New business

[Migline1991]

I have a new lipstick line launching on 07/29 12pm Est time click the link to shop at lipstickmaniac.com.co my question is how do you guys network ? 

[UpPromote-old]

Hi @Migline1991,

I think you can consider about affiliate marketing. This is an ideal marketing campaign for all size businesses to help you increase your sales faster and stably. You can understand that, affiliate marketing allows you to connect with various affiliates, and then they will use their advertising sources such as social media channels, websites, blogs, etc, to promote your products. The affiliate commission is successfully recorded whenever a customer makes a purchase via the unique link or coupon associated with their recommendation. So it is totally safer and saver. 

Here are some benefits of affiliate marketing:

1. Make extra income

The main advantage of affiliate marketing is that the income is entirely performance-based. This is because affiliates are only paid a commission when a purchase has taken place. That means if the affiliates have an ineffective campaign, it won’t affect your budget.

2. Low investment but high cost effective

In fact, affiliate marketing does not need a huge amount to build a customer service team, or running advertising. This campaign helps to mitigate any risks that drive traffic or run social ads with little or no result for your Shopify business, while also ensuring that merchants achieve what they pay for. 

3. Promote business brand name

A research reported that 92% of customers trust the recommendations of people, companies or influencers they know.For this reason, working directly with affiliate marketers who then promote your products to their established audience, brings more opportunities and more direct sales. 

Here are the steps you can follow to promote your products via affiliate marketing:

1. Offer an appropriate commission structure

When setting the commission rules, make sure that it is compatible with your market (not too low or too high in comparison with your competitors). Set a number that can make you stand out but may not spend all your money on affiliate marketing. Via UpPromote: Affiliate Marketing you can easily setup multiple commission programs.

Beside setting program commission, you can also that might be useful for promoting products with higher/lower price or higher/lower profit margins. Merchant can make use of this feature by offering a higher commission rate for the product you want to drive more sales.

2. Be transparent about your affiliate program details

On the affiliate registration form, you should state clearly your program commission rule on the Benefit section and additional term. Affiliate would prefer a program with clearly stated details than ambiguous information. Some merchants also have strict rules about where you can and can’t use links and how you cite them, that’s okay then but just make sure to let the affiliate know about your rules.

Besides, you can add more fields on the registration to get more information of your affiliate, along with making a careful research about affiliate before approving them because it is affiliate quality that matters, not quantity.

3. Avoid spam sign up

As mentioned before, it is the affiliate quality that matters, not quantity, so you should apply some tips to avoid spam sign-up that may waste your time:

• Enable Captcha (human verification) to prevent fake affiliate accounts that are not created by human,

• Add more required fields on the Affiliate registration form to get more affiliate information, add field like Instagram account or Zip code,... to force affiliate provide information, it may eliminate untrustworthy account.

• Disable Auto-active affiliate: if you regularly get spam sign-up, you should deactivate Auto-active affiliate feature and spend time to research and approve affiliate manually, it may spend lots of your time at first but would be useful to manage your program later.

Besides, our system also prevents spam registration by automatically remove accounts with more than 5 capital letter on the sign-up name (which looks like fidufHaHUhYhZsNN) because we consider them as spam.

4. Review your shop with best quality product and precise description

Affiliate program success lies in the quality of your selling products. Before giving them to any promoter, make sure you optimize product quality and provide a precise description of product function, how your affiliate boosts your items will depend mainly on the product itself.

You should also collect customer testimonials to provide affiliates, realistic reviews from real customers would be a handy tool for partner. Besides, ambassadors themselves will try the product if possible to help with their promoting process, so there no use in praising your products to the skies.

5. Assist your affiliates while they are promoting your product:

The most important thing to do is to assist your partners on their work, you can’t expect to sit still and sales come up rapidly (it may if you are a big brand and affiliate actively contact you for partnership). Here are a few things you can try on your campaign:

• Make sure affiliate can reach you easily: Provide support email or other contact information so your affiliate can reach you easily.

• Provide high-quality product media kit: You can upload banners, product images and other media assets on Creatives with high quality to help your affiliate do their work better.

• Give advice to affiliates about the promotion method they should use because you know your products better. You can send Bulk email to affiliates or state your guide on Affiliate guide to help them with some tips or with the most suitable method.

• Share success story of existing affiliate in your shop for inspiration: Some of your affiliates may not be an expert yet, sharing them a motivating story could help to boost their attitude as well as provide them with a valuable lesson to apply.

• Send feedback on their performance: although your affiliate can see their performance on their account, you - the merchant should be the one who gives a regular report on their performance, you should notify them when their productivity comes high or low so you both can figure out a way to improve their performance. In case your affiliates do their job outstandingly, you can offer them a bonus to incentivize them for better results.

  

Above are some tips to optimize your affiliate marketing strategy on the initial period. Although the success of the job does depend on the affiliate’s marketing skills, there are things you can do as a merchant to assist affiliate to achieve the positive results.

All the bests,

UpPromote: Affiliate Marketing

Buid. Manage. Succeed with Affiliate Marketing

[VitaF]

Hello and good luck with your new store!

What can be very beneficial for new businesses is to think about how to start building a subscriber's list from early on and get the necessary leads for further communications and return customers. One way to approach this is SMS marketing as it is a very personalised way of communication making customers feel appreciated and eager to return to shop with you. 

As you are able to automate the messages, you can easily remind customers of an abandoned cart, new products in stock, an upcoming sale and much more.