Every year, we start advising our clients to start prepping their Q4 affiliate campaigns early – sometimes as early as July. But every year, whether it’s from brand-new clients or clients who weren’t in position to get started any earlier, we start getting some familiar questions as we stare right into Q4 crunch time: is it too late to get a return if we start affiliate efforts now?

Unless they’re asking that question in the final days of holiday shopping season, my answer is always no, it’s not too late. There’s opportunity to improve your affiliate performance in the busiest season of the year, and that opportunity is worth capturing for a few big reasons:

1) There’s simply a bigger scale of placements, content, and buying intent available now than in any other time of year, by orders of magnitude.

2) Even if affiliate campaigns are a bit behind, brands have other holiday initiatives – messaging, discounts, new products, promotional offers, creative themes – built and ready to use. Affiliate is just one more (powerful) channel to use to take advantage of those assets.

3) Many brands are still formulating budgets for the next year. Q4’s influx of data and insights is a great way to stress-test a new channel to figure out how to incorporate it into the next year’s budget.

With all that said, you’ll need to be strategic about which affiliate initiatives to tackle now – you won’t be able to tap into the channel’s full power without a more holistic plan in place. So where do we recommend you focus to realize the most Q4 impact?

Go after key content placements

The best way to make a big splash is to recruit and activate upper-funnel content partners (think Wirecutter, CNet, Vogue, etc.) to get on review guides, gift guides, and “best of” holiday lists. Those placements help introduce your brand and product to net-new audiences and create new shopping journeys.

How to get started: Find a partner with those connections built in. There’s nothing programmatic about recruiting new partners, so the best shortcut is to tap into existing relationships. This is one initiative where a partner with the right relationships in your vertical can make a huge difference.

What can you expect? Affiliate marketing has grown every year, with each Q4 bringing more affiliate impact to our clients’ DTC businesses. In 2023, revenue driven by affiliates during BFCM was up over 400% YoY – with content coverage up 22% YoY. The potential impact of recruiting new, and optimizing existing, relationships is still significant even if you are only able to achieve a fraction of that potential with a late start.

Optimize performance with existing affiliates

If you’ve already got active affiliate partners and haven’t refreshed your commission structure for a while, this is a great place to zero in. We can often help clients create a more dynamic commission structure that aligns commissions with proportionate influence over new sales, which serves to maximize ROI. You’ll realize which partners you can afford to incentivize less and which partners you’re willing to incentivize more to get net-new users to your site – especially since those users will be more valuable during Q4’s high tide.

How to get started: Your own reporting is a good starting point, but to understand how your partners are performing against expectations, it’s best to compare your numbers to industry reporting with relevant benchmarks. From there, you can identify underperforming partners with a ton of latent opportunity that you can unleash with the right incentives – and partners you might be over-crediting relative to your competitors.

What can you expect? Smarter commission structures shouldn’t cost you more – they should just tune up the revenue (and ROI) you get for what you’re willing to pay.

Identify and remove non-incremental partners from the program

Here’s an almost universal truth for brands that haven’t done incrementality testing: not all of your affiliates are adding value. In fact, some may be cannibalizing your other media channels and eating away your margin in the process.

Identifying and removing those affiliate partners will have minimal impact on your revenue and give you room to either grab more net profit or get even more aggressive with your product promotions and discounts.

How to get started: In a best-case scenario, you’d have the knowledge and tools to run an immediate lift or holdout test to gauge incrementality, but it’s far less risky to lean on a partner who knows how (and when) to run those tests to get valuable insights with minimal impact on sales. The right partner will do more than that – they’ll already have a list of red-flagged partners you can immediately cut without going to the trouble of testing.

What can you expect? Similar to the initiative above, this will help increase your ROI and revenue by putting your fees to work where they’ll have the biggest impact.

You can get traction on these if you have great in-house resources, but your best bet for tackling all three of these with confidence in your approach is to find the right partner. At DMi, we do all of these, all year round, for hundreds of cherished clients with aggressive growth and performance goals. Reach out to us at info@dmipartners.com to get your piece of the Q4 action this year.