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Introduction
Shopify sites normally earn revenue through selling their own products. However, affiliate marketing can add a new stream of revenue for Shopify sites. Online stores can drive more website traffic and improve conversions by seeking out lucrative Shopify partners.
If you want to introduce your products to a wider audience, affiliate marketing is a great way to go. However, affiliate marketing campaigns come with their own unique challenges.
In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about setting up an affiliate marketing strategy on Shopify.
Do Affiliate Marketing Campaigns Work Well for Shopify Stores?
Affiliate marketing is a relationship between you (the store owner) and a publisher (affiliate). In this relationship, the affiliate agrees to promote your products in exchange for commission sales.
If you’re partnering with a popular content creator, it’s a win-win situation. You get to introduce your products to a wider audience, and the affiliate earns a commission for every referral they provide you.
For this reason, affiliate marketing campaigns are highly beneficial for Shopify stores. If you can find the right partner, you can sell more products without increasing your paid advertising spend. On top of that, you can request product recommendations from content creators, bloggers, and influencers who are highly trusted in their fields.
Step-by-Step Guide for Setting Up a Successful Affiliate Program on Shopify
Designing a successful Shopify affiliate program is a straightforward process. Here are all the steps you’ll need to take to get started.
1. Choose the Right Affiliate Partners
Not all affiliates are created equal; some will be more effective than others at promoting your products and driving sales. When choosing affiliates, look for those with a strong track record of success and a relevant audience.
For example, let’s say that your online store sells natural hair products. Instead of partnering with affiliates that simply have a large audience, it would be better to target a publisher that uses natural hair products.
Ideally, your affiliate should enjoy your products. Paying affiliates for fake product recommendations is unethical and inauthentic, which can hurt your brand. Therefore, conduct research to find affiliates in your niche that embody your core values and love your products.
2. Create High-Quality Content
Your affiliate partners will promote your products to their audiences, so it's important to give them high-quality content to work with. This could include product reviews, blog posts, comparison charts, and videos.
Content drives affiliate marketing. The best affiliate content tells a story rather than blindly promoting a product. For example, an affiliate that loves your product can record a video and tell a story about how your product changed their life.
They can start by identifying their problem, how they came in contact with your store, and how your product made a difference. These compelling stories are more effective in convincing people to visit your store and make purchases.
Otherwise, you’ll just be hiring an affiliate to regurgitate company promotions, which defeats the purpose of creating social proof for your business.
3. Offer Competitive Commissions
Affiliates are in it for the money, so it's important to have a competitive commission structure. This will incentivize them to promote your products and work hard to drive sales and get a payout.
There are two ways to set fair affiliate commissions (standard rates in 2023 are between 5% and 25%). One way is to perform competitive research. If you’re certain that your competitors are relying on affiliate marketing, you can find out how much they’re paying their affiliates.
The second method is creating a pricing strategy based on how difficult it is to sell a product. For example, if you sell high-ticket items, it’s reasonable that you’re not pulling in high-volume monthly sales.
The high price makes up for this. However, if your prices have a lower average order value, you’ll need to sell a higher volume of products. This same pricing strategy should work for affiliate marketing.
If you have high-ticket items in your inventory, it makes sense to offer leading commission rates to pay your affiliates for their hard work. In addition, Shopify stores with low prices can set fair rates that won’t interfere with their margins.
4. Make It Easy for Your Affiliates To Promote Your Products
Provide your affiliates with all the tools and resources they need to promote your products, such as product descriptions, images, and banner ads. You should also make it easy for them to create their own affiliate links.
The logistics of the affiliate marketing process fall on your shoulders. After all, it’s only your affiliate’s job to attract people to your store and sell products for you. The good news is that it’s not difficult to create referral links and manage your affiliate network.
Affiliate management tools streamline all of these tasks for you. They even make it possible to integrate your affiliate’s website and social media profiles so they can easily get started and ramp up their content efforts.
5. Track Your Results
It's important to track the results of your affiliate marketing campaigns so you can see what's working and what's not. This will help you to optimize your campaigns and improve your results over time.
You can use affiliate marketing apps to see how well your campaign is performing. Based on these results, you can periodically meet with your affiliate and suggest ways to improve their campaigns.
By tracking your results, you can improve poor referral programs and reward successful affiliate marketing programs with additional bonuses and incentives.
Benefits of Affiliate Marketing on Shopify
By now, you should understand what Shopify affiliate marketing is and how it’s supposed to work. If you’re still not sold on how affiliate marketing can benefit your Shopify store, here are some more advantages to consider.
Greater Brand Awareness
When your affiliates promote your products to their audiences, they increase brand awareness for your business. This can lead to more affiliate sales and new customers.
Affiliate marketing is one of the surefire ways to drive unique visitors to your website without relying too heavily on paid ads. For example, let’s say you’re already running pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns on Facebook and Google.
These campaigns are successful, but you want to target qualified leads through Amazon, email marketing TikTok, and YouTube. With affiliate marketing, you can use your affiliate’s marketing channels as an extension of your own.
If an affiliate is performing better than you on specific marketing channels, you’ll do more than raise the brand awareness of your products. You’ll also add new user segments to your target audience.
More Website Traffic
Your affiliates will drive traffic to your Shopify store through their websites, social media accounts, and other channels. This can lead to more sales and conversions. Increasing your store’s website traffic is the first step to meeting your marketing goals.
With more website traffic, you can sell more products. When this happens, you can improve your sales and affiliate revenue. A higher volume of website traffic can also accomplish your branding goals: The more people who visit your website, the more likely they are to remember your brand.
Cost-Effective Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a cost-effective way to promote your products and drive sales. You only pay your affiliates when they generate a sale for you. As a result, affiliate marketing may be one of the most inexpensive digital marketing campaigns available.
Many eCommerce retailers spend thousands of dollars running paid advertising campaigns to drive traffic. Unfortunately, a lot of Shopify stores operate on thin profit margins. Every dollar counts, and many stores can’t survive while allocating tens of thousands of dollars to their marketing campaigns.
With affiliate marketing, even small Shopify stores can increase their website traffic, improve their conversion rate, and raise brand awareness without spending thousands of dollars. Affiliate marketing makes it possible to only pay when you get the results you’re looking for.
Scalability
Affiliate marketing is a scalable marketing strategy. As your business grows, you can recruit a higher number of affiliates to promote your products. This can help you to reach a wider audience and drive even more sales.
It’s no secret that the largest retail stores have multiple celebrities endorsing their products. An affiliate marketing campaign is designed to grow your online business because it doesn’t require you to spend more money.
Unlike other digital marketing efforts, you can leverage affiliate marketing in the beginning stages of your store and as you’re growing.
How Gander Helps Shopify Brands With Their Affiliate Marketing Campaigns
Videos are some of the highest-performing affiliate content. They’re digestible and preferable for many demographics. You can have your affiliates record shoppable videos to broadcast what they like the most about your products.
Fortunately, Gander makes it simple to stream and share high-quality shoppable videos without advanced video editing software. You can even embed your videos anywhere you want to maximize your reach and return on investment (ROI).
Ultimately, Grander makes it easy for affiliates to promote your products by providing them with shareable and shoppable videos that encourage shoppers to purchase directly from your site.
Add Shoppable Affiliate Videos to Your Shopify Site With Gander
Overall, affiliate marketing can add an extra revenue stream for your online business. By using affiliate platforms, you can spread the word about your product without spending thousands on paid ads and SEO.
The good news is that affiliate marketing doesn’t have to be difficult for an online entrepreneur. Gander makes it convenient to create engaging and compelling shoppable videos that demonstrate the value propositions of your affiliate products.
What’s more, affiliates can embed your shoppable videos in emails, on social media, and on other eCommerce platforms — maximizing your ROI.
If you’re ready to try Gander, sign up for free to get started.