The Fastest Way to Scale eCommerce Affiliate Marketing: Interview with the Creator of Shopifreaks

Why do some eCommerce businesses grow exponentially while others struggle to get off the ground?

Perhaps the reason is not what products they’re selling but who is selling their products.

Today, we’ll share the key insights and ideas from our most recent podcast episode with Paul Drecksler, the creator of the Shopifreaks newsletter.

The Changing Landscape of Affiliate Marketing

Not too long ago, affiliate options used to be very limited. Only a few eCommerce platforms had partner programs, so content creators or anyone looking to work with an online business had to search far and wide.

Today we’re living through the opposite situation. It seems like the majority of brands has put a lot of attention into their affiliate marketing strategies. And now companies are struggling to find reliable partners, and every potential affiliate is in very high demand.

As a result of this power shift, eCommerce brands are chasing affiliate partners, trying to attract them to join their program with flashy marketing and additional commission payments. Despite all that effort, many of them still struggle to secure content producers who match their requirements.

How to Find The Best Affiliates: Creating Value as an eCommerce Business

Many eCommerce affiliate programs share the same vision: ‘We need affiliates to make us as much money as possible, and we want the conversion rates to go up right now.’

And just to be clear, there is nothing wrong with this kind of mentality. Anything a business does is done in order to maximize profits and minimize associated expenses.

However, you shouldn’t lead with that mindset when you’re launching the partner program or planning to grow your existing affiliate network.

Instead, switch your focus from thinking about how much money you can make off your affiliates, and start looking for ways for you to generate them as much money as possible.

Switch from thinking, ‘How much money can you make off affiliates as fast as possible?’ to ‘How can they make the most money with us?’.

Most affiliates that come your way don’t know your brand that well, and they naturally prioritize their own brand and their well-being over yours. This can shift later as your relationship grows and develops, but not at first.

That’s why you need to make your affiliate marketing program attractive to them.

Deliver value through thoughtful onboarding, supportive materials, keeping in touch and answering all their questions, and through a generous commission rate as well.

Don’t Look for Perfect Affiliates – Nurture Them

One thing that any eCommerce platform can try is changing the way they approach potential and existing affiliates.

Instead of trying to find the right partner who will tick all the boxes from day one, look for the right type of partner with a big promise, nurture them, and build the relationship from the ground up.

There is a much higher chance of you creating a genuine bond with social media influencers and other affiliates if you focus on people with potential. Look for someone with a similar vibe, ethics, and, of course, relevant target audiences.

How do We Know When an Affiliate is a Promising One?

Here is a little exercise to help you figure it out.

Imagine that you don’t have an affiliate program, and simply want to hire someone to advertize your products – would you choose those potential affiliates?

If the answer is Yes, – you found the one. If you’re on a fence, then this person might not be your top choice.

Look for people you would want to pay anyway, regardless if it’s in the form of affiliate commissions or a one-off contract.

One Good Affiliate Can Change Everything

One of the examples Paul shared during the podcast was an oral healthcare company that both sold and manufactured the product and, therefore, had impressive margins.

Thanks to them not being short for cash, the company chose to share a generous portion of their profits with future affiliates as they were launching the program. 

They offered:

• Lifetime commission
• Rate that was x5 higher than the market standard

At one point, they onboarded a mommy blogger who they really clicked with in terms of values, focus, and business goals.

The years went by, and as the relationship continued to grow, the mommy blogger continued to generate a sizeable portion of affiliate program’s turnover.

At the end, she was generating 90% of the company’s affiliate revenue, and 80% of the their overall revenue.

Naturally, this case is more of an exception than it is the norm.

However, this is a clear example how one invested and well-matched affiliate can change things completely. That’s why it is important for affiliate marketers to adopt a forward-thinking approach to working with partners, and understand that spending time upfront and cultivating a relationship really pays off.

How Can eCommerce Help Affiliates Win

Affiliate partners need to write and produce good content, and there are several ways affiliate marketers can help them do it.

Let Them Fill in the Gaps

The golden rule of content creation for publishers is that they need to fill in the gaps of what the eCommerce brands aren’t doing enough.

Whatever the eCommerce platform is missing in their product marketing, publishers can take over. For example, they can run product demonstrations or education for potential customers or pair items with other goods. For instance, an affiliate can share how they’ve connected the new awesome headphones to their musical instrument to practice at home without disturbing the neighbors but by still hearing every little bit of sound that they’re playing.

The key is to add value to the end-user while filling those gaps.

Help with the Workload

Help your affiliates out with the workload; don’t let them do everything by themselves if you feel like they’re drowning.

For example, if they’re producing video content, can you provide them with B-rolls? Or maybe hire an editor to help them shoot or a videographer for post-production.

You might have someone on the team ready to work with affiliates or need to hire a freelancer. Either way, don’t be afraid to incur additional costs associated with an affiliate’s content production, especially if you’re doing it for the first time. This will be a learning curve in any case, plus you might find that a little extra effort on your end will elevate the social media post or the other type of content, resulting in higher conversion rates compared to your usual results.

Don’t Hide Them

Somewhat unconventional advice that Paul shared was for eCommerce brands not to be afraid to create website landings for their biggest affiliates, and share the content they create.

Many companies don’t do it as they don’t want to drive traffic to the affiliate-generated content, thinking they will be losing money with all the people clicking the affiliate link.

In reality, if you share your publisher’s content, you’re both going to make more money. On top of that, you’re supporting your affiliate partner too by giving them exposure and showing your trust and investment in the relationship.

It’s important to understand for anyone who is worried about wasting affiliate marketing campaigns; budgets by highlighting third-party content, – not everyone who checks out the affiliate’s content will buy the product right away.

In fact, for most users, it will only be a step further in the conversion funnel toward the purchasing decision. And even if this piece of content ends up being the final push, who knows if the sale would have happened if it wasn’t for this affiliate’s content?

The landing page is also bridging the gap between affiliate’s website and yours. Sometimes, the user browses your partner’s website pages, finds a link and clicks, and they are redirected to your website which looks completely different. This confuses them and makes an impression that they’ve been redirected to the wrong place.

Tip: Naturally, you won’t be integrating every affiliate into your website with landing pages. This can work with selected partners who are already very active and generate stable affiliate revenue for your brand. Consider the top 10% of your affiliate network.

Don’t fear comparisons

Sometimes publishers create content where they put several brands together and make comparisons, for instance, on review sites. Many eCommerce companies and businesses, in general, are reluctant to share or engage with this type of content because:

• The comparison may highlight their weak points
• They don’t want to promote competitors

Such comparisons provide invaluable social proof. Content where only your product is mentioned and praised all the way creates less trust from clients than a comparison where you can see every company’s strengths and weaknesses.

Clients are very knowledgeable these days, and they fully understand that you can’t possibly be the best across all categories. If you insist that you are, it comes across as ingenuine.

Bottom line, try adopting a more open-minded approach to being placed next to competition in your affiliates’ content, it’s not as bad as you think it is.

Storytelling: Yes and No

When it comes to storytelling, these days, it seems that there are two groups of users:

• Group 1 wants only facts and nothing else but facts
• Group 2 enjoys all the details

What do you recommend to your affiliates in that case? As always, the truth lies in the middle.

Storytelling is not a universal technique, and it has its time and place. For instance, recipes or instructions may suffer from lengthy descriptions and back stories. People won’t want to scroll or wait for the publisher to get to the main point, and they’ll leave. Other topics will perform better with storytelling, for instance beauty or wellness-related content thrives on many details.

To balance the two, you can recommend affiliates to use different tricks, depending on the form of content they produce.

1. For websites and text blogs, they can use drop down menus, so only the key information is presented, and anyone interested can click and expand for more.
2. With video content or text content, creators can embed links to further information. So, instead of creating one huge piece of content, they’ll drop it into several smaller ones.

Most Common Content Mistakes in eCommerce Affiliate Marketing

Both brands and affiliates make typical mistakes in the eCommerce field.

Affiliate Perspective

• Over-pitching the product. Your affiliate hypes up the products, and then users follow the affiliate links and see that they are not as advanced, or when the quality is lower than presented. As a result, the user either never follows through with the purchase, or ends up refunding it, causing the partner to lose the commission too. It’s not a good outcome, so it’s better to always accurately represent the product. 
• Staying with eCommerce brands that are not up to their standards. Many affiliates still make this mistake, even though there are so many affiliate programs now that there’s no need to stick to bad products and brands. You don’t have to represent someone you don’t believe in. 
• Not reaching out to the companies they love, only because they can’t find the existing affiliate program. Often, companies will not have a partner program yet. If you ask them, they might consider launching it with you as their first and only partner. If you really love the brand, it makes sense to try, and find out if there’s a chance for you to cooperate with them.

eCommerce Perspective

• Competing with affiliates. For example, an affiliate code gives a 10% discount, but newsletter sign-up is 15%. What’s the point of using affiliate codes for users in that case? eCommerce should treat affiliates as partners, not as yet another competitor on the market.
• Ignoring existing customers. This is stepping into the territory of the referral program rather than an affiliate one, but it’s important to mention it. Everybody wants new customers, but not many are willing to care for existing ones. Instead of ignoring the people in whom you’ve already invested a lot of marketing effort, incentivize them to leave a review, make a second sale, upgrade, etc. Introduce a referral program where they can get commission or other perks for promoting you. They’re your most loyal fans and should be prioritized over everyone else.

How to Know if You’re Not Ready to Launch the Affiliate Program

Affiliate programs are excellent for driving your business goals, boosting brand awareness, and achieving sales targets.

There is a small issue with affiliate partnerships, though, – they won’t work if you’re not ready.

It’s possible that it’s not the right time for you to launch your program right this moment.

The first, and the most telling sign, is if your website, social media platforms, and other marketing channels are currently underperforming. If those primary instruments are not selling, it makes no sense to look for affiliates as your way out.

There is a common misconception about affiliates that it’s essentially free money, and very little work is required on the eCommerce’s end. In reality, however, all your affiliate marketing efforts will go to waste, unless the rest of the workflow is optimized.

Think about it, the key goal of a partner is to persuade the prospects to click their affiliate or referral link. Once the lead is on your website, it’s up to you to close the deal. Yet, if the website is not ready, for example, the interface is not optimized, the selling points are not there, contact information is outdated, and navigation is counter-intuitive, the lead will simply close the page and leave.

As a result, your affiliate partner did the work, but didn’t get the reward in the form of commission or a bonus. All because your side of the contract is, essentially, not fulfilled.

If that situation goes on for long enough, the brand will be missing out on affiliates income, as most active and successful partners will simply be leaving you in favor of eCommerce businesses that are more organized and successful with the rest of their marketing instruments.

It’s much more effective in the long run to deal with internal issues first, and only launch the program after that. If you do it the other way around, you’ll risk creating a bad impression with most active affiliates in the field, and not being able to onboard them later on.

If your website can’t sell to your existing traffic, and you get an affiliate who sends you 10,000 visitors, and you don’t close any of those visitors, you’re not going to have affiliates for very long.

Elevating your eCommerce Affiliate Program with Software

Scaling your partner program is extremely difficult if you do it manually.

Reliable affiliate tracking software can take a big chunk of the workload off your shoulders:

• Onboarding new affiliates
• Tracking and attributing conversions
• Real-time reporting
• Flexible commissions
• In-platform communication

The best part, you can automate your affiliate platform to minimize the input required on your end. Instead of having to spend hours on crafting reports and arranging payments to affiliates or tracking affiliate links, the system can do it for you within minutes, and the risk of mistakes and miscalculations is minimized.

Final Thoughts on Scaling eCommerce Affiliate Marketing

Growing your affiliate program is a process that takes time, but it definitely pays off. Companies with established affiliate networks get up to 30% of their revenue from this marketing channel.

If you want to successfully scale and build a group of reliable and well-performing partners, focus on their wants and requirements to make your program attractive. Work on your website and social media to perfect your customer experience and ensure you support your partners’ efforts and contribute to maximizing the conversion rate.