to prepare your affiliation for the sales?

How do you approach sales for your audience?

Talking to your audience about sales is not the same everywhere. For example, if you're running a coupon site, talking about sales comes naturally. On the other hand, a designer with an editorial theme (news, blogging, tutorials...) will need to approach the subject of sales more judiciously.

Here are a few tips to encourage your audience to take an interest in sales:

• If your media is about beauty, avoid tech or video games. If the products featured are relevant, then the return on investment will be all the better for you.
• Showcase products that are really on sale and offer an attractive discount: there's no point in presenting a product at -5% (except in exceptional cases).
• Target merchants you trust. Otherwise, your community may doubt your honesty.

Generally speaking, affiliation is based on a relationship of trust with your audience. Every time you write a coupon, you're putting that trust back on the line. So make sure your sale offers are relevant.

How to get organized on the day the sales start (and a little before)?

If you're aiming to be at your best on the Wednesday of the sales launch (in France), it's important to prepare in advance.

The first thing to do on your side is to list the merchants that match your theme. Prepare your list of favorites and open all the tabs one or two hours before the sales start. Prioritize merchants based on your experience (which ones offer the best sales discounts, for example).

Now you've got the material to start sharing with your audience. If you can, share this list of merchants in an article or post (if your medium is a website or social network), ideally published the day before the sale. In this way, you offer your audience a procedure to follow, give them advice on how to prepare, and set up your affiliate links in advance.

On the day of the sales, you're going to have to be on your toes: set up a dedicated page (if you haven't already done so) and keep on sharing good deals. What works quite well for a medium that doesn't specialize in bargains is a "feed" for the sales: a single page on which you place all the offers one after the other. If there's an automatic refresh or a little alert when something new is posted, that's even better.

Finally, make sure you follow the sales throughout the legal period: the volume of good deals is greater on the big day, but there are often nice surprises along the way. As with any affiliation strategy, it's over the long term that you perform best.

How can you analyze sales performance on your media?

Depending on the size of your media, but also on your audience, it's quite possible to see your statistics take off in the first few days of the sales! This is something to be taken with a grain of salt: the sales period is in no way comparable with any other (even with Black Friday).

If you want to make the best possible comparison of your affiliate income performance on sales, it makes sense to compare year-on-year. Of course, this requires some long-term perspective, but there's no other way to draw real conclusions about sales performance.

To help you with your analysis, here are a few points to consider:

• The conversion rate: the higher it is, the more targeted your offers are (modulo a sufficient offer from merchants for sales, which is not always the case). To find out, simply divide the number of transactions by the number of clicks on your affiliate links.
• eCPC: an indicator of how much you earn per click. An eCPC close to 10 centimes is considered good. However, be careful with this indicator during sales, as the products in question are discounted.
• The number of clicks: to find out which products are most popular with your audience and refine your sharing of bargains during sales.
• Best-performing merchants: it's important to know which merchants perform best during the sales. You can then optimize your watch list for the next sales.

Finally, one last element is important for your analysis. However, you won't find it in the figures we get via affiliate platforms or even via the Affilizzdashboard... This element is the feeling of your audience: read the comments or feedback you can get, they're worth all the gold in the world and will help you know what your followers need.