Holiday Season Prep: 5 Tips for Staying Engaged with Your Partners

Oct 17, 2022

Katie Spurkeland
Director of Product Marketing

Half of consumers intend to kick off their holiday shopping by Halloween–‘holiday creep’ fueled by inflation, inventory challenges and shipping delays among other retailer hurdles. With Partnerize, marketers have the flexibility to quickly reach their target audiences with holiday-specific messaging and promotions through their partnerships. However, leveraging partners to capture share of consumer purchases shouldn’t be a one-size-fits-all approach. Stay engaged with your partners during Q4 and beyond by employing these pro tips.

Lead with insights.
Tap into the Partnerize platform’s robust analytics and reporting suite to let data guide your collaboration conversations. Here, you can evaluate historical performance to draw actionable insights from the 2021 holiday season or year-to-date metrics that will help you to customize messages by performance segments, such as:

• Top performers. Partners that fall in the top 5-10 in your program for transactions or revenue should be leading contenders for your holiday season spend (think: featured placement or exclusive opportunities) due to their proven success.
• Underperformers. Identify partners that are under-performing in your program, including partners that drove less success year over year or in H1 vs. H2. Reconnect with these partners to gain a better understanding of how you can improve results and reach holiday shoppers.
• Low conversion rates. If you have partners in your program that are driving strong traffic but low transactions, get in touch with them to chat about recommendations to turn their browsers into buyers.

Create incentive plans.
The Partnerize platform’s dynamic commissioning functionality enables you to automate sophisticated reward structures that incent partners to drive to your broader business goals. To maximize the benefits of your partner base during the holiday season and beyond, consider implementing commissioning rules for:

• Excess inventory. Implement product-specific commission rates that incent partners to heavily promote surplus items.
• Sale category. Protect your profit margins by tailoring commission rates on sale category products to be lower than high-ticket items throughout the rest of your site.
• Product or purchase attributes. Customize commission rates for unlimited data points that let you automate payment for item qualities such as flight path, color, size, subscriptions–the options are limitless!
• Holiday gift guides. Incent partners to promote your holiday gift guide to their audiences by commissioning higher on the items included.
• Tiered incentives. Deploy partner rewards by conversion attributes such as AOV or revenue threshold that incent partners to drive higher value baskets in order to ultimately earn larger rewards.

Once you’ve developed your commissioning structures, share the parameters with your partners. Making partners aware of the reward structure ensures that they are in-the-know when it comes to increasing their earning potential and driving results.

Personalize outreach.
Avoid deploying generic messages to your partner base with Partnerize’s grouping functionality that lets you create partner segments–a capability that ensures your partners receive the message most relevant to them. For example, group partners by:

• Vertical or partner type
• Performance segment (top revenue drivers, top traffic generators, no transactions YTD, etc.)
• Region

Once segmented, deploy newsletters with the most appropriate content for that group through the platform’s integrating messaging system. As a note, you can also implement unique commissioning structures per group.

And, don’t overlook the value of individualized communications! Partnerize makes it possible for partners to customize their profiles, including their most up-to-date contact information–accuracy bolstered by Partnerize’s recent email verification initiative. Reference these email addresses to send direct messages to your partners’ inbox to chat further about opportunities specific to them.

Share your promotional schedule.
Providing partners with advanced notice of your upcoming promotions gives them the insight they need to proactively grab links, schedule featured placements, develop gift guides or make recommendations for optimizations during your most enticing periods. Not rolling out holiday discounts? Share details about new items added to a sale category, product-specific messaging, seasonal collections and more.

Collaborate.
When reaching out to partners, ensure that you are keeping it conversational while sharing valuable information about your program. Consider sharing promotional opportunities that you are able to support to open the doors for discussion, such as:

• Request placement suggestions or media kits
• Inquire about unique opportunities
• Discuss what worked well for your competitors, or how you can stand out to their following
• Offering gifts or giveaways
• Cross promotion, such as a feature on your brands’ social channels

Transparency about what you are able to provide partners or support for promotion opens the conversation and ensures that you will arrive at the best-possible opportunity to resonate with their audience.

Interested in learning more about how Partnerize supports brand x partner collaborations? Get in touch at contact@partnerize.com.