Quick Start Guide: Affiliate Marketing for Shopify Beginners

It is no secret that affiliate marketing for e-commerce stores can alter the course of the business and bring a big spike in sales numbers. Yet, for many affiliate marketing beginners, the path to adopting this strategy can feel unclear.

As an e-commerce owner, you can leverage strategic affiliate marketing strategies for Shopify to expand your reach and generate revenue.

In this blog, we provide you with a quick start to understanding affiliate marketing beginners and how to start your affiliate program in Shopify in a simple, budget-friendly way.

Introduction to Affiliate Marketing for Shopify

Affiliate marketing for Shopify is a quick and easy way to increase brand awareness and sales by employing affiliates or influencers who will promote products or services in exchange for a commission on each sale. Therefore creating and implementing affiliate marketing for beginners is very simple.

Affiliate marketing is a large umbrella that embraces referral marketing, influencer marketing, word-of-mouth marketing, etc. Therefore, an affiliate can be an influencer, blogger, or loyal customer who promotes your products to their audience.

For every successful sale they generate, they will earn a commission. In return, you can choose one of the various types of affiliate commission and offer it to them.

For Shopify beginners, affiliate marketing can be the most suitable marketing strategy as it involves low upfront costs and is easy to implement.

Why Shopify Merchants Should Embrace Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing for beginners will bring multiple benefits to a Shopify store. Thus Shopify merchants should embrace affiliate marketing to tap into advantages like the following:

1. Increase Revenue: With affiliates, you can get more people to visit your online store and thus make them buy your products.
2. Build Brand Awareness: Often, affiliate will have their own set of audiences. Thus affiliates can make the brand reach a larger crowd.
3. Reach the Right Audience: Your products can reach audiences genuinely interested in them.
4. Cost-Effective Marketing: You pay only for successful sales. Hence, affiliate marketing for beginners is user-friendly.
5. Build Credibility: Collaborating with trusted affiliates and influencers can create brand trust and affinity.

Comparing referral programs vs. affiliate marketing in Shopify: For beginners, affiliate marketing is the better choice as it increases brand reach across the globe and can support scaling. On the other hand, the referral program for Shopify can be supported only if the customer base is huge.

How to start affiliate marketing for beginners in Shopify​?

To start affiliate marketing for beginners in Shopify, you ought to identify and satisfy some prerequisites as discussed here.

Defining Affiliate Goals for Your Shopify Store

It is important to define what is the goal you are expecting to achieve through affiliate marketing for your Shopify store.

For instance, if your goal is brand reach, you can approach a variety of affiliates across niches in different channels. If your goal is to increase sales, you can set optimal affiliate commission and quality affiliates who can bring new customers.

By aligning affiliate marketing strategies with the required outcome, Shopify beginners using affiliate marketing can efficiently grow their stores while maintaining control over costs and ROI.

Choosing the Right Affiliate App

Choosing an affiliate tool in Shopify that suits your needs is one of the important decisions you should make before starting your marketing journey.

The best Shopify affiliate marketing app for beginners is Afflr. Using a Shopify app can not only automate affiliate marketing for beginners but also perform everything with accuracy. Installing Afflr is quick and you can integrate with your Shopify store and theme without any friction.

Here are the benefits of using Afflr

• Automated commission tracking.
• Customizable affiliate program templates.
• Real-time performance analytics.

Going forward, let’s see how to implement every step in a beginner’s affiliate marketing program using Afflr.

Creating and Launching Your Affiliate Program

Creating your first affiliate program can be easy and be over within minutes if you use Afflr.

3 steps to create a Shopify affiliate program with Afflr

1. Navigate to Afflr Dashboard > Programs > Add Program.
2. Select a pre-designed template or create a custom program.
3. Configure details like commission rates, approval methods, and payout options.

Affiliate Program Templates in Afflr

By introducing templates of affiliate programs based on what is widely used, Afflr offers one-click affiliate program creation for your Shopify store. This can be especially useful when launching first affiliate marketing with beginners.

Creating an Affiliate Program with Afflr

While you can edit the pre-designed affiliate programs any time you want, Afflr also provides provisions to create an affiliate program for beginners from scratch.

Following this, you can personalize your program right from name to commission structure to discounts. You will also have control over advanced features like auto-approving affiliates to the program, selecting payout methods, etc.

You can easily set up affiliate commissions in Shopify using a variety of flexible methods, including fixed-rate, percentage-based, tiered, recurring, and rule-based commissions.

Checkout this easy tutorial video to get you started in creating an affiliate marketing program for beginners with Afflr

Promoting and Growing Your Affiliate Program

The key step to growing your affiliate program is promoting it the right way. This will help you build a solid affiliate network.

Afflr offers you all the means to make promotion easy even for affiliate marketing beginners.

The following steps can get you started on promoting and growing your affiliate program with ease.

Leveraging Social Media and Email Campaigns

To promote your affiliate program across platforms like social media or emails, you can use an affiliate sign-up form created using Afflr.

This affiliate sign-up form will contain a description of the affiliate program like commission rates, fields to enter affiliate details like name, and email, and a clear CTA that encourages affiliate registration.

With a user-friendly interface by Afflr, an affiliate marketing beginner can effortlessly embed this signup form into their Shopify store. Then it is as simple as promoting this link.

Here is an example of an affiliate signup form

Recruiting Quality Affiliates

To recruit affiliates, you can employ various methods like

• Manual Recruitment: Reach out directly to influencers and bloggers.
• Sign-Up Forms: Embed affiliate registration forms on your store.
• Bulk Imports: Import lists of potential affiliate

You can simply go to Afflr dashboard -> Affiliates -> Add Affiliate to manually add affiliates to your affiliate program.

Affiliate program beginners can create a signup form by clicking the ‘Create’ button on the program page. Then you can embed the signup form to your Shopify store.

With Afflr, you can take full control over all types of affiliate recruitment to make sure you collaborate only with quality affiliates. Based on the need of your program, you can choose the way of affiliate recruitment.

Manual Affiliate Approval
You can personally check the affiliates who sign up by manually converting their status to Active.

Auto Affiliate Approval
On the other hand, if you are looking to grow your affiliate program, then you can auto-approve all affiliates to save you time and manual work.

Anytime, over the course of your affiliate marketing beginner’s journey, you can reject the affiliate based on the need.

As soon as an affiliate is approved, Afflr creates a Shopify affiliate link and code for them that is unique. You can further personalize this code on demand to suit the program.

Sharing Marketing Assets for Promotion

Providing the needed marketing materials to your affiliates is imperative because unless your affiliates understand your products, they will not be able to promote them authentically.

There are two ways through which you can make your marketing materials accessible for affiliates through Afflr.

(i) Affiliate Portal
An affiliate portal is a personalized dashboard for an affiliate where they can check their sales, commission, payout, etc. Afflr allots an exclusive affiliate portal that you can offer to all your affiliates. It is here where you can upload all the marketing materials needed for affiliate marketing for beginners.

(ii) Onboarding Email
Afflr lets you automatically send an onboarding email to your affiliates once they are approved. The contents of this email can be edited. So, you can attach a link to your marketing materials and send this to all your affiliates on automation.

Automating and Tracking Affiliate Performance

Automating affiliate marketing for beginners saves time, ensures accuracy, and simplifies management. With tools like Afflr, you can handle payouts, track referrals, and manage affiliates easily.

Tracking affiliate performance helps you understand which campaigns drive results. You can identify top-performing affiliates, and determine the best-selling products based on sales. By analyzing this data, you can determine inventory stocks, motivate affiliates with bonuses, and focus on strategies for the best ROI.

Using Analytics to Optimize ROI

Using Afflr you can track sales, commissions, and profitability, ensuring nothing goes to waste. Shopify merchants can use the “Afflr” tag for every sale made with Afflr and optimize campaigns based on what sells best with affiliate marketing in Shopify or which affiliate program yields the best results.

You can identify successful affiliates and offer them more rewards using Afflr by introducing tier-based commissions.

Managing Affiliate Payouts

Timely payouts build trust and integrity in your brand. Shopify affiliate tools like Afflr automate affiliate payouts via offline, PayPal, Tremendous (gift cards), store credits, or gift cards.

Afflr affiliate payout is as simple as just payment with a single click. All you have to do is go to Afflr dashboard -> Payout -> Click Pay beside the affiliate name.

In the Payout tab, enter payment and process payment easily.

With bulk payment options and detailed transaction records, Shopify merchants can ensure accurate and efficient payment processes. Automation not only saves time but also enhances affiliate satisfaction due to timeliness.

Best Practices for Running Affiliate Campaigns in Shopify

The best practices for running affiliate campaigns in Shopify that can help an affiliate marketing beginner maximize the outcome are:

1. Set Clear Expectations: Let your affiliates know about your commission rates, standards, and when and how you pay your affiliates. Come up with the basic terms of conflict resolution.
2. Build Relationships with Affiliates: Maintain communication with affiliates regarding sales, promotion material, affiliate payments, etc.
3. Continuously Optimize: Regularly review your affiliate program’s performance and make adjustments.
4. Experiment with Different Campaigns: Try new affiliate marketing strategies, like offering tier-based commission.

Overcoming Common Challenges in Affiliate Marketing

Marketing for beginners with affiliates has numerous challenges.
Here are common hurdles and how to overcome them:

1. Low Affiliate Engagement: Daily or weekly connect with your affiliates and always motivate them and ensure that they are promoting your affiliate products vigorously.
2. Fraudulent Activities: Use the Shopify affiliate marketing apps that have fraud detection features to protect your affiliate program.
3. Ineffective Promotions: Provide clear guidelines and high-quality marketing materials to your affiliates for a smooth promotion process.
4. Difficulty Recruiting Affiliates: To reach more affiliates and recruit them, create an affiliate signup form and promote them across channels.
5. Balancing Costs and ROI: The budget of the affiliate marketing for beginners should be computed based on the capability of outcome based on business scope. You can use this ROI calculator to find out more about the optimal budget for your program.

Scaling Your Shopify Affiliate Marketing Efforts

Once the affiliate marketing program of a beginner is in place, you can focus on adopting it to support scaling.

1. Expand Your Affiliate Network: Expand your affiliate network and recruit affiliates from diverse affiliate marketing niches to reach a broader audience.
2. Introduce Multi-Tier Programs: Provide commission affiliates for recruiting new affiliates.
3. Leverage Multi-Channel Affiliate Marketing Shopify: Use social media, email, and blog collaborations to diversify your reach.
4. Invest in Advanced Tools: Use Shopify apps with advanced referral tracking features for detailed analytics and A/B testing.

By implementing these steps, beginners using affiliate marketing can enhance their visibility, drive higher conversions, and grow their Shopify store value effortlessly.

Conclusion

Affiliate marketing for beginners can be cost-effective, and scalable, and help build your brand’s presence. By following this guide, you’ll be equipped to launch, promote, and scale your affiliate program for better results.

Success in affiliate marketing for beginners comes from consistent effort, clear goals, and adapting to challenges.

Further Reading

• Shopify Affiliate Integration Made Easy: Top 4 Tools To Consider
• Proven Strategies for Fueling Shopify Affiliate Growth in 2024
• Top 5 Shopify Affiliate Campaigns to Try
• 10 High-Earning Affiliate Marketing Niches in 2024