What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is an essential tool for many fashion retailers that want to increase their reach through directly targeted channels. Basically, an affiliate marketer promotes your brand on their digital platform in exchange for a percentage of the sales they referred to you. With new developments in technology and constantly evolving social media platforms, it has become easier than ever to partner with bloggers and influencers to increase sales and reach.
Although you will have to share a small portion of the business profits, affiliate marketing is a mutually beneficial relationship that saves you from taking on a bulk of the advertising legwork. There are several services that make it even simpler to find the appropriate marketers for your brand, so getting started is a piece of cake.
Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is an excellent tool for increasing sales as well as growing your social media following. Bloggers and influencers are great partners for your business because they are well-connected to their followers, and finding the right influencer means you have access to a very specific market that will be interested in your product. Most popular Instagrammers strive to be authentic with their followers, so a positive product endorsement comes across as more genuine than a regular paid advertisement that can seem spammy.
RewardStyle
Rewardstyle is a monetization platform for content creators started in 2011 by a fashion blogger. They have now grown to over 1.6 billion dollars in yearly sales for retailers, partnering with well-known brands like Sephora, Net-A-Porter, Topshop, Etsy, ModCloth and more. How it works is by using signature links to products in their blogs, bloggers can gain a percentage of sales made by their referrals which are tracked by retailers. Retailers gain the benefit of boosted sales and web traffic, along with more public visibility through popular blogs.
LikeToKnowIt
After the Instagram boom, the makers of RewardStyle created a spinoff called LikeToKnowIt, which operates through Instagram. The main concept is the same: facilitate a partnership between influencers and retailers. However, the image-heavy and mobile-friendly benefits of Instagram inspired LikeToKnowIt to create a platform that allows users to screenshot their favorite influencers’ looks and shop the clothing featured in the photo. They also offer a service which sends email updates including shoppable links to items in the user’s ‘liked’ Instagram photos.
ShareASale
ShareASale has been in the affiliate marketing business for over 18 years (aka almost since the birth of internet shopping) which means they’ve gotten pretty good at it. They include merchants from categories like fashion, home & garden, business and more. Through the service, merchants can choose which affiliates they want to work with based on their website and following. The agreement can include compensation based on pay per sale or pay per lead.
Making The Sale
After you have funneled leads to your website by partnering with influencers, it’s your turn to clinch the sale with a professional homepage and product pages. You want to make sure your new products and specials are prominently outlined to guide visitors and catch their attention. If you need a website makeover, Mad Mind Studios offers web design services as well as marketing and branding. Using signature links or personalized promo codes, you are able to track which partnerships led to a spike in sales and additional traffic to your online store. This data can help you hone which tactics work the best for your business, and make you an expert in affiliate marketing in no time.