How affiliate and influencer partnerships help brands scale…

Read this ebook to learn how affiliate and influencer marketing works in ecommerce and how Shopify brands grow their revenue successfully.

How affiliate and influencer partnerships help brands scale and succeed on Shopify

Why partnerships can boost your business on Shopify

Myths and misconceptions about partnerships

How to create an affiliate/influencer program

Managing the partnership life cycle

Three Shopify businesses that created successful partnerships programs

Ready to get started?

Why partnerships can boost your business on Shopify CHAPTER 1

Ecommerce has surged over the past few years, with Shopify, an ecommerce platform for online stores and retail point-of-sale, powering a significant portion of the brands flourishing during this time. Why is Shopify so vital? Shopify makes it easy for customers to shop for the brands they love. What’s not so easy? Getting customers to find your brand in the first place. That’s where partnerships can help.

Wait, what exactly are partnerships?

Partnerships are a collaborative, referral-based relationship between a brand with another brand or individual that is mutually beneficial — and helps both partners in the relationship reach their business objectives.

What’s more, partnerships are a low-risk, high-value, flexible, cost-effective way to get the word out about your business to customers and drive more customers to your store. This ebook will get you started on building partnerships that work for your brand. Whether your goal is to increase awareness, conversions, or grow your customer base, partnerships are a powerful tool for companies of all sizes, including small- and medium-sized businesses, on Shopify.

Myths and misconceptions about partnerships CHAPTER 2

Businesses that have yet to build affiliate, influencer, or partnerships programs may assume they’re time-intensive, laborious processes reserved for companies with a lot of money and experience.

80 percent of brands have affiliate programs

80%

Not true.

Partnerships happen when an individual or a business works to promote a second business’s products or services. Partnerships come in all types, including affiliate, influencer, brand-to-brand, and more. Research shows that 80 percent of brands have affiliate programs. 1 The majority of brands (in one study, 59 percent) have content marketing budgets, and of those brands’ programs, 75 percent want to use some of that money for influencer marketing. 2

Image bleeds off the edge Transparency - None

1. Jack Steward, “21+ surprising affiliate marketing statistics and facts (2021),” March 7, 2021. https://findstack.com/affiliate-marketing-statistics/ 2. Jacinda Santora, “100 influencer marketing statistics for 2021,” updated September 7, 2021. https://influencermarketinghub.com/influencer-marketing-statistics/

Still, small and medium businesses — and even some large ones — are uncertain about partnering with affiliates, influencers, and other partnership types because they think: ● “We’re too small.” ● “We don’t have the right people.” ● “We don’t even know what partnerships are.” Ultimately, none of these concerns are barriers to creating a partnerships program.

If you have the tech know-how to use Shopify, you’re ready to launch a partnerships program using Shopify x impact.com.

1. You’re not too small

If you’re big enough to do marketing, you’re big enough to have affiliate or influencer partnerships. Why? Because a brand’s marketing may build brand awareness, which is very important, but it does not necessarily build trust. A survey conducted by Matter Communications in 2020 showed that only 38 percent of consumers polled were likely to trust recommendations from a brand, while 61 percent were likely to trust recommendations from a “friend, family member, or influencer on social platforms.” 1 If you’re not yet performing marketing activities, you may be at the stage of building brand awareness. This important step can help your potential partners succeed later.

If you’re already marketing and want to move into partnerships, the Shopify app can help you seamlessly integrate with the impact.com platform and gain access to added benefits. At about 16:1, return on ad spend (ROAS) is even better for Shopify merchants that use impact.com. Not bad when you’re small or want to use your dollars wisely.

61%

trust friend, family member, or influencer recommendations.

1. “Matter survey reveals consumers find influencers more helpful and trustworthy than brands during the pandemic,” Matter, May 26, 2020. https://www.matternow.com/blog/matter-survey-reveals-consumers-find-influencers-more-helpful-and-trustworthy-than-brands-during-the -pandemic/

2. You already have the right people to make partnerships work

When you have the right partnerships management platform, you don’t need to worry about growing your headcount to make partnerships work for you. With the Shopify x impact.com integration, you can confidently take on the challenge and start launching partnerships with publishers, content creators, affiliates, influencers, and others. You’ll be creating relationships with experts who know their audiences and have a trusted place in their lives. The brilliance of partnerships is that the partners you choose have already done the work of authentically building relationships with their followers — and your business will benefit.

Because impact.com automates so much of the process, you won’t need an entire village to manage and scale your program to hundreds of partners. The process and platform are flexible, and with impact.com’s support and the vast amounts of information available, you can tailor your program to suit your business and its needs.

3. Here’s what partnerships are

Partnerships are created when individuals or businesses agree to work with another business to promote the second business’s products or services. When you set out to develop partnerships, you’re in the process of discovering and recruiting individuals and businesses to sell to your target customer. Your goals may range from bringing in new customers and growing your revenue stream to increasing the frequency of repeat customers, growing your mailing list, or making sales. Many types of partnerships exist, depending on the kind of business you run, and your goals, budget, and ideal customer.

Affiliates

Ambassadors

Sponsorships

Mobile apps

Premium publishers, news, and content

Strategic brand-to-brand partnerships

Social influencers

Charities and nonprofits

You want to grow your business — where do you start?

Now that you know what partnerships are, it’s time to think about how to build your partnerships program. Historically, marketing pros have leveraged traditional tactics such as paid advertising, search engine ads, pop-up ads, or even newspaper or radio ads to grow their business and find new customers. However, consumers are not as responsive to traditional marketing as they once were. In fact, 84 percent of Millennials don’t even trust advertising. 1 Luckily there is a much better solution to growing your business, no matter the size — with partnerships.

Partnerships are not marketing

Partnership marketing is slightly too narrow a term to cover the breadth of what you can do with impact.com x Shopify. The benefits to both partners are dramatically different from marketing activities in partnerships, so “marketing” gets dropped altogether. With impact.com, you can create affiliate and influencer partnerships programs that bring value and expand your customer base.

1. Yuyu Chen, “84 percent of millennials don’t trust traditional advertising,” March 4, 2015. https://www.clickz.com/84-percent-of-millennials-dont-trust-traditional-advertising/

Partnerships program ROI is worth it

Mature partnerships programs contribute an average of 28 percent of overall company revenue. That alone is a solid reason to set up and grow a partnerships program. 1 In a Forrester study conducted for impact.com, the research revealed that brands find these common outcomes with partnerships programs: 2

55%

73%

Improved brand awareness

New customer acquisition

49%

Increased revenue

1. Forrester, “Invest in partnerships to drive growth,” 2019. https://go.impact.com/PDF-PC-AW-InvestInPartnerships-Forrester2019.html? _ga=2.139200179.1829692798.1639599677-1615334427.1625145987 2. impact.com, “The state of commerce content in 2021: Benchmarks, challenges, and recommendations for brands,” 2021. https://go.impact.com/PDF-PC-ED-The-state-of-commerce-content-in-2021.html

Understanding affiliate and influencer partnerships

You may want to explore affiliate and influencer partnerships first.

Affiliate programs: A simple first step to partnerships

Affiliate programs are arrangements where a brand pays an affiliate (also called partners or publishers) a fee for generating clicks

or sales from affiliate links. These programs are also known as partner programs and referral programs. When an affiliate joins a brand’s affiliate program, the brand assigns unique tracking links, which the affiliate can fetch from its partner portal. The affiliate then uses these links on its website, social media posts, emails, and other places it promotes the brand. The affiliate receives a commission from the brand for any purchases made through the affiliate links. It’s a lot to manage, but the impact.com platform automates this activity.

Affiliate partnerships come with a range of partners

Affiliate marketing is a strategy used both in business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) campaigns, with more than 80 percent of brands using affiliate programs to promote their products. For brands, affiliate marketing can deliver 30 percent or more of total revenue, with an impressive average return on investment (ROI) of $15 for every dollar spent. 1

1. Ryan Council, “Ultimate guide to affiliate marketing,” impact.com, July 7, 2021. https://impact.com/partnerships/ultimate-guide-to-affiliate-marketing/

Affiliate’s top categories show the diversity of businesses that can benefit

Top 20 affiliate categories*

Fashion Sports and outdoors Health / wellness, beauty Travel Home / garden Computers / electronics Education / training Business Financial / insurance High-end / luxury stores Entertainment Malls / department stores SaaS Auto / moto Gifts / flowers Books / magazines Baby / toddler

18.7%

14.6%

11.1%

8.6%

7.4%

5.4%

4.3% 4.1%

3.5%

3.1%

2.7% 2.7%

2.2% 2.2%

1.8% 1.8% 1.6% 1.6% 1.4% 1.2%

Vision care Jewelry Art / photography

* Source: Geno Prussakov, “Analysis of 550 best affiliate programs reveals top 20 niches,” AM Navigator, September 25, 2015. https://www.amnavigator.com/blog/2015/09/25/analysis-of-best-affiliate-programs-top-20-niches

Influencer programs: A great way to increase awareness and bring new customers

Influencer partnerships occur when brands collaborate with influencers. Influencers help drive brand awareness and purchasing decisions through product placement and endorsements on social media.

An influencer becomes a true partner when a brand forges a long-term, always-on relationship with them. Using an influencer for a one-off influencer marketing campaign is not a partnership.

It becomes more of a true influencer partnership when the relationship deepens into something more evergreen.

Influencer programs provide more than just conversions

According to one study, influencer marketing generates about $18 for every $1 spent. 1 Ecommerce stores, in particular, are using influencer partnerships to accomplish a few critical goals: 1. Promote their store. When influencers talk about a product, they can simply share a link and send customers your way. 2. Share user-generated content. People trust influencers more than they trust even influencer marketing, so content created by users about your business adds to your trust quotient. 2 3. Use testimonials from influencers in other places. Creative content that influencers produce about your brand is helpful in ad campaigns, product pages on your website, landing pages, in your newsletters, or in your own social media. It works as social proof about your brand. 4. Create targeted promotions. Sales and discounts are better when they target a specific audience. These kinds of promotions work well with influencers.

1. “Werner Geyser, “The state of influencer marketing 2019 : Benchmark report [+infographic],” Influencer Marketing Hub, August 18, 2021. https://influencermarketinghub.com/influencer-marketing-benchmark-report-2021/ 2. Klara Melnar, “User-generated content: Why is it important?,” Mediatoolkit, accessed November 29, 2021. https://www.mediatoolkit.com/blog/user-generated-content-why-is-it-important/

How to create an affiliate/influencer program CHAPTER 3

Shopify x impact.com lets you quickly launch and automate your partnerships programs

The Shopify x impact.com integration makes partnership programs simple. The integration allows Shopify merchants to integrate with impact.com in just minutes, so you can quickly launch and automate your affiliate and influencer partnerships programs without developer involvement. By integrating with impact.com as a brand on Shopify, you can discover and recruit new affiliate and influencer partners, automate contracts and payments based on the terms you set, and track performance — all in one place. Ultimately, automating partnerships with the Shopify x impact.com integration allows Shopify merchants to unlock more revenue potential and acquire new customers as their partners promote their products and services.

Get started — click on the impact.com app in the Shopify app store

The first step to building a powerful partnerships program is to integrate impact.com into your Shopify store through our app.

Here’s a quick walk-through of how to integrate impact.com into your Shopify experience:

Find the impact.com app in the Shopify app store by typing “impact” into the search bar. Or click here to go directly to the app store: https://apps.shopify. com/impact-1

Click the “Add app” button.

3. Log in to your Shopify store.

4. Click the “Install app” button in the bottom right corner.

5. After the impact.com app has been installed, existing customers will be directed to enter their impact.com credentials. New customers will be directed to a demo request form.

Setting goals and measures of success for your partnerships program

The first step to success in partnerships is ensuring your partnerships program supports your overall business goals, which will make the program valuable no matter the size of your business.

Partnerships are the most cost-effective method of reaching audiences, with the fewest limits on what goals you can set and achieve. You have room to be flexible with what you create and what you pay.

Common goals include:

● ● ● ● ●

Increasing revenue

Increasing new customers

Expanding customer email lists

Improving profit margin

Increasing website traffic

Once you decide which of these goals you’d like to focus on first, you can move on to how you’ll measure success.

Measures of success for partnerships

Measures of success (often called key performance indicators or KPIs) are tied to the goals you want to achieve. Common KPIs include:

● ● ●

Revenue

New customer numbers

Conversion rate or how many browsers become customers Average order size (AOS) or average order value (AOV)

●

● ●

Percent of returning customers

Number of sale-producing publishers and creators, or number of affiliates producing sales for you

●

Margin percent on your average order

With impact.com, it’s possible to track metrics that allow you to follow each partner and measure whether they’re meeting their goals. Once you know what success looks like and how you’ll measure it, it’s time to start your partnerships program.

Setting your partnerships budget

Because you're only paying for actions that generate revenue, the concept of setting a budget doesn’t necessarily apply to partnerships. However, the reality is that finance teams need budgets. Ideally, you and finance would work together to approach the task. Aim for a budget that’s as flexible as possible so you can increase your investment in partners that deliver value. You may not be accustomed to the flexibility that a partnership budget allows — but you might quickly get used to it when your returns increase. Budget planning for partnerships is flexible and individualized

Consider the following as you plan your partnership budget:

The affiliate channel operates on a fixed cost-per-action (CPA) model, so your budget “asks” will naturally grow as demand and affiliate promotion grows for your product.

Assuming your growth is incremental, there may be little formal budget planning ahead of time.

If a significant publication frequently covers your brand and you’re generating substantial sales from its website, consider directly reaching out to develop a connection. Seek other ways to collaborate on commerce content opportunities.

The best course of action is to test your spend on partners that experience significant growth.

If a partner is not delivering value as expected, weigh your options. Do you need to increase the commission rate to encourage the partner to produce more traffic? Do you accept the situation and simply spend less time focusing on more valuable partners? Talk to your partner to promote an open and transparent relationship. If you‘re expecting more value, ask why you're not seeing it.

Consider establishing a test budget to try out different incentives and commissions when working with influencers.

To optimize future spending, examine the previous month's influencer channel performance. Take into account seasonality and content needs for the upcoming month.

Managing the partnership life cycle CHAPTER 4

Successful partnership creation and management occur through a framework covering all the activities used to create, measure, deepen, and optimize a business’s relationship with its partners. This optimized framework is known as the partnership life cycle. 1 Since it applies across all partnerships, there’s no need to treat every partnership as a unique entity to be individually handled.

1. “Infographic: Managing partnerships throughout their life cycle,” impact.com, accessed November 23, 2021. https://impact.com/partnership-cloud/pc-aw-ig-managing-partnerships-througho ut-their-life-cycle/

Partnerships evolve and produce more through life cycle management

Below we’ll briefly review each step of the partnership life cycle to clarify the framework you set out to create your partnerships program. (Need in-depth guidance on each stage of partnership life cycle management? Check out impact.com’s resources with an ebook dedicated to each stage, including how-to’s and case studies: https://impact.com/ebooks).

Discover & Recruit

Contract & Pay

Optimize

PARTNERSHIP LIFE CYCLE

Protect & Monitor

Track

Engage

Discover and recruit

Finding the right partners can be intimidating when you’re starting to create your partnerships program. With impact.com’s marketplace, you’ll have searchable access to vetted partners. For each partner, you’ll find metrics on their performance and samples of their creative content so you can get a feel for who they are and what they do. You can also bring in partners not part of the marketplace and work with them through impact.com. Next, you can reach out and begin to recruit partners from inside impact.com, establishing relationships with those that offer similar goals.

Contract and pay

Before partners join your program, you’ll create contracts for them that lay out the commissioning rules from the metrics you decided were important. These terms and conditions will be applied and determine how your partners get paid. Payment through impact.com is simplified, so your partners are paid in the currency they want and when they want — based on the contracts you created for them.

Track In the impact.com platform, all of your partners will be set up with proper tracking infrastructure so you can attribute credit to them when they deliver converting traffic. Tracking works with all your properties across desktop, mobile web, and mobile apps. 3 You can start and build partner relationships by communicating the right amount of relevant content at the best times. By engaging them, you will help your partners become successful participants, which will help keep you top-of-mind with them. Regular communication informs partners about new products, creative, and incentives that encourage them to keep driving traffic your way. 4 Engage Protect and monitor While partnerships are a great way to achieve your goals, they’re not without bad actors. The impact.com platform allows you to vigilantly protect yourself from issues with potential high-risk partners and carry out all the compliance requirements that keep your program professional and safe. 5

Optimize

Long-running partnerships can often deliver more of a good thing. Ensuring these partners are credited and compensated means they’ll continue to be productive. Optimize your overall partner mix and ensure that a diversity of partnerships contributes value throughout the customer journey.

Three Shopify businesses that created successful partnerships programs

Understanding how everything fits together for actual businesses will help you find your path forward. Take a look at Vincero, Ivory Ella, and Corkcicle, three businesses that use impact.com to create partnerships programs tailored to their specific needs and goals and get inspired for your own company’s partnership possibilities.

Vincero

Vincero is a luxury watchmaker. The brand recently expanded its line to other accessories, including belts, sunglasses, and wallets. As its product line expanded, the company knew the keys to expanded business growth lay in: ● Broadening its overall partnerships program ● Bolstering its partner base with new content partners

The need: Vincero realized that recruiting new content partners would be difficult to execute manually. The company needed a way to automate the partner onboarding and management process to focus on growing its partnerships revenue, and thus its business. The goal: Vincero realized its target audience would be more easily reachable through specific types of bloggers and influencers. Using the impact.com platform and a direct sign-up link for its existing partner relationships, Vincero identified the content partners that best represented its target audience and quickly onboarded them onto the impact.com platform.

Customizing its contracts is what made the process a seamless experience for Vincero. In addition to discovering and onboarding new content partners, Vincero created unique, one-to-one contracts with each new partner. The outcome: The ability to diversify its partnerships allowed Vincero to achieve and go well beyond its goal of establishing partnerships with creative partners to increase its revenue.

In particular, Vincero:

Grew content partner ROAS 332 percent by recruiting new content partners using the impact.com platform

Drove a 290 percent improvement in monthly conversions

290%

+332%

Increased content partner revenue by 1,058 percent over nine months

+1058%

Ivory Ella

Ivory Ella offers high-quality apparel and gear that makes people feel good about their purchase. In other words, good clothes for a good cause. All in the name of elephants. The need: Ivory Ella wanted to launch and grow a brand new partnerships program. The company was excited about the channel’s ability to reach untapped markets and encouraged by the low barriers to entry for starting a partnerships program.

The goal: The goal: The brand’s program goals were to tap into new audiences, leverage its existing social influencers more efficiently, and create relationships with other strong partners in time for the fourth quarter of its first year on the impact.com platform.

“We’re beyond thrilled with the growth of our partner program. . . We’ve exceeded our revenue goals and done it more efficiently than we could have hoped for.”

Ryan Duranso, Cofounder, Ivory Ella

The outcome: Using the impact.com platform’s robust promo code tracking, the company could rapidly scale, easily tracking and attributing sales to each partner even if a partner didn’t use tracking links. Ivory Ella also began grouping its partners into segments to take advantage of the unique way each segment added value to the partnerships program as a whole.

By the end of its first full year on the impact.com platform, Ivory Ella saw:

11 percent of its total revenue coming through the partnerships channel

11%

19x

19 times ROAS

After setting a solid baseline in the first year, the company focused on its Q4 revenue, increasing year-over-year (YoY) Q4 revenue by 55 percent and generating 17 percent of all revenue through the partnerships program

+55%

Corkcicle

Corkcicle is a lifestyle and consumer brand focused on hydration that leverages ecommerce platform Shopify to manage its online store. Although initially hesitant about starting an affiliate program for fear of attracting low-quality customers, Corkcicle decided to pursue the affiliate channel to help drive traffic and fuel revenue growth.

The need: After launching its partnerships program, Corkcicle realized its customer acquisition and affiliate performance was hindered by a modest partner network with scant content partnerships opportunities. The goal: Corkcicle’s partnerships team knew there was much more affiliate revenue potential out there, so it sought to optimize its affiliate program by diversifying channel revenue share and expanding its customer base.

“The affiliate channel has become a fundamental part of Corkcicle’s marketing portfolio. It’s the perfect complement to our other digital marketing efforts as it has expanded the prospecting reach while also driving people down the funnel.”

Amanda Nelson, Vice President of eCommerce, Corkcicle

The outcome: Using impact.com’s partner discovery tool, Corkcicle forged partnerships with premium publishing houses. It also generated placement opportunities in gift guides for seasonal and holiday occasions.

Corkcicle leveraged impact.com’s reporting in a variety of ways, including:

●

Identifying its highest-performing partners

● Demonstrating how these partners contributed to conversions across channels ● Using partner insights to further hone its strategy

Key outcomes included:

Revenue earned by the affiliate channel grew 178 percent quarter over quarter (QoQ) by the close of Q1 2021

178x

From the beginning of Corkcicle’s agency WITHIN’s management in January through Q1 2021, the affiliate channel doubled its share of total business revenue — up to 10 percent of total business revenue

+10%

Ready to get started? CHAPTER 6

Find out how you can power your affiliate and influencer partnerships with the impact.com x Shopify integration. With the integration, you can find new partners, track their efforts, and reward them for driving sales to your Shopify store.

Request a demo today.

About impact.com impact.com, the leading global partnership management platform, has been transforming the way enterprises discover and manage all types of partnerships — including affiliates, influencers, commerce content publishers, brand-to-brand, and more — since its founding in 2008. Its powerful, purpose-built platform helps businesses, including brands, publishers and agencies, to build authentic, enduring and rewarding relationships with both publishers and consumers. By providing visibility across the entire consumer journey they are able to aggregate, orchestrate and optimize the total value of the entire mix of partnerships with ease and transparency, driving growth and creating new value for consumers. To learn more about how impact.com’s technology platform and partnerships marketplace is driving revenue growth for global enterprise brands such as Walmart, Uber, Shopify, Lenovo, L’Oreal, Fanatics, Levi’s and 1-800-Flowers, visit www.impact.com.

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