Main Benefits
Your affiliate program can give you more visibility and exposure to potential customers you would not reach otherwise as affiliates may create additional materials, reviews, & content that you would otherwise not have.
By launching a campaign of unique codes or standalone codes, you can easily track influencer campaign’s performance. This way, you can also manage pay-out in affiliate schemes – you can track the coupon redemptions per month, purchase value per month and at the end of each month, and summarize how much commission to pay out to your affiliates.
You can set up such a campaign as a single-sided referral program as well where the affiliate is the referrer without the cap on the incentivized referrals and they get a reward each time they manage to get a successful referral. This would work if your rewards are for example discount vouchers, gift cards or physical products. You can read more about how to create a referral program here.
If you would like to pay your affiliates a percentage of the sales or a fixed amount per referral, you would need to track the number of referrals and orders placed thanks to the affiliate recommendations. You could do it by creating standalone discount code campaigns with each standalone code matching one affiliate, then you would track the orders made with that code (for easiness of sharing the codes you could create URLs that pre-fill the checkout with the affiliate code that your affiliates could use) and pay your affiliates end of the month based on the data collected. That way you can also offer some extra deals to the customers who bought something using the affiliate code, for example an extra 5% discount.
Program rules
Best Practices
- You can decide to pay your influencers per content piece, per the number of redemptions, or a percentage of the purchase value (e.g., 1% of each purchase done using their coupon code, evaluated at the end of the month).
- Review the performance of the coupons regularly to evaluate your partnerships with influencers.
- Remember that if sales is your goal, this is the right way to track influencer performance but if your goal is brand awareness, focus on your website or social media visits that influencers brought.
- You can also add some other perks to your affiliate program like a permanent discount for the affiliate only on your products or free products for them. It can become an “ambassador” program.