And then you set up a campaign and then from with all from within your Social Snowball account, once your affiliates are now owe their commissions from within your account, you could book send all your payouts in two clicks. It’ll take money from the connected funding source dispersed to all the affiliates are paying via email. And then the affiliates will be able to choose how they want to redeem their earnings. And there’s over like 700 options or something that they could choose from. So things like bank account, PayPal, Amazon gift card, Visa card, Starbucks gift card, pretty much any like modern way to redeem money, the affiliates will be able to choose from and it’ll be instant, regardless of which they choose. And it’ll be no fees whatsoever, regardless of which they choose. So it’s a great experience for affiliates. They just, you know, get an email and they get to click a couple buttons and then get a payment sent to whatever they want. And it’s great for the merchant as well. Because rather than having to deal with and pay bonus payouts, or you know hiring someone to deal with manual payouts, they just log into their interface, select all send, and then it’s handled. So we kind of those were like the two payouts and affiliate acquisition were like the two big mountains that we heard a lot in the beginning. That’s kind of what we’re known for right now. As far as the roadmap, there’s definitely a lot I can talk about. One thing that I’m really excited, though, is our new segmentation engine that we’re releasing. So essentially, what that is, is we’re creating the ability for merchants to create many affiliate programs. So rather than having like one brake blanket program with the same rewards, Commission’s free gifts, you know, whatever kind of incentives that you’re locking into an affiliate program, even as far as like, what products the affiliate program applies to, we’re allowing you to create many of those affiliate programs. And then rather than, you know, get that that’s not proprietary, that’s, you know, been done by other affiliate programs. Um, the differences with Social Snowball, where you’re gonna be able to do is segment you affiliates into those programs based on preset criteria. So obviously, with a Social Snowball affiliate program, we’re playing the volume game, we’re turning everyone possible into an affiliate, we’re not doing anything selective, if you want to do something selective, you either a don’t like money, or you’re just not the customer for us. I get I mean, from from a, it. Okay, we’ll move on from that. But yeah, um, but so obviously, you know, you’re we’re playing the volume game here. So the segment affiliates into a lot of different affiliate programs would take a lot of work to do that manually. So if someone’s like an influencer, and they have a lot of followers, and you want to give them a slightly higher commission, or if you know, you’re using Octane AI, for example, and they filled out a shop quiz, and you know, their preferences or their skin type, for example, and you want to give them an affiliate program targeted to a certain collection, or maybe a free gift from a certain collection. This is this is all stuff that would have to be done manually. So what we’re doing with Social Snowball now is you can set the criteria for these different programs such as you know, how much someone spent on your store, how many people they’ve referred in their in your affiliate program, but also data from other sources like Octane AI, or Gatsby AI. Um, so Gatsby is like a social media follower collecting tool, um, used by a ton of big brands. So it, you know, gives customers incentives to like, enter their Instagram or Tiktok handles, and we’ll get into, like, collect data on their accounts based on that. So we could sync that data up with Social Snowball, as well as like an octane shop Quizlet, like I was talking about, that data would all feed into the segmentation engine, and then we could segment affiliates into different programs based off of that, and then set different rewards and incentives in those programs. So if we know that someone has referred a lot of friends, we might create a tear for someone who’s referred over 10 friends and give them a higher commission that’s, you know, motivated to keep referring friends as an example. Or if we know someone has over 20,000 followers on Instagram, we might want to create another influencer affiliate program and give them you know, some sort of extra gift or different type of commission, etc. Like that. Um, you know, those are just a couple examples, but the possibilities are pretty endless. And that’s something that we’ve been working on for a while that I’m really excited about releasing in q1 2022.
Joshua Chin 14:49
Very cool. Very cool. I believe that at this point that this, this absolute comes out, it’s probably going to be q1 Probably late January, early February.
Noah Tucker 15:03
Okay, first time people are listening it released, it should be really generally released in beta at that point.
Joshua Chin 15:08
It should be at least in beta. Awesome. What’s, uh, what’s your playbook? Or, or a say I’m a, let’s say, I run an econ brand that’s doing say 1000 sales a month 1000 sales a month? So I have a at least 1000 new affiliates every single month. Right? How do I amplify that? How do I scale this? What’s your playbook for that?
Noah Tucker 15:40
Yeah, so I mean, I would say, you know, as far as scaling, there’s really two ways to look at it, one could be acquiring more affiliates, and then two could be getting more value out of your existing affiliates. And I would focus on the latter first. Because, you know, once you do start scaling, and you start acquiring more affiliates automatically, you want to have that getting more value out of your existing affiliates already unlocked. So that when you do scale, like you’re, you know, already doing more. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So I mean, my biggest piece of advice would be like to integrate really deeply with your lifecycle marketing stack. So email and SMS plays a really big role in this. And a lot of, you know, agencies that do affiliate marketing as a service, or people who have worked with previous affiliate programs that switched the Social Snowball, don’t think to do this instinctually because they don’t, they’re they don’t understand. They’re just not used to at least every customer being an affiliate. But when you treat an affiliate, like any other customer, and it just, you know, make sense to be hitting them on all these touch points that they’re getting hit on with every other marketing materials you’re doing. So you know, if you’re sending them, you know, notifications on SMS and or you know, marketing materials on SMS, there’s no reason that you shouldn’t be sending them reminders on SMS about their code, or like, different types of inspirational educational affiliate marketing content, via email, you know, so I recommend people really integrate deep with their life cycle marketing channels. We have native integrations, as of right now with Klaviyo and postscript. And then we have Zapier integration, where you can pretty much integrate with any other ESP or SMS provider that you’re using. And we have more native ones coming out, as well as an alloy integration coming out in 2022. So you’ll pretty much be able to integrate with any marketing channel that you’re using. Yeah, yeah. Um, but I mean, like, yeah, you want and you want to be strategic about it, too. So like with reminders, you don’t want to just spam your affiliates that your slash customers like as the same as how you wouldn’t spam them with any other marketing material, you want to be strategic with it. So like, I always recommend people to send reminders about sharing their code or link when the customer is most emotionally involved in your brand. So like, right after they place an order, you know, we hit them on the thank you page. And then I would also recommend sending instant notification right after that, and then, you know, when an order shipped, maybe they’ll be very excited. And then that, especially after an order arrived, now they have the physical product themselves, they could, you can even encourage them to film content with it and use that content to share their code, and then repurpose that content as UGC for your other channels. And it’ll always be really high quality content, because they’re not just filming it to get like a $5 coupon how they might be with other apps, they’re filming it, because they want people to actually buy with it. So they’re gonna really do a good job making content for you to repurpose. And we see a lot of merchants repurposing this content as well, and almost building out a system for it, which is something that, you know, we have in the roadmap to build out a little more on the product side as well. But yeah, I mean, that’s probably my biggest piece of advice.
Joshua Chin 18:27
Very cool. Very cool. So I like that. And when, when it comes down to scaling the number of affiliates beyond your, beyond your audience, if people are listening or interested in doing that, what’s the best possible next step? Don’t you think?
Noah Tucker 18:48
Yeah, I mean, so I’d say like, kind of how I said before, like your customers should be, you know, your affiliates no matter what, um, beyond that, like your other own channels should be converted into affiliates that they like, if they weren’t already, so people who are ready in your email, and that’s and so this should be sending invites to join your affiliate program. Even if you let’s say, you install Social Snowball, today, you might have an email list of 100,000, that people aren’t affiliates yet. So you might want to send like an invite to them type thing to get people already in your own channels. And then I would move to social media as well, I would post you know, recruiting affiliates and a link to the signup form, something like that. And then beyond that, like I don’t discourage people from doing the more traditional affiliate marketing models of doing outreach to publishers, bloggers, review sites, influencers. That’s the word and that’s so great. And I encourage, you know, Social Snowball is not built exclusively for customer affiliates. It’s built with, you know, more traditional affiliates, publishers, influencers in mind as well. And there’s no reason to not have it all in one in one platform. And now, especially with a releasing where you could build different programs for different groups. It’s going to make that even easier and more automated. But as far as like the more traditional outreach to affiliates, Getting involved in affiliate networks, I definitely recommend merchants do that as well. I just think most merchants kind of have that down already, and are doing well off of it. What most merchants aren’t also utilizing is converting their customers and own marketing audiences into affiliates as well. And when you combine both and do both at the same time, that’s when you really see affiliate marketing being like a massive sales engine for your brand.
Joshua Chin 20:23
That makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. No, what are some mistakes that people often make, in from your point of view in the Shopify space with affiliate marketing?
Noah Tucker 20:37
The biggest one, I see, this actually happens a lot, this happens so much that we actually had to put a little like, warning message on our onboarding flow for people to not do this. So basically, in an affiliate program, peep, you offer two incentives, you offer an incentive for the advocate, and then an incentive for the new customer, you don’t have to offer an incentive for the new customer. But we recommend use a discount code because it’s only going to help. And what we see people do sometimes is the discount code that they’ll offer to new customers will be lower than a discount code that they offer to regular traffic on the website for like a newsletter signup, or Spin to Win wheel or SMS, or anything like that. So what will happen is people will be referring friends, you know, the advocates will be referring friends with a discount code, let’s say for $5 off, and then the person will the new customer will arrive at the website, see, join this newsletter and get $10 off. Yeah, nine out of 10 times, if not 10, out of 10 times they’re going to ditch the $5 off code, Shopify only allows one code per purchase, they’re going to take the 10. And then the sale won’t be attributed to the affiliate. So even though the affiliate program is working, and people are referring friends, none of that data is attributed in Social Snowball as referral sales, and it feels like it’s not working. And then, you know, I’ve had, you know, like Customer Success calls with some of our merchants, where I’ll explain this to them. And then they’ll change it to match or be whatever discount code they’re offering as like a newsletter signup. And like overnight, the affiliate program will start like the graph goes like this. So it that’s like, that’s like a very important one. And I always tell people, like the reason that you can afford to give a healthier discount for affiliate or Yeah, for customers referred to by affiliates than regular store traffic is because you’re not paying any ad dollars to get these people to your store. The CAC is the numbers that you set in this affiliate program, the referrals, the advocates, reward plus the discount for new customers is your CAC. It’s like the progressive name your price till you see in the commercials, that’s their that’s the, that’s the CAC that you’re paying to acquire customers. So you can afford to usually be on the generous side with these incentives, since there’s no other ad dollars getting this traffic to your website. So if people, you know if people have the drawback of Oh, but I’ll also have to the pay the affiliate, I don’t want to give a discount as big as the one we do for a newsletter usually can afford to and it usually pays and it always pays off very well.
Joshua Chin 22:50
Makes sense. It makes a ton of sense. And if people if we’re not looking to give a discount? What are some innovative ways that you’ve seen people incentivize affiliates. And so with affiliate, you got to pay cash, but yeah, or Yeah, for taking up the offer? Have you seen anything done really well beyond discounts? Or discounts to the best?
Noah Tucker 23:20
I mean, discounts are definitely the standard and like the way we build the platform is definitely around using discounts. We do have the ability for you to offer a 0% or $0 discount code, which people are usually not doing but what you can do we also have the ability to use tracking links instead of discount codes. And with tracking links, excuse me, it’s it’s optional to include a discount that will like automatically apply at checkout with the link or not. So it could just be a tracking like strictly to check track the conversion and not offer any incentive. Right honestly, that usually performs best for like a more traditional affiliate that either owns a review site or or like you know, any other blogger publisher, or like an influencer that’s just like use my link. Yeah, even with influences, though, it’s pretty standard to at least give some sort of discount. So yeah, I would definitely recommend I mean, what I always tell merchants is the more you give the more you get, like you want to be generous with these incentives but obviously that doesn’t work for every brand and you know, we definitely work with a good handful of brands that use the tracking link feature and don’t offer a discount with it. Um, but I would say if you are going to do that, I would have a reason for it. I wouldn’t just do that out of like saving, you know that extra 5% on your margins I would do it because you’re working with a specific type of affiliate that you know, this will perform fine with.
Joshua Chin 24:35
Makes sense. That makes sense. Noah for people who are interested in testing out Social Snowball, or connecting with you, where should they go to?
Noah Tucker 24:47
Yeah, I mean on Twitter, you know, I’m always answering DMS on Twitter or Instagram on on both I’m NoaTuck spelled N O at T UC K. And if you if someone wanted to try Social Snowball, of course we have our listing Shopify app store where they can install themselves. But if they want to book a demo, you can do so right from our website as well. There’s a button like right in the header, but good demo.
Joshua Chin 25:09
Perfect. And as usual links are in the show notes down below. If you are listening in from Spotify or Apple podcasts, you can always got to Chronos.Agency/podcast to check out our show notes. Noah, thank you so much for being on the show.
Noah Tucker 25:28
Thank you so much for having me Josh appreciate it.
Outro 25:33
Thanks for listening to the eCommerce Profits Podcast. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click Subscribe to get notified of future episodes.
