As one of the biggest e-commerce platforms globally, Shopify aims to cater to both small and enterprise-level online stores, as well as anything in between.
A big factor that plays a role in Shopify's flexibility is its powerful, ever-evolving app store. Businesses that choose Shopify as a platform have access to an absolute goldmine of apps, allowing you to build and refine your store around your needs.
Recently, the addition of affiliate marketing apps on Shopify stores has been blowing up. In Layman's terms, affiliate marketing apps aim to increase revenue by incentivizing (using commissions) current customers to recommend their store's products to others.
Why should I use affiliate marketing?
Having a strong affiliate marketing program means reduced ongoing costs, as well as reduced risks. Hiring a marketing & sales team is expensive, so why not recruit an army of affiliate partners that can generate the same, if not more sales, without the investment.
Affiliate marketing also greatly increases your web-reach; since your reps will be advertising your businesses via their social media, blogs, and all other online content. This also means a great load of work is lifted from your shoulders, as these marketing attempts would previously be your sole responsibility! Also, seeing buzz being generated by lots of different people will leave any prospects impressed with your products.
Upping your game, you can even recruit influencers or other prominent social media figures to promote your product, guaranteeing thousands of new eyes being laid upon your product.
How much money can I make from affiliate marketing?
The affiliate marketing industry is rapidly shaping up to be one of the best modern marketing strategies. Looking at statistics, it's reported that spending on affiliate marketing in the United States was predicted to reach around $8 billion by 2022. This is a huge growth from its humble beginnings in 2010, back then only garnering around $1.6 billion.
Another study provides a closer look at exactly just how much affiliate marketers are making. Results from this survey show that 9% of affiliate marketers churned out more than $50k from this marketing strategy in 2016. The majority of online merchants (around 65%) said they were getting between 5-20% of their annual profits from affiliate marketing alone.
Creating an affiliate program using Shopify apps
With Shopify's easy-to-use app store, setting up an affiliate program for your store is super simple. Begin this process by browsing the app store and installing an affiliate program app of your choice; our personal favorites include Secomapp & Bold.
Let's take a deeper look at these two apps, and what they bring to the table:
Secomapp: Affiliate Marketing
Secomapp is used and trusted by more than 30,000 Shopify merchants to help their business flourish. Secomapp focuses on affiliate marketing's idea of no upfront costs – exclusively paying when sales are actually made, leading to huge traffic & revenue boosts.
This app allows you to customize your program's monetary incentives personally, ensuring a streamlined prize-progression for all your affiliates. Affiliate tracking is accurate and automatic, resulting in a very smooth experience for both referrers and new affiliates.
Setting up the app is a breeze, with a quickstart guide available to everyone, as well as detailed documents and a super dedicated support team that work around the clock to answer any customer queries.
Bold Loyalty Points & Rewards
At its core, Bold allows you to create a loyalty point system, creating a retention program in minutes. But Bold also, of course, allows the creation of a referral program.
This referral program allows you to offer incentives to new customers, reward existing customers for successful referrals, customize your program with minimum purchase amounts, and much more!
Conclusion
Affiliate marketing is a very intruiging option for upcoming online-euntrepeneurs due to its low-risk high-reward dynamic. With a click of a few buttons, you can install one of these apps and take your online store to the next level.
