How to launch an Affiliate program using Shopify customer accounts
Leveraging your own audience
Affiliate and influencer marketing can be a cost-effective form of advertising. You pay commission only when a referred order happens, so you do not pay for traffic that does not convert. Simple Affiliate has a free plan, and Autopay adds a payout fee only if you pay affiliates with it. You pay for targeted word of mouth - which makes finding the right partners to work with the most important aspect of a successful program .
How do you find them? Well, the first place to look is your own website traffic and customers. Chances are you've already caught the eye of people with large enough online audiences to get started. Finding your first affiliates can be as simple as adding a link to your main and footer menus, or sending an email. We'll go into more detail about this below.
Keeping it in-house
The next most important aspect of your affiliate program is consistency. Keeping your communication with potential and registered affiliates under your domain will make sure that the experience is seamless. The last thing you want is for your affiliates to have to register or log in anywhere else. The following guide will show you how to set-up and launch your own self-branded, totally in-house, affiliate program using our Shopify App "Simple Affiliate".
Simple Affiliate
We built Simple Affiliate with two things in mind:
- Provide the best tool for merchants to leverage their own audience as affiliates
- Make the experience as seamless as possible
The trick is that anyone wanting to interact deeper with your online store should be logging in to a single account - whether they are an affiliate or a customer.
Step 1 - Getting set-up
Then open Simple Affiliate and follow the Complete your setup checklist. Turn on the Simple Affiliate tracker. Referral links, popups and automatic discounts do not work without it. If your store uses new customer accounts, also install the affiliate extension.
Once Simple Affiliate is installed, affiliates sign up and sign in with the customer account that they use on your store. This is the same account they use to check their order history and addresses. Where the affiliate dashboard lives depends on your customer accounts. On new customer accounts, it is in the customer account area of your store. On classic customer accounts, it is a page on your theme at yourstore.com/pages/affiliate. You can change that address in Simple Affiliate in Settings > Dashboard.
Step 1.2 - Adding a link to your menus
Next, we recommend adding a link to the "Affiliate Dashboard" page to your main menu. Click here to get a refresher on how to add menu items to your Shopify theme.
Step 1.3 - Choosing the right tools
Your influencers and affiliates know how best to speak to their audience - and it's your job to provide them with the right tools to drive sales. Instagram influencers will usually find it easiest to make referrals using discount codes, while bloggers prefer using referral links. If you are working with a podcast, then custom links are an exceptionally concise way of promoting your store. Discount codes and custom links are on the Pro and Premium plans. See our Getting Started guide for instructions on how to set up the following tools:
Discount codes
Tracking referrals through discount codes lets affiliates say "Visit yourstore.com and use the discount code SIMPLE to save" - which is a simple and effective sentence. The power of Simple Affiliate is that you set one discount rule for a whole group of affiliates. Discount codes are on the Pro and Premium plans. For example - you could have a group "Lipstick" for lipstick influencers that is assigned the following rule:
"Amount off collections: 15% off the lipstick collection."
Each influencer in the "Lipstick" group will have a unique discount code that follows this rule. If an influencer is moved to a new group, their discount code will update to follow the new group's discount rule.
Referral links
These are enabled by default. Affiliates can see their referral links on their dashboard. On the Basic, Pro and Premium plans, they can create more than one link with different destinations. On the Starter plan, each affiliate has one link. This works well if your affiliates have blogs or websites of their own. Affiliates can use referral links in banner ads or in text links to your store.
Custom links
Custom links have the power to combine both discount codes and referral links into one click. For example, affiliates can tell their audience youstore.com/ben to save 10%. When you turn on the discount for the link, a click on the custom link applies the affiliate's discount code to the cart. The group of the affiliate needs an active discount rule.
Step 2 - Sending an email
The best way to find new affiliates is by emailing your customers that already have accounts on your store, and have opted in to receive marketing messages. We suggest informing them about how they can join your affiliate program. See the example below:
Subject: Refer a friend
Content: Get your friends in the game and earn commission when they make a purchase! Visit [your affiliate dashboard link] and log in to get sharing.
If you want to be more detailed, you can include a step-by-step guide on how to start earning commission on your store:
- Log in to your account on our store
- Sign up to our affiliate program
- Copy your referral link and share it with your friends
- Check back often to see your earnings
- Add your payout details in your dashboard (for example your bank account or PayPal email)
- We will pay your earnings to the payout method that you add
Step 3 - Scaling your program
The beauty about having an in-house affiliate program is that any marketing money spent on attracting new customers now has the added benefit of potentially bringing in new affiliates as well. However, there are still many ways to scale your program as you grow your online presence:
- Custom pop-ups
- Posting regularly on social media
- Email automation (send to loyal customers)