Holidays to Boost Your Conversions

We are well aware that holidays are important, both on a personal and economic level. It’s a busy season, a happy season, and a shopping season too. People are looking for presents, they are ready to spend money, explore new opportunities (to spend money), and they also have more time for new experiences.

This being said, there can be no doubt that shopping has become a ritual during the holidays. And what holidays are we talking about? Because it’s not just Christmas and hectic Black Friday sales, there is a slew of different holidays that can be roughly divided into such groups as:

• Local holidays: National Shopping Day (Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand), Single’s Day (China), Boxing Day (UK), etc.
• Niche holidays: World Theatre Day, International Jazz Day, Get Out Your Guitar Day
• Awareness days: Eye Care Month, Self-Love Month, Obesity Awareness Week
• Festival holidays: Independence Day, Halloween, Labour Day
• Personal holidays: birthday, anniversary, significant events

(Or you can even invent your own holidays that will trigger niche sales!)

Dating

Of course, dating is an evergreen vertical, this means that you can be profitable at any time of the year. However, even an evergreen niche shows better performance during such holidays like Christmas or St. Valentine’s Day, as people experience festive mood and have more time to communicate and look for new opportunities and ways to improve their personal situation.

iGaming

Within the iGaming offer vertical, gambling is more closely linked to traditional holidays, like Christmas for example, because people have more spare time to explore online casinos and have a desire to treat themselves to a bit of fun and maybe earn an odd buck along the way. On the other hand, betting is a very event-related niche that is closely linked to all big sporting events. So you should definitely be aware of the international matches and competitions, especially when they coincide with holidays when, once again, users have more desire to spend money and more time to make bets.

Things you can do in advance

Analyze

Generally speaking, you should analyze and optimize your ad campaigns at any time. But when you analyze in advance, you have a pretty good chance of getting more out of your campaigns than if you would simply dive unprepared on the first day of the holiday sales. There are several aspects you can study before the shopping frenzy starts.

Competition

Analyzing your competition is a great idea at any time, you can use spy services or spy tools (you can read up on this topic in this article). Analyzing marketing trends via spy tools is a way of finding out what products are in demand, and sometimes you can be surprised by what users are looking for. So this is a good chance to provide them with an opportunity to get exactly the product they want.

Audience

It goes without saying that you should know your audience and their preferences and pain points. With gambling, for example, there is a belief among players that you have to spend money to make money. This is why they keep playing when they are on a losing streak because they believe that they will get their money back and will earn more than they have lost. For this reason, attracting new players with promises of big winnings is rather easy.

There are ways you can obtain valuable information even without using the notorious cookies that are going extinct (not quite). You can simply ask your audience about their likes and dislikes: use email use letters polls, quizzes, and questionnaires to get first-hand information that will take your ad campaigns to a new level. Make sure that you don’t overload your mails with sales propositions because for users such letters look boring and pushy. Use such formats as bestsellers and lists of bonuses and discounts because your emails need to have some value for the reader. For example, free spins and no turnover betting bonuses are good for your iGaming promos.

Market

Study the trends with spy tools, this is especially useful when you have a niche offer or when you know exactly what offers your main competitors are driving traffic to. 

Find the overlooked niches, because if you see much demand for the product and “out of stock” notice in many stores, you can seize this opportunity and provide users with the chance to get the product by following your link.

Mind the seasonality of both holidays and the demand for specific products. Also, it’s a good idea to adapt your creatives and landers to the season, as this makes them more appealing and relatable. For example, a gating creative with a Christmas-style picture will draw more attention than a generic photo of a nice-looking girl.

Run tests

Testing in advance gives you the chance to collect more data and optimize accordingly. If you launch an A/B or warm-up campaign one week before the Valentine’s Day, you will have more competition and higher traffic prices. Testing in advance allows you to determine the best options, promotional angles and approaches.

Don’t try to cover all niches and time periods during sales or holidays, it’s a highly competitive time and you will pay an arm and a leg for traffic and good ad placements — and still get less than you expect. Users are overloaded with information and promotions at such times, so it is better to concentrate your efforts on a narrower audience or time period and invest in catchy creatives and sales-boosting copy.

Start warming up

Get your campaigns from last year’s holidays up and running. This is especially true for white-hat niches that stay predictably stable year on year. Why reinvent the wheel if people buy Christmas decorations and snow globes every year? So it’s a good idea to analyze your campaign results after the holidays and save the data for future use.

Email and SMS marketing campaigns are good for warming the audience up, but you have to balance out the sales-y stuff with the useful bits. Also, make use of hashtags, they are attention hooks that are most used in modern social media and can become a great promotion tool.

Approaches

• Event-related listicles or list-shaped articles with a selection of themed offers. 
• You can promote dating and iGaming on Google and Facebook if you are careful in your copy and creative approaches. There are ways of attracting the target audience without saying “dating” or “casino” out loud.
• Messengers and chats where users can find lifehacks and schemes for winning are a great fit for gambling and betting offers. But make sure that you (or your team) add fresh content regularly and that your audience has all-round support (because you will have to deal with negative feedback, and you can monetize a dissatisfied user further if you deal with this situation properly).
• If you are good with SEO traffic and website building, try out review websites. These sites can be adapted to any offer vertical, and, once optimized properly, they will bring a steady flow of traffic on autopilot.

Conclusion

Holidays don’t end with Christmas and St. Valentine’s. There are plenty of monetization opportunities for niche holidays and awareness days and the best way to get the most out of these periods is to be ready in advance. As the saying goes: fix the roof before it starts to rain. Pick your affiliate manager’s brains for insights, unwrap the data from last year, analyze a lot, run tests, optimize, and warm up your audience — this is the best way to tackle the holiday shoppers and players.