The holidays present online retailers with tremendous earning potential.  With mere days left in the month of October, and the countdown to the real holiday madness just around the corner, now is the time to have a good look at your marketing campaigns to make sure you’re set up to enhance your sales volume, and ultimately, seal the deal.  Here are some key areas of your marketing campaigns that you should look at to make sure you’re in shape for the season.

1. Quality Affiliates
Having knowledgeable, capable marketing partners is crucial to the success of your online campaigns.  A quality affiliate will have an attractive, user-friendly website with a high page rank, and will employ multiple marketing methods to promote your product(s).  So make it a point of recruiting these affiliates and regularly logging into your account to evaluate the quality of partners that you are attracting to your program.

If you don’t feel confident about the caliber of your partners, you should speak to your affiliate manager, or consider re-evaluating your recruitment strategy.  Your Traffic Report can also help you identify your top-performing affiliates, along with their conversion rates, and can be pulled based on Affiliate ID.  Once you have partners whom you believe have the potential to perform well in your program, the more likely quality sales will be generated.

2. Click-Through Rate
Your click-through rate is an important indicator to help you determine whether (a) customers are attracted to your product/service, and (b) if they are abandoning your landing page for some unforeseen issue.  For example, you may create an effective banner ad or coupon, but a problem on an affiliate’s site, your landing page or your shopping cart could be impacting the customer’s ultimate decision to buy.

The Deep Linking tool is applied by merchants who want to help their affiliates highlight specific products that match the need of the customer.  This tool allows affiliates to send customers to an exact area of your site that truly responds to their buying need.  When a customer sees a product on a banner that they like, and then lands on a relevant landing page for that item, you are helping to seal the deal, and reduce the odds of shopping cart abandonment.  If you’re seeing low stats, consider permitting a tool like deep linking in your program, or talk to your Share Results affiliate manager to offer some insight.

3. Seal the Deal
Once an affiliate has sent a customer to your website, and the customer is ready to buy, it’s up to you to seal the deal.   Make sure you have the right tools, and are doing everything you can to make buying convenient and simple.
An example of a deal breaker might be a banner on an affiliate’s site promising a flat price for one of your products, only to have that customer discover shipping charges during the checkout process.  In fact, according to comScore, 43% of shoppers abandon their shopping carts because of unexpectedly high shipping charges, and 72% of consumers say that if an e-commerce site eliminated free shipping, they would use another e-commerce site that did offer free shipping.  Free shipping is just one of several incentives that are important to online shoppers, so make sure to incorporate this in your strategy whenever possible.

Most importantly, remember to apply your Share Results marketing software to its full potential by using the tools at your disposal, and to check in with your affiliate manager regularly to find more strategic techniques for closing the sale.

Is your affiliate marketing campaign ready for the holiday season? If not, this is the blogging event to get you ready for the busiest season of the year. Check out last week’s blogs, and make sure to tune in until November 27 for more tips and techniques to help you end Q4 with your most successful campaign yet!

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Merchants: Boost Your Sales and Seal the Deal with 3 Quick Tips