If you’ve been around direct marketing circles for very long, then you know that major holidays, such as Thanksgiving, offer “one more reason” to email your lists, create limited discounts on your products, and so on.
I don’t know about you, but during the couple of days before Thanksgiving, and on the holiday itself, I get an onslaught of “thank you” emails from various optin lists I’m subscribed to. While it’s always a great idea to thank your customers and prospects, I have to admit that I gloss over most of those emails, because I get so many of them.
This reminds me a lot of what it’s like when you’re getting hammered by so many people promoting the latest product launch. You know how it is… a high percentage of the subject lines are eerily similar, and even if they’re not, you can pretty much tell which emails are promoting that latest product… so it’s easy to just overlook those emails, because they all seem the same.
This got me wondering…
“How can product owners/affiliate managers use Thanksgiving (or other major holidays) to motivate their affiliates to take action?”
Here are a couple ideas I came up with:
Preemptive Holiday Strike- Thank your affiliates ahead of time (if you haven’t read it, here’s a post I made recently about the importance of thanking your affiliates), so you can avoid having to compete with other people who are sending out “give thanks” emails within a 1-3 day period. Like a week or two before Thanksgiving arrives, send out thank you cards and/or thank you emails, while making them aware of the “Black Friday Bonus” mentioned, below.
I use this method with my wife around Valentines Day.
On that day, women all over receive flowers, gifts, and candy from their husbands, boyfriends, or significant others, but I feel it’s much more meaningful to my wife if I, instead, think ahead and send her some flowers a couple weeks BEFORE Valentines Day!
With this “Preemptive Love Strike”, I put my message – that I love her – at the forefront of her mind, which obviously results in a closer relationship than we already have, and when the actual holiday arrives, she already knows that I love her and that I did my best to make that clear to her, while other wives may not have that sense of surprise and attention when getting their gifts on the holiday itself.
It’s also pretty cool, because my wife gets attention from the other teachers in the school (she teaches kindergarten) for being the only one who got flowers that day. That’s another feather in my cap. 
Black Friday Bonus- Whereas “Black Friday” typically involves holiday shoppers (like my wife) making a mad dash to the stores for some amazing deals on various gifts, you could switch things around and offer a special BONUS to your affiliates by offering an increased percentage on any sales they make during the holiday weekend, or simply promise to pay them a 10-25% bonus on top of all sales they make during that period.
The great thing about this idea is that you can implement it AFTER Thanksgiving if you didn’t think of doing a “Preemptive Holiday Strike”. It can also be a stand-alone strategy, where you simply wait for all of the “give thanks” emails to subside, and then you come out of the blue with your special offer to affiliates.
If you DO decide to wait until after Thanksgiving to contact your affiliates with this offer, I recommend making the sale last for a week or two, to give them some time to schedule their promos effectively.
You can now take these ideas and duplicate them with every major holiday down the road. Just keep in mind that you want your emails to stand out with attention-grabbing subject lines, contacting people before and/or after an onslaught of similar emails, and so on.
Finally, the one big “a-ha” is that you can use the holidays not just for offering sales, discounts, and special offers to your CUSTOMERS, but also for offering special BONUSES or increased commissions for your AFFILIATES, as well!
Take care,
Andy
P.S. If you haven’t, already, check out the “perfect product launch” (and personalized critique of your current affiliate program strategy I’m offering) here.
