Referral & Affiliate Marketing

Referral Marketing, or word-of-mouth marketing, is quick way to increase incremental revenues on your e-commerce site. Referral marketing allows you to incentivize your customers to spread the word about your brand, in exchange for rewards including product discounts on future purchases, cash prizes and free giveaways.

Properly designed and executed referral marketing campaigns can easily increase bottom lines by 10 – 20% over time.

We use platforms such as ReferralCandy and FriendBuy to power our campaigns. These tools can be integrated into any major e-commerce platform including Magento, Shopify and WooCommerce.

Affiliate Marketing leverages affiliates from various affiliate networks to give your brand exposure. You place funds in an escrow account with an affiliate platform, set a compensation method (e.g. pay per sale, pay per click, pay per impression, etc.), and when the affiliate fulfills the conditions, they are paid out. Unlike word-of-mouth marketers, affiliate marketers usually sign up as a means to supplement their income or earn a living. They tend to own their own websites or blogs, write extensive product reviews or are subject matter experts in a particular field.

Affiliate platforms vary in their feature sets, quality of affiliates and price. Some have a low price entry point to join, but are largely self-service, while others are more expensive but provide an account manager to help jump-start the program and help recruit the best affiliates.

Some affiliate programs we work with include:

• CJ Affiliate
• ShareASale
• Rakuten LinkShare
• AvantLink

All in all, joining an affiliate program as a merchant is not a set-it-and-forget-it marketing channel. For it to be truly successful, it needs to be properly designed and affiliates extensively educated and nurtured, much like an organization would do for its own internal sales organization. That said, affiliate programs have the potential to significantly increase sales due to their inherit network effects.

Contact us today to help you select and implement a Referral and/or Affiliate Marketing program.