Few affiliate marketers these days can claim to not have at least a passing familiarity with Singles' Day.
Originally popularized by Alibaba in 2009, Singles' Day—celebrated on November 11th (11/11)—has grown into the largest day for ecommerce worldwide each year. In 2019, Alibaba reported sales activity totaling $38.4b last year, more than 2.5 times the US sales of Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2019 combined. This year, with China reopening post pandemic, retail spending is back to normal, and in some cases, better than normal. Singles' Day 2020 is gearing up to be another big one.
As Singles' Day continues to grow in China, the shopping holiday has been making waves overseas. More and more US-based advertisers are leveraging the holiday to beef up their promotional calendar. Additionally, shoppers across all of Asia have gained interest in treating themselves during Singles' Day.
To better understand how our global publishers are promoting the holiday this year, we spoke to publishers from China and the APAC region:
55Haitao (3791870)
Based in China, 55Haitao is a large loyalty site focused on cross-border shopping. In addition to offering cashback and promoting great offers, 55Haitao has a large and active user forum, as well as a large content team. They offer advice and recommendations for their users on how to best use freight forwarding/drop shipping services, so advertisers don’t need to have international shipping to integrate with them.
- When will your Singles' Day event run? November 5 – 11
- Is Singles' Day or Black Friday bigger for your site? In terms of importance for our shoppers, they're equal. We do see larger sales on Black Friday since we have a more cross-border focus, but Singles' Day has been catching up in recent years.
- Do you see specific products or verticals that are especially popular on Singles' Day? Fashion (luxury), beauty, health and wellness, and domestic travel (for China) are all strong performers.
- What recommendations can you give to advertisers for Singles' Day? Due to high demand, we require investment from advertisers for placement on Singles' Day. In order to make sure you’re getting the best traction for your offers, we recommend booking hybrid models to make sure it’s attractive for shoppers.
Dealmoon (1899918)
Dealmoon is the largest platform for connecting Chinese-Americans with the world’s best brands. In addition to strong offers and robust content created by their team of editors, their audience of over 18M is highly engaged and motivated. They have multiple years’ experience promoting Singles' Day, having been in the CJ network for nearly 15 years.
- When will your Singles' Day event run? Dealmoon’s Singles’ Day event will run Nov 1st – Nov 15th, with our peak days being November 10th & 11th.
- How important is Singles' Day for Dealmoon compared to Black Friday/Cyber Monday? Singles’ Day is one of the biggest shopping events on Dealmoon, and a perfect time for retailers to test their Cyber Week deals as an early exclusive offer with us.
- What are your users usually interested in buying on Singles' Day? Anything jump out? Our users are looking for all categories at best of web pricing. It’s really about the hunt for the deal so bring your A-game!
- Do you have any recommendations for advertisers who want to work with you during Singles' Day? If there is any time to go big, it’s during Singles’ Day! Many of our participants offer their strongest exclusive events during this period and we have many advertisers who drove 7-digit sales in only a couple hours. Please connect with your Dealmoon Account Manager as our peak inventory is booking up quickly—don’t miss this opportunity! Reach out to partnerships@dealmoon.com.
Linkhaitao (4544012)
Linkhaitao is a China-based sub-affiliate network that works primarily with smaller Chinese publishers. They have an active recruitment team that works with publishers typically focused on cross-border shopping.
- When will your Singles' Day event run? November 4 – 11
- Is Singles' Day or Black Friday bigger for your site? We treat Singles' Day with as much importance as Black Friday and Cyber Monday. We've seen a growing number of merchants around the world invest a great amount time and effort into Singles' Day in recent years and results have grown with that.
- Do you see specific products or verticals that are especially popular on Singles' Day? Beauty and fashion are always top categories. Recently athletic apparel has seen a huge increase in demand.
- What recommendations can you give to advertisers for Singles' Day? Plan with us in advance on competitive commission rates so we can secure good engagement from publishers. Make sure your inventory, customer service, and logistics are ready to handle a large influx of sales.
RebatesMe (4039057)
RebatesMe is a large cross-border loyalty site based in China. They offer very competitive cash-back rates and have seen success with the fashion, beauty, and exercise verticals. The majority of their traffic is from China although they do also have a significant portion of Chinese-American shoppers who use their site.
- When will your Singles' Day event run? November 10 – 12
- Is Singles' Day or Black Friday bigger for your site? For our Chinese demographic, Single's Day is very important. Their wallets will open on that day since it’s such a big shopping holiday for them. They will definitely be comparing prices in the US to everywhere.
- Do you see specific products or verticals that are especially popular on Singles' Day? We think the big categories this year will be fashion, beauty, luxury, accessories, and footwear.
- What recommendations can you give to advertisers for Singles' Day? Be aggressive on discounting, even if it's just for 24 hours. Do it all on 11/11 if you can. If you can give exclusive offers on popular products, we can make sure it gets the proper exposure.
Shopback (4345648)
Shopback is Asia’s largest loyalty shopping site, with over 13M total users and 10M app downloads. They have localized sites for nine different markets within Asia: Australia, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Singapore. They have seen enormous growth in recent years and completed the acquisition of Rakuten Korea earlier this year.
- When will your Singles' Day event run? Our Shopback Singles' Day Shopfest event will run November 3 – 15
- Is Singles' Day or Black Friday bigger for your site? Black Friday isn’t a big shopping day for most of our markets. Singles' Day has become quite popular in recent years so we have a much bigger focus on that.
- Do you see specific products or verticals that are especially popular on Singles' Day? Fashion and beauty are quite popular.
- What recommendations can you give to advertisers for Singles' Day? We have a lot of advertiser interest for Singles' Day, so please make sure you reach out as soon as possible if you're interested in booking a placement as it's first-come, first-serve.
Skimlinks (5370367)
A sub-affiliate network that works with over 50 networks, Skimlinks is the largest independent customer acquisition channel in affiliate. In addition to a strong presence in Europe and North America, Skimlinks has built dedicated Account Management teams for APAC to better capitalize in the strong growth in those markets.
- When will your Singles' Day Event run? Singles' Day is far from a one-day event for us. We have weeks of lead-up to the main event with participating advertisers—and publishers have responded to that. Content will go live in the two weeks before and be promoted with any continuing deals until demand subsides in the week after Singles' Day.
- What will the event look like? Are you planning anything special for this year? We expect it to be another record-breaking event. Skimlinks has had an excellent year publisher side, tripling the size of the network and our Editorial Network will be hard at work producing bespoke content around key retailers for publishers from Taiwan to Hong Kong and Australia during Singles' Day.
- For your APAC affiliates, is Singles' Day or BFCM bigger on your network? This varies across markets. Certainly, for our affiliates in China, Hong Kong, Japan, and Taiwan Singles' Day is the pre-eminent event—we recorded $4.2M order value on Singles' Day 2019, a 50.7% uplift year-on-year.
- Any advice or tips you can give advertisers who want to work with you? The best results for advertisers working with Skimlinks come from the bespoke partnerships we can broker with quality editorial content publishers. We have excellent relationships with both international brands and local players and have a fabulous track record in cementing deals around bespoke commission rates and tenancy agreements. For advertisers that want to work with us, there are three things to keep in mind: be flexible, have a competitive mindset, and share as much promotional information in advance as you can.
SMZDM.com (3434966)
SMZDM is China’s largest deal site, with over 26m page views per day, and 4.3m DAU on their app. Their name in Chinese means “What’s Worth Buying” in Chinese, and their shoppers look to them for the best offers on the Chinese web. They have a strong core of cross-border shoppers, with particular interest in electronics, health, and fashion verticals.
- When will your Singles' Day event run: November 1 – 12
- Is Singles' Day or Black Friday bigger for your site? Black Friday is quite popular with our cross-border shoppers, but Singles' Day by far is our largest shopping day of the year. In 2018, we hit $326m GMV in a single day.
- Do you see specific products or verticals that are especially popular on Singles' Day? Most verticals perform well on Singles' Day, although we do see digital products and consumables (paper products, alcohol, etc.) see the best success
- What recommendations can you give to advertisers for Singles' Day? We can definitely help advertisers secure effective exposure on a strong deal for Singles' Day. However, for our site we’d recommend international advertisers focus more on Black Friday, I’d recommend you invest 80% of budget into Black Friday and 20% into Singles' Day.
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