Why you should use affiliate marketing in your store – After the Show

Crystal Vilkaitis: Are you doing anything with affiliate marketing? Have you heard of affiliate marketing? Done any research thinking it could help drive your traffic or maybe nothing at all, you’re like, what affiliate marketing retail for me, my brick and mortar. I don’t know. Really? However, wherever you are. We’re going to talk about it in this episode of after the show.

This week I spoke with Wade Tonkin of Fanatics, the top company to talk with about affiliate marketing

Crystal Vilkaitis: So hello, hello, and welcome to after the show. This week’s guest was Wade Tonkin. He is running the affiliate department at Fanatics. It was incredible to have a conversation with him.

Man, it was a loaded conversation. We talked all things, affiliate marketing, and honestly, fanatics is one of the top, if not the top brand and company to talk to you when it comes to affiliate marketing. So the fact that we were able to get fanatics on Rooted in Retail in the first place is a huge, like honor, huge honor, and I’m grateful.

And Wade shared so much information and so here’s the deal. If you are brand new to affiliate marketing, then you felt really overwhelmed listening to Wade. You might’ve felt like this doesn’t apply to me. This doesn’t make sense. I’m going to turn it off cause this doesn’t make sense for me and my time is very limited.

So I’m going to sit this one out. Others of you, if you’ve heard of affiliate marketing, if you’re doing any of affiliate marketing or if you’re like really looking for ways to drive your website traffic to Sell without creating a ton of content. And you’re just really hungry for what’s working now. Then you probably loved this episode.

In today’s after the show, I just want to do some basics as to why you might use affiliate marketing for your store, because there’s a lot of benefits and here’s the deal.

Affiliate marketing, for independent retailers, is the secret way you can build your business

Crystal Vilkaitis: I think affiliate marketing for independent retailers. Is almost like a super secret way for you to build your business.

And the thing is, is that affiliate marketing is not brand new. It didn’t just start. It’s been around for a long time. But we haven’t really talked about it as it relates to retail. I don’t see a lot of people out there, like not just we like here on the show, but people who are retail experts. You don’t See it a lot for the independants.

You definitely can see it for bigger boxes. But it’s not necessarily new. There is a lot of opportunity for you. It’s a different way of thinking. And April is all about EVOLVE cause we’re having our conference EVOLVE at the end of the month, which I’m so excited for. And because it’s EVOLVE month, this is a perfect time to air Wade’s episode because it’s a different way of thinking.

I have a session called dare to be different. Affiliate marketing is different. And so I want to break it down a little bit on some of the basics and help you understand why this might be something that you really should care about. Because the other thing I’ll tell you is that I predict that affiliate marketing is going to be a much bigger conversation this year.

I’ve already been seeing it on the channels that I’m on, on YouTube and TikToK and the research that I’m seeing more and more brands are doing affiliate marketing with more and more creators and influencers, they’re doing affiliate marketing. And also then with the launch of TikTok shops and allowing for creators to sell products from the TikTok shop.

That’s essentially affiliate marketing. And so the fact that such a big app like TikTok is now putting such a big emphasis on their shops and allowing creators to sell those products, it’s becoming a bigger conversation. And a bigger part of marketing.

One reason to do affiliate marketing is to extend the reach of your shop

Crystal Vilkaitis: And so I just want to say the reason that you would do any kind of affiliate marketing, there’s a lot of reasons, but one, it’s going to extend your reach because you can have people who are marketing for your store, whether it’s your brick and mortar or online.

An example of how you can leverage affiliate marketing when your brick-and-mortar also has an e-commerce shop

Crystal Vilkaitis: But I will tell you online, if you sell online and have an e commerce store, it’s easier to do affiliate marketing because it’s easier to track because you’re going to have links. You’re going to give your person or business or brand who is marketing for you, they’re your affiliate.

You’re going to give them specific links that they use to go to your website. And when people buy products from your website, they get a notification that happened and they’ll get a percentage of that sale, whatever percentage you guys have determined. And so I want you to think of it this way.

Let’s say you’re a toy store and you sell online and you also have a physical storefront. And one of your goals is to grow your sales. And so you start looking for influence, influential moms, moms that are on TIkTok or Instagram, or maybe Pinterest who are just creating amazing content.

Maybe they also have a podcast, like they’ve got an audience and they’re just creating really helpful, great content for other moms. And so you want them to know about your store, your mission, why you’re unique, why you’re special, why they’d want to work with you. And you want to find that influencer or that affiliate that you really resonate with like you like their vibe and their content and their audience. It could be your audience. And you start this relationship with them because the mom, she’s creating all this great content. The way that person makes a living, if she doesn’t have a job, is through typically selling other people’s products or paid ads, sponsorships, endorsements, things like that.

So let’s say that this mom just absolutely falls in love with your brand, the products you sell, maybe there’s a specific line. She’s Oh my God, every mom should be buying this line of toys they are so educational and helpful and blah, blah, blah. And so she’s not necessarily going to go and build an e commerce website and now sell and have her whole, her own line and her own brand.

And she’s selling online. You do already have that. You’ve saved the hassle. She doesn’t have to go through the time and money that it takes to do that. So she’s got this captive audience. You’ve got the website with the products, connect those two. She’s the content creator. Let her be creating the content to drive the traffic to your e com store.

It’s a win, win, win, win, win. Cause the customer is winning as well. And then you have those trackable links. And so that obviously is increasing. That’s extending your reach because that mom, let’s say that she’s You know, 50, 000 TikTok followers who are very engaged and passionate. She’s now. Saying your brand, sending people to your website, you’re now getting that additional exposure.

People are going to jump over and learn more about you and maybe start following you and go to your website. And then once they’re on your website, you can retarget them through ads to keep marketing to them. The other thing you can do and you absolutely should be doing is you should be getting that email address as well.

Where, when people go to your site at a certain time, a pop up can come, like maybe they’re leaving and you do an exit pop up or maybe after they’ve been on a couple of pages, you’ve got a pop up with an offer, join our list and get that email because then you can start marketing to them.

Now, imagine that mom has 10, 000 email addresses. And she sends a weekly newsletter of all the things moms need to know. And in there, she’s got a product highlight. It’d be pretty cool to get your product and your store and your link, not Amazon’s link, but your link for her to link to that and endorse your store and your product or the lines that you carry.

So now she’s doing email marketing for you, social media content. She could have a TikToK page where she’s got, I think I said 50,00 TikTok followers. If you have a shop, she can now plug into your shop, do lives. And help sell those products for you. So it’s just another way of thinking. It’s so low risk because you don’t pay up front.

You’re only paying if they start selling products for you. And I just think for certain retailers, this could be a massive opportunity to blow up your online sales.

How affiliate marketing would work for a brick-and-mortar shop

Crystal Vilkaitis: Now you could do some stuff locally with your brick and mortar, where let’s say you find a local influencer or you have a few local affiliates or ambassadors, whatever you want to call them.

And they come into your store and maybe they live stream from your store to their very captive audience. Maybe they’ve got, a hundred K Instagram followers and they want to come in and live stream and do an hour of live selling with you and really engage and have a lot of fun, and then they’re going to get a percentage of everything that was sold and that comes in, two days after the live or something like that.

You could also give these locals a special code that they have to use or picture they have to show at the register so you can at least track it back to them. That’s the only side where it’s a little bit more complicated with brick and mortar only is that you don’t have the trackable link and then you also limit how many affiliates you can have when it’s just locally based, right? You might not have as many people who are local, where if you’re e com and you’ve got a big range of people that you’re trying to connect with, who could be affiliates for you, then you’ve got a lot more, so it’s cost effective, like I just said, because it’s low risk as far as getting in.

And you’re not paying these people until they sell things. The trackability of it makes it great because maybe you have five affiliates and two, you just look and they’re not getting any clicks. They’re not getting any sales. Like you can see all that in these platforms. I’ll give you a couple of the platforms.

And Wade mentioned a few of them on our interview too. But then you could be like, Hey, you know, I’m not even seeing any kind of clicks. Have you been posting? Have you been emailing? Do you need anything from us? You want to be working these relationships. So you stay top of mind. And then you might even say we’ve got another affiliate and we just sent them a $3,000 commission check this month.

We’d love to do that for you too. Here’s what they’re doing. You should try it for your audience. And so I think that can really inspire people. Plus through affiliate marketing, it’s going to increase your credibility because you’ve got these influential people that are endorsing your brand and recommending you.

Tools to use to manage your affiliate marketing program

Crystal Vilkaitis: And so of course that’s going to add to our credit, our credibility. So in order to get those trackable links Wade on the podcast, he mentioned share a sale and impact. I think impact was his favorite one, but he mentioned those two. There’s also commission junction, post affiliate pro, TikToks got their own program there.

And then, if you go to the Shopify, if your website is on Shopify, if you go to the Shopify app store, just Google Shopify app store, and then put in affiliate marketing, you’ll find a couple of apps in there where they’ll help facilitate this and you’ll be able to log into your platform and see how many clicks and transactions and all of that.

You definitely need to have this technology so you can track your affiliates. And I would do more, I would have this technology where we’re tracking clicks to not just coupon code redemptions, like you can track that in store and online. But I want to know are they actually sending us traffic?

And then is that traffic converting? And if they sent us traffic, is that person also joining our email list? And then is that person buying from our emails? Like you could get focused in on a few different metrics that are meaningful to track the promotion of this, but like this could be a way better way for you to drive that traffic versus you trying to become the influencer on Tik Tok and you trying to build your own audience and you creating several Tik Toks every single day.

Maybe you batch them every week, but still you’re busting out like 30 tech talks and you’re doing what you got to do. And if you’re someone you’re like, I don’t want to do that. No way. Find somebody who’s already doing it, who loves it and see if they’ll sell your products. That’s as like basic as it can get with affiliate marketing.

Wade gave awesome tips on this episode. So go listen, because he’s got a lot of experience. He helps you avoid pitfalls and just get to how to get set up for success and finding the right affiliate. So I think you’re really going to love that. But this is such a great way to make you more competitive, to build your brand, to think differently, to drive more revenue, to increase your list, to make you just a better retailer when you find the right partners.

So I really encourage you, it’s EVOLVE Month. I really encourage you to think differently and start doing some Thinking and researching on if this could be a great opportunity for your store, because it might be all right. Let me just make sure I did everything with my notes. And again, if you’re in the Facebook group, say hello.

I always am checking what you’re saying about all these episodes that we do. Plus that’s where all the conversation is. So be sure to join the group. We also were on Instagram now. You can follow us. We are Rooted in Retail podcast. We’re brand new. So we got three followers right now. I think me and crystal media are one and two.

So come on over, follow us there. That’s where we’ll be sharing mini clips of the episode. And you can connect with us on Instagram as well.

Next week’s episode

Crystal Vilkaitis: Now, next week’s guest is Kareen Walsh. One of my dear friends. And I’m in a mastermind with her and she is one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever seen. Spoken with, she is so smart.

She drops so much wisdom. I think you’re going to want to actually listen to this episode a couple of times. I’d recommend spacing it out like this month, the next month. She also has a program called EVOLVE. So it’s EVOLVE month. We’ve got Kareen who will be sharing her whole program. Like she breaks down that acronym and really helps you scale your store. So you’re going to love her and everything that she has to share. So tune in and remember that I’m rooting for your success. Have a great weekend. Bye.