If you were in the costume business, you’d wish that every day was Halloween.
BuyCostumes.com has learned to deal with the fact that at least 60% of their business is done in the run-up to October 31. Other than that, it’s Easter bunny outfits, Santa suits, and possibly a bump at Mardi Gras. From a marketing perspective, the problem is how to maximize that window of sales opportunity—which can start as early as August for dedicated dressers—by keeping your name top of mind with folks shopping for that new All Hallows look.
Affiliate relationships have been a large part of the answer to the exposure dilemma that Milwaukee-based BuyCostumes faces. “Affiliates have been a fantastic part of our business year-round,” says Jill Stolt, marketing specialist for parent company BuySeasons.com. “A lot of affiliates have more specific Web sites, such as superhero sites or St. Patrick’s Day sites, so we can offer them a lot of content to help them out. And they give us exposure around the Web in turn.”
BuyCostumes recruits most of its affiliates—numbering anywhere from 3,000 to 5,000 throughout the year-- though affiliate network Commission Junction. “Occasionally we’ll just surf the Web and approach some other people, and we do include information on our Web site for other people that are interested in joining,” Stolt says. Affiliates can account for 25% to 40% of BuyCostumes’ transactions, with the high end coming during the peak costume buying season.
Working with Commission Junction has made the affiliate program fairly easy to administer, Stolt says. “They manage all the payouts,” she says. “We can upload all our banners and product links, so it’s very self-service for most Web sites. Our key strategy has been to stay interactive with the program and to be responsive to the affiliates, when they request a specific banner to fit their site or a certain coupon offer.”
Managing affiliate relations can be a task by itself; in essence, the business has to work just as hard to win the regard of the affiliate partners as it does to win customers’ attention. But BuyCostumes has evolved some techniques to do just that. The fee structure for affiliate relations means that they get to keep their commissions without chargebacks, even when customers request refunds. BuyCostumes can make this offer because costume sales do not tend to see high fraud counts, and the company is able to flag problem orders before they get through the commission pipeline.
The other key is building relationships with these thousands of affiliate sites, some large but many very small. Beginning in 2004, BuyCostumes began handling that by running sales incentive contests, offering prizes ranging from T-shirts and iPods to a Morris Mini Cooper car for sales leaders between Sept. 1 and Dec. 31. “It worked great,” Stolt says. “We got a lot of positive reaction from the participants. I think it was a fun way to get people to set goals and reach certain sales levels. No one won the Mini Cooper, which was destined for the affiliate who did $1 million in sales; but one affiliate came close.
Stolt says the contests will probably be back this season, because they work as a strong motivator for affiliate partners. So strong, in fact, that BuyCostumes was ranked among the four top-selling apparel sites on the Web last October.
Another unique aspect of BuyCostumes’ affiliate approach is the amount of scope they give partners to do search-engine marketing. Many merchants restrict affiliate SEM in order to reduce keyword competition. But BuyCostumes allows affiliates to bid on all keywords, including its brand name and trademarks. The in-house SEM team can then concentrate on finding the less popular, highly specific search terms that affiliates will tend to overlook.
“There’s a lot of competition for the affiliates out there,” says Stolt. “It’s a good way to give them some recognition, and it helps to control our SEM costs.” At the peak season, she says, BuyCostumes and its affiliates might have several thousand keywords under bid.
Enlisting affiliates through Commission Junction gives BuyCostumes some necessary assurances about how and where their links will be displayed. “When they join CJ, affiliates need to outline what techniques they use on their Web site, such as certain types of pop-up software,” Stolt says. “So when they apply to us, we can approve or deny that application on those grounds.” BuyCostumes is concerned to keep the brand family-friendly, so they rely on Commission Junction’s monitoring function to advise them when other products advertised on a given Web site might not be appropriate.
Affiliate marketing isn’t the total answer for BuyCostumes. The company has been aggressive about public relations, making it onto national TV for Halloween fashion shows. Last year, they began predicting the winner of the Presidential election based on the candidates’ popularity as a Halloween mask, using sales data that extended back to 2000. (In other words, the poll is two for two in accuracy.) That garnered the company an amazing amount of press, Stolt says.
Last summer, BuyCostumes also began taking a more aggressive approach to e-mail marketing. “In the past, we’ve been a bit careful about e-mail, simply because targeting people in the off-season, it’s likely you’re going to get a lot of unsubscribes,” Stolt says. E-mail campaigns were unscheduled and sporadic. “But last June we stepped off with a ‘Summer Movie Madness” e-mail, and then applied the analytics to monitor our success. Our aim going forward is to include fun topics that are relevant to the season without risking overload.” One aim of the new campaign was to clean up the list and reactivate customers going into the fall buying season.
Now Stolt says she expects to send out one or two e-mails a month—“to remind people that we’re here and that we do have year-round products, even if it’s not Halloween.”
