Episode Summary
In this episode of the 7 Figures and Beyond e-commerce marketing podcast, Greg Shuey hosts Noah Tucker, the founder and CEO of Social Snowball, to delve into affiliate marketing for e-commerce brands. The episode begins with a discussion on the evolution of affiliate marketing and its current integration with influencer marketing. Noah shares his journey from working on e-commerce brand operations to founding Social Snowball, driven by the desire to address the limitations of existing affiliate platforms. The conversation covers the benefits of affiliate marketing, practical steps for setting up a program, and strategies for optimizing affiliate efforts. Key insights include the importance of treating affiliates as valuable acquisition channels and leveraging modern tools to enhance program efficiency and effectiveness.
Key Takeaways
- Evolution of Affiliate Marketing: Affiliate marketing has shifted from traditional publishers and bloggers to include influencers, creators, and even customers as modern affiliates, adapting to changes in e-commerce and social media landscapes.
- Benefits of Affiliate Programs: Affiliate programs provide a diversified and owned acquisition channel, reducing dependency on unpredictable external factors like Meta’s CPM fluctuations, and allowing brands to control their customer acquisition costs.
- Setting Up an Affiliate Program: Start by turning customers into affiliates with automated, low-maintenance systems. Expand to influencer seeding programs, ensuring continuous engagement and incentivization to drive sales.
- Optimizing Affiliate Programs: Utilize integrations with email service providers to automate communication and inspiration for affiliates. Implement giveaways and frequent touchpoints to keep affiliates motivated and engaged.
- Handling Fraud and Ensuring Integrity: Use advanced tools like Social Snowball’s Safe Links to prevent coupon abuse and affiliate fraud, ensuring unique, single-use discount codes that maintain program integrity and profitability.
Episode Links
Greg Shuey LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-shuey/
Noah Tucker LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-tucker-%E2%98%83%EF%B8%8F-71a294154/
Social Snowball: https://socialsnowball.io/
Episode Transcript
Greg Shuey (00:01.278)
Hey everyone, welcome to episode 27 of the Seven Figures and Beyond podcast. I hope everyone is having an amazing day today. Here in Utah, it’s pretty gloomy. We’re getting some rain. It’s actually, what is it? About 46 degrees out right now. We’re almost to the end of May. I’m all bundled up. Like it’s completely ridiculous, but you know, it’s sunny somewhere. Is it sunny where you’re at, Noah?
Noah (00:27.694)
It actually is, which is crazy because the past five days have just been gloom on gloom on gloom, but I guess today’s the lucky day I actually sat outside and had breakfast in the sun with my shirt off, which felt really good because I’ve been sun deprived.
Greg Shuey (00:41.054)
That’s awesome. Getting the, what is that? Vitamin D? Is that what that is? The sun? There you go. Cool, cool. Well, today’s guest is Noah Tucker. He is the founder and CEO of Social Snowball. These guys are the number one platform to help with affiliate and referral programs for e -commerce brands. And today’s topic that we’re going to be diving into is, guess what? Affiliate marketing.
Noah (00:43.47)
Yes. Yeah.
Greg Shuey (01:11.07)
So this isn’t a topic that we’ve spent a whole lot of time about or time on yet. I’m really excited to unpack this and talk about some basics and advanced tactics that you can start to leverage today to grow your brand. I’m also really excited about it is because affiliate marketing is where I got my start about 20 years ago, like a really long, long time ago. It’s changed so much since then, but.
I’m excited to kind of learn and hear what’s new in affiliate marketing and I’m excited to hear how that can be applied to e -commerce brands. Because when I got my start, it was B2B Lead Gen. So that’s what I used affiliate marketing for. So this is going to be a little bit different. And I’m excited to dive in and learn. So Noah, thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to chat with us today.
Noah (01:59.054)
Happy to, yeah, it has changed a lot, a lot. I mean, even in the past five, 10 years, let alone 20 years, so I’m sure there’s a lot you could teach me about what it used to be like when I was five years old.
Greg Shuey (02:09.822)
I was gonna ask, you must have been super young. So five, five years, there you go. Cool, cool. So before we dive in, would you just take a few minutes, introduce yourself to our listeners and share a little bit about your personal story and how you’ve gotten to where you are today.
Noah (02:22.83)
Mm -hmm. Sure.
Noah (02:28.398)
Sure, yeah. So obviously right now I’m the founder of Social Snowball. That’s what my entire life revolves around. In a past life, I worked on the brand side of the e -commerce world. So I was an operator building some of my own stores. I did a lot of consulting work for brands, like a lot of paid ads, honestly, a lot of building ambassador and affiliate programs. So that’s kind of how it all started. And basically, you know, with these stores that I was working with,
building these affiliate and ambassador programs, I was just using whatever existing tools there were in the Shopify ecosystem to power them at the time. So there was plenty back then. And all of them just kind of felt, and I wasn’t really thinking too deep into this at the time, but they all felt very clunky. Everything was very manual. It just was like an outdated UI, things that are simple, like onboarding affiliates and sending payouts and anything like that was just like a huge hassle. And so I kind of just…
Greg Shuey (02:57.758)
Yeah.
Noah (03:19.278)
I mean, dealt with it for a while. And then after, you know, being in that world for five years, I was already kind of looking for what my next career move would be. And I had the idea to like really take all of the pain points that I hated from these more legacy affiliate platforms and solve them and build an affiliate platform meant for the more modern day e -commerce brand. And that’s kind of how, you know, that was like the light bulb moment to start Social Snowball. And that’s really, you know, what brought us to where we are today.
Greg Shuey (03:48.894)
That’s awesome. I love brands that are built out of problems and necessities. So in short, I mean, it was basically everything out here is trash. I’m gonna go build something that’s amazing. Would that sum it up pretty well?
Noah (04:02.542)
Yeah, I mean, at the time I thought they were trash in hindsight. I know that they weren’t necessarily trash. They were just built for when affiliate was a different, you know, meant something a little different than what it means today. Like I think, you know, I mean, less so even in the past 20 years, the past five, 10 years, the word affiliate has kind of changed in meaning. It used to be more just like.
Greg Shuey (04:09.022)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (04:14.846)
Got it. Okay.
Greg Shuey (04:21.694)
sure.
Noah (04:22.478)
publishers and listicles, review sites, bloggers, and it still is that today, but there’s also like a new type of affiliate that brands are partnering with. And I like to call these like modern affiliates, which are like influencers, creators, ambassadors, even a brand’s own customers can be affiliates. And so what I realized, you know, looking back is that those platforms that I was using, it wasn’t that they sucked. It’s just that they were built for publisher affiliates and blogger affiliates and listicle review site affiliates. And I was trying to partner with influencers, creators, and ambassadors as affiliates. And it wasn’t built for that.
Greg Shuey (04:50.11)
Got it.
Noah (04:51.63)
and the tools and user experience that you need to partner with a publisher is super different than that. You need to partner with an influencer. So at the time I thought they suck. Now I realize they were just built for a whole different world of affiliate that I wasn’t trying to work with at the time.
Greg Shuey (05:06.078)
Yeah, okay, cool. And out of curiosity, did you bootstrap this whole thing? Like how did you get started?
Noah (05:10.99)
We are Boots.
You’re a bootstrap. So I did have a little bit of money saved up from my e -commerce endeavors beforehand. So nothing crazy, but enough to just get like a super basic MVP off the ground. I’m not technical myself, so I had to, you know, work. I mean, that was a whole disaster in itself, but I worked with like an agency and a bunch of freelancers eventually got like a really, really basic MVP off the ground. And then once I started making money, I just aggressively reinvested every penny into growth. And it wasn’t like until we were a year and a half in that I had to start taking a salary for myself.
because literally my savings and crypto and stocks were all at zero. And I was like, I literally can’t buy food right now if I don’t take a salary. So that’s, I waited as long as possible.
Greg Shuey (05:45.118)
her.
Greg Shuey (05:54.174)
That’s cool. Good on you, man. That’s great. All right, you ready to dive in? Cool. So let’s start off by talking about the difference between influencer marketing and affiliate marketing. And it almost sounds like you’ve kind of blended the two. So I think a lot of people, when they hear those two words, they’re like, they think two very, very different things. And a lot of people might get them confused. So could you spend some time there?
Noah (05:59.214)
Let’s do it.
Noah (06:08.174)
Yeah.
Noah (06:11.598)
Yeah.
Noah (06:17.294)
Yeah.
Noah (06:22.222)
Absolutely. So back when I was using those legacy affiliate platforms, I think influencer marketing also was very different than what it is today. And if you look at the influencer marketing platforms that came around that era, they all are reflecting this and like they, you know, the influencer partnerships at the time were focused around generating content, getting impressions, EMV, like just really brand awareness and not really measuring.
Greg Shuey (06:31.262)
Sure.
Noah (06:48.686)
new customer revenue from influencers. Like that, that was the focus at the time. And the reason I think that it was the focus is because at the time Metta was a really cheap and scalable and reliable and consistent acquisition channel. Not to say that it’s not a scalable acquisition channel today, but it just changed a lot and it’s more expensive and it’s less reliable and there’s more external factors and things can change and it could totally ruin your business if you’re too dependent on it. So the shift that’s happened with influencer marketing is that it’s become.
more customer acquisition focused. When a brand partners with an influencer, they care less about how many impressions you got and they care more about how much new incremental revenue was generated from the partnership. And so, you know, with the shift of that affiliate marketing has had influencer marketing has made a similar shift where they kind of have like merged together to an extent because now with influencer partnerships is the brand’s main focus is new customer acquisition and attributable revenue.
They need an attribution system for that, which is affiliate marketing. So that’s kind of the intersection of where, of where they’ve met. And social snowball is kind of like the platform in that intersection.
Greg Shuey (07:58.654)
I love that. Yeah. I think that, you know, a lot of brands for lack of a better word have gotten fed up with influencers, right? Who have all these, they tout all of these big numbers and impressions. And it’s like, what are you doing for me? Like, what are you actually adding to my business? So, you know, I, I’m, I’m happy to see something happening there to help with the attribution side of that.
Noah (08:23.022)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (08:25.342)
And it’s holding these influencers more accountable for the work that they’re doing, right? And I think there’s a lot of upside there too. Like the good ones can make a lot more than, you know, give me $1 ,000 to do a post and a reel and to give you a shout out on my Instagram. I think there’s a lot more upside there as well. So that’s awesome.
Noah (08:36.558)
Mm -hmm.
Noah (08:42.67)
Hmm.
Noah (08:46.702)
Yeah, no, totally agree. And I mean, it’s more than just, you know, my wild idea and this platform that we built, like this is what brands care about now. They’re searching for new acquisition channels. And even if it’s just like 10 % or, you know, 15, 20 % of your new customer acquisition is coming from a channel that’s not meta, whether that’s influencer or something else, like that’s really powerful on a day where metas, CPMs go crazy. And you don’t know why, at least you can kind of hedge that with like 20 % of new customers coming from a channel that’s unrelated.
So I think that’s like the shift happening across the entire e -commerce landscape and influencer is affected very heavily.
Greg Shuey (09:16.286)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (09:22.846)
For sure. Cool. Awesome. So for those who are new to all of this, like what would you say the key benefits are to building and running an affiliate marketing program?
Noah (09:36.014)
So one is what we just touched on, that you can diversify your customer acquisition and it’s just a safe thing to do, just like you would diversify your portfolio investments so that if one thing goes to shit, it doesn’t ruin your entire net worth. This is similar and with Influencer and Affiliate, what’s cool about it is it’s an owned acquisition channel. So unlike Meta and Google and really any other paid ads channel where it’s an external third party,
Acquisition channel you own your influencer relationships. You own your list of affiliates. You own that relationship Nobody could take that away from you No platform to take that away from you Maybe Instagram could change something or tick tock or change something but you still own that relationship with that influencer or you know any type of affiliate and That’s just really I mean, it’s the same thing. We always talk with retention channels, right? Like your email and SMS list is an owned retention like it’s an owned channel. You could have an owned
acquisition channel too. It’s not just a retention thing and influencer affiliate ambassador partnerships are a channel that you own, which is incredibly powerful. So it’s just nice. It’s comforting as a business owner to know that some of your new customer acquisition can come from something that’s less affected by external factors that you have no control over. So that’s one. And then two, it’s just like overall decreasing acquisition costs. Like what you spend to acquire a customer through an influencer affiliate.
It’s like you could choose what that is, right? Either you’re going to get sales or you don’t, but you choose the CPA. It’s like manual, it’s like manual bidding. Like you set a commission for let’s say $10 per referred order from an ambassador or affiliate. And either people are going to be motivated to acquire you customers at that price or they’re not, but you have control over that. So it’s not like one day you open up Facebook and you’re like, what, how did our CPAs double? That’s not going to happen with the affiliate. So it’s, I would say those are like the two, the two biggest benefits, honestly.
Greg Shuey (11:23.678)
That’s awesome. I’ve never thought about this as an owned channel. I love that you bring that up, right? I mean, even if TikTok goes away at the end of the year, right? If the US shuts them down, these influencers have an audience and they’re probably gonna follow them to the next thing, right? And so that’s a fascinating angle and thought. I love that. That is perfect. So let’s talk now about kind of the setup.
Noah (11:39.278)
Yes. Yes.
Greg Shuey (11:53.47)
So when a brand decides, I’m gonna do this and I need to set this up, what are the essential steps or things that they need to be thinking about to make sure that this goes smooth and that they have the best chance of success?
Noah (11:57.454)
Mm -hmm.
Noah (12:03.534)
Yeah.
Sure.
Yeah, well, I think there’s, you know, within the umbrella of like a modern affiliate we’re talking, there’s multiple programs you could set up and some of them are easier than others, right? So like the lowest hanging fruit to start with would be turning customers into affiliates. And this is something that we help a lot of brands do where essentially instead of just giving your customers like a referral program where it’s like, you could get a coupon if you enter your friend’s email address, like it’s super outdated. Nobody really uses that. It never generates more than like 1 % of a brand’s GMV.
You could actually treat your customers as affiliates and let them become an actual acquisition channel for you. And what I mean by that is actually giving them links and codes that they could share, being able to reward them in cash instead of just a coupon so that if they’re not planning their next purchase, they still have an incentive to refer a friend. And if they’ve referred three friends, they still have a…
an incentive to refer a fourth because it’s not like they just have a bunch of coupons saving an account that like lose value the more referrals they make. So if you treat them as affiliates and give them an incentive structure that’s aligned with the goal of customer acquisition, you can actually get a lot of referrals out of your customers. And people don’t realize this like beyond just paying them in cash, you could also have like tiers and bonuses. Like after they refer five friends, you send them a gift. When they refer 20 friends, you give them a higher commission. When they refer 50 friends, you give them a super high value gift. Things like this keep them motivated. And
Greg Shuey (12:59.23)
Yeah.
Noah (13:25.728)
you could actually, instead of just having your customers enter one email address for their friend that they’re never going to see, because who even checks their email these days? You could actually have your customers refer friends at scale and make that a really meaningful channel. And the cool thing about that is it’s very low -hanging fruit in the sense that it’s very set in for get it. So there’s some steps you need to take to set it up, which would be putting a widget on the thank you page that says, here’s your link to share with friends, integrating with Klaviyo or whatever email tool you’re using so that you could send the link.
Greg Shuey (13:38.878)
Interesting.
Noah (13:55.632)
links and codes post purchase. You know, just like light setup like that. But once it’s done, it kind of just runs on its own. So it’s not as high maintenance as some of the other programs. So if brands just want to like dip their toes, I would recommend that.
The second thing would be more of a proper influencer seeding program where you’re sending out gifts to influencers at scale and then enrolling them in your affiliate program so that they’re incentivized to not only post but actually generate sales along with the post. That one is a little bit more work because you have to find the influencers and reach out to them and there’s a little bit of more management that goes into it, but it could be extremely powerful as well.
Greg Shuey (14:35.134)
Got it, cool. Let’s talk about like brand size. Like are affiliate programs good for companies that are just starting out that don’t have a customer list or are they better for brands that once they’ve got some traction, you can kind of lay this on top of maybe help us understand that a little bit.
Noah (14:53.902)
I think like with influencer seating, it’d be, it’s something you should do at every stage. Influencer seating is a great way to just get your product into the right hands of influencers, get them posting, build some hype, also be driving sales at the same time, which is, you know, what’s really powerful, of course. That’s valuable when you’re a new brand starting out and it’ll just help your other efforts. Like even if you’re still relying really heavily on paid in the beginning, just having your product in the hands of influencers and people start seeing it everywhere, like it’s only going to boost everything. So that’s why I recommend.
Greg Shuey (15:11.422)
Mm -hmm.
Noah (15:23.31)
that for if you’re starting out or if you’ve been around forever, like you should be seeding always. Then turning customers into affiliates, you should probably wait until you have enough customers where that’s gonna be meaningful. So I don’t know what the magic number is, maybe once you’re getting like 100 customers a month or something like that, at that point, you should probably be creating them affiliate links.
Greg Shuey (15:43.742)
Got it, cool. Do you open that up to all of your customers or do you have a way to be able to identify which customers have the most social following and the best opportunity?
Noah (15:54.894)
We open it up to everyone. I mean, theoretically, the worst it could do is not generate a lot of new customers. But even if it’s even if it’s just running and it generates you five new customers a month or something, like obviously that’s not great. Still, you know, again, you’re only paying out commission if someone refers a friend successfully. So there’s like, it’s kind of like a risk free channel in that sense. So there’s no reason not to do it. Even when you’re a super small brand. The only reason I say that is because like it’s better to wait a little bit is because if you’re a super small brand,
Greg Shuey (16:01.726)
Fair enough, yeah.
Greg Shuey (16:07.518)
cares I guess. Yeah.
Noah (16:24.848)
is probably things you could spend the time on that you would spend to launch that post purchase program that would have a higher ROI in a shorter period of time.
Greg Shuey (16:35.294)
Got it, cool. I love that you bring up time, right? Because you’re spending time or you’re spending money for someone to manage this. And so you’ve got to figure out how to deploy that to where you’re going to get the best return. Perfect. Cool. So once we’re up and going, we’ve got an affiliate program going, we’ve got it launched. Can you share some tips and some tricks on how to optimize an affiliate program for the best results?
Noah (16:41.166)
Right.
Noah (16:46.19)
Mm -hmm.
Noah (17:02.03)
Yeah, definitely. So there’s a few things you can do that go a long way. So one, you want to integrate with your ESP, like Klaviyo or whatever you’re using to send emails, so that you can have frequent points of contact with the influencers or any type of affiliate on autopilot. You don’t want to have to go in every week. It takes too much time. So you could set up flows that trigger when someone joins a program or when they refer X amount of sales, those kinds of things. And then it could be a welcome package explaining how the program works and showing types of content that have worked in the past.
Greg Shuey (17:21.982)
Interesting.
Noah (17:29.134)
It could be inspirational content showcasing an affiliate that made a lot of money last month, and it’ll just kind of send to everyone to inspire them to post more. It could explain how the tiers work so that when they know when they were hit 10 referrals, they unlock this. When they hit 50 referrals, they unlock this. Just things to kind of keep them motivated. You definitely want to enroll them in some sort of sequence with emails that is just going to educate, inspire, and remind them about the program. That’d be one.
Another thing is giveaways. So you could have like just another thing to keep affiliates engaged because there’s what’s one thing if an influencer post wants or a customer post wants and then forgets you want them to continue posting and like continue driving sales month over month. So something that brands do is like they’ll enter everyone who refers over X amount of sales per month in a giveaway. So every month it’ll reset and then you have to hit let’s say three referrals or five referrals or whatever. And then if you hit that.
Greg Shuey (18:06.046)
Right.
Noah (18:20.174)
Everyone who hits that within that month gets entered in a giveaway to win a super high value product or whatever your customers are going to care, or your affiliates in this case, are going to care about.
Other things like, I mean, with your customer affiliates in particular, you have to leverage every touch point you have at that customer to remind them about the referral program. If you want to maximize engagement. So something I’ve seen brands do really well is implement a macro with their customer service team to basically remind customers about the referral program after the end of every positive customer interaction. So if a customer writes in and they’re like, where’s my order and the customer service agent is like, you know, here it is, whatever it gets all resolved before they close that conversation, they can be like, Hey, by the way, here’s the.
Greg Shuey (18:39.646)
Hmm.
Noah (18:59.984)
affiliate code we already created for you, greg123. Just a reminder, every time you share this and a friend buys, we’ll send you $10. And if you have 300 customer service tickets a day, that’s 300 additional touch points where a customer is happy interacting with your brand and you could plug the referral program. And little things like that definitely make a difference.
Greg Shuey (19:03.39)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (19:17.918)
Interesting. Okay. Do you see a lot of brands work out of that call to action into their new customer workflows or are they kind of standalone campaigns that are going out and educating and trying to get them to join?
Noah (19:33.71)
It’s often within their new customer workflows. So for their post -purchase email, so you can, for example, you can add a universal content block in Klaviyo that they could add to the footer of every email that’s like, by the way, here’s your referral code already, or your link, whatever, already generated. Every time you share it, we’ll send you $10. And that could just be in every post -purchase email. There’s no additional steps for them that need to fill out a form or anything. Their link is already created. They could copy it, paste it, share it across socials, whatever they want right away.
And then usually there’s dedicated emails as well. So maybe one or two post purchase and then definitely a bunch more after they receive the product and have been using the product or consuming the product. You definitely want to push for referrals pretty hard at that point. So you’ll probably do some dedicated emails that are just like, again, these inspirational content showing how much another affiliate is earned or just explaining more how the program works and that kind of stuff.
Greg Shuey (20:22.846)
That’s very cool. Awesome. Do you have any like really cool case studies or examples that you could share with us?
Noah (20:32.398)
Sure. One that comes to mind that’s done a few of these strategies we talked about is a company called The Pod Company. It’s like a cold plunge company. And I think they sell like saunas and other like wellness products like that as well. Yes, exactly. So as you can imagine, a very active community built around that brand who loves talking about cold plunging and sharing. So their customer and influencer affiliate programs do incredibly well.
Greg Shuey (20:43.966)
Got it. All the rage, the cold plungers. Yep.
Noah (21:00.43)
they have their customer service team plugging the program with every, at the end of every customer conversation. I think they created a macro and gorgeous and all their CS reps are trained on how to use it and when to use it. And that does really well. and they’re doing a giveaway. So for them, it’s a really high ticket product. So every time someone gets one referral within a one month period, they get entered into the giveaway to win, I think a free sauna or something. So it’s just, you know, it’s just like, if they could get 50 people, I mean, they definitely get way more than that, but if they get 50 people.
Greg Shuey (21:24.35)
cool.
Noah (21:30.19)
to refer one friend each month and then again the next month and then again the next month because they know they get entered in that giveaway. I mean, just the referrals per customer or per whatever affiliate, maybe this is for influencers too, can just skyrocket from one to potentially 10 plus. It just makes a huge difference. There you go. There we go.
Greg Shuey (21:47.806)
It snowballs. It snowballs. Is that word familiar to you?
Noah (21:55.586)
Exactly.
Greg Shuey (21:59.582)
Cool, that’s a great example. Do you have any others?
Noah (22:03.918)
Yeah, I mean, there’s some brands who have implemented some really interesting strategies. Another one that’s pretty cool is Tabs Chocolate. It’s like this aphrodisiac chocolate, literally like sex chocolate. Super interesting product, but I think they have trouble advertising on a lot of social platforms because of their category. And so they set up a really interesting program where they would have creators, instead of sharing content for the brand on their own social channels, they would make new social pages.
Greg Shuey (22:15.006)
Huh.
Greg Shuey (22:20.51)
Sure.
Noah (22:32.814)
that are all branded as Tabs Chocolate. So it wouldn’t be like Tabs underscore chocolate. It wouldn’t be like Tabs chocolate underscore. If you go on TikTok and search Tabs Chocolate and go to the users tab, you’ll see thousands, literally thousands. Yeah.
Greg Shuey (22:38.686)
Huh.
Greg Shuey (22:43.358)
I’ve seen brands do that where they have so many and I’ve never known why. That makes sense.
Noah (22:49.294)
Yeah. So all of those are individual creators as affiliates. So they’ll all have like an affiliate link in their bio and they’ll create a ton of content for the brand branded like as the brand essentially. And they’ll post it across short form platforms, not just Tik Tok, but also Instagram for reels and YouTube for shorts. And if they, you know, post, if you have 50 creators that create a page on real, you know, Instagram, YouTube and Tik Tok, that’s a 450.
and they each post three times per day. That’s 450 posts a day. If you repurpose it across all day, it’s just blitz. Yeah. I just take over. And like, if you have 450 pieces of pieces of content per day going out and just run from platforms, some is going to go viral. Does it will? So yeah, that’s a really interesting one. I’ve seen.
Greg Shuey (23:21.022)
Dang, it is blitz. It’s just a big blitz. Huh.
Greg Shuey (23:35.326)
Fascinating. How does your technology work with like TikTok shops? Because I know that’s starting to blow up, right? And people are working with collaborators and compensating them as like an affiliate through TikTok shops. Does your platform integrate with TikTok?
Noah (23:44.126)
yeah.
Noah (23:52.11)
It doesn’t as of now, I would say TikTok shop is kind of more like, cause TikTok shop is almost like Amazon in the sense that it’s like a third party channel where you don’t get any of the customer data. So although TikTok shop works really well for a lot of brands at least.
Greg Shuey (24:02.014)
Got it. Okay.
Noah (24:06.67)
It’s, it’s, you don’t want to, again, it’s like, kind of, you don’t want to put too many eggs in that basket because if anything happens to tick tock or, you know, even if it doesn’t, like you’re not getting the customer data, it’s not really true DTC. It’s like a separate sales channel the same way Amazon. So I would just say like, if tick tock top works for your brand, run it up as much as you can, but don’t take away a affiliate and influencer from your DTC because that’s still like, you still need to.
Greg Shuey (24:19.23)
Right.
Greg Shuey (24:26.75)
Yep.
Noah (24:32.398)
Optimizer D2C channel as well at the same time. Like you should be running both realistically.
Greg Shuey (24:37.694)
Got it, cool. All right, kind of as we’re wrapping up here, the last two questions that I like to ask all of our guests is, so the first one is we’re about halfway through the year. So what predictions do you have as we kind of end the year and then go into 2025 when it comes to affiliate marketing?
Noah (24:58.83)
Good question. Really good question. Well, I see the trend that started to happen continuing and that trend is like, whoever can be an affiliate is becoming more and more democratized to the point where anyone can be an affiliate. So it started as just like professional affiliates that are like publishers and bloggers and review sites. Then it became like really big influencers. Then it’s like micro influencers. Then it’s like ambassadors. It’s like now customers. Realistically, anyone can be an affiliate.
Greg Shuey (25:13.63)
interesting.
Noah (25:24.622)
And it’s not just, you know, me and social snowball that support that theory. Like even with TikTok shop, like you were talking about, like you only need to have now a thousand followers to be able to be an affiliate for TikTok shop for any brand on there. So that’s like, it’s, it’s only moving more and more in that direction. And whether it’s TikTok shop or a DTC affiliate program or whatever affiliate program you’re running, anyone could be an affiliate as long as they could drive sales. And I think the gatekeeping.
of affiliate programs is going to be less and less and less. And I think, you know, with that, there’s going to be maybe new types of fraud that come up and then there’s going to be new technology that can prevent it. Cause you know, so many people are going to be have access to become affiliates, which is like, you know, kind of already happening now. So I see that trend definitely continuing throughout the year.
Greg Shuey (25:56.83)
Mmm.
Greg Shuey (26:07.582)
Fascinating, I know that when I was doing B2B lead gen affiliate stuff, affiliate fraud was humongous. Are you seeing a lot of fraud in the D2C space right now?
Noah (26:17.933)
I’d say the biggest type of fraud that happens, which is actually something that we have a really cool solution for, but the biggest type of fraud across the industry that happens is coupon abuse, like codes getting on coupon sites or like honey getting leaked. And then not only are you giving out discounts that weren’t meant for those customers, but then you’re paying a commission to the affiliate when it’s like they didn’t even drive the sale. So that like can destroy your margins. And so.
Greg Shuey (26:40.83)
Interest
Noah (26:42.286)
Well, we’ve built for that is basically a tool called safe links, which is like a coupon code replacement. So affiliates would share this link instead of a code. And it looks just like a normal affiliate link. You could like customize and throw in it like any affiliate link, but how it works is every time a shopper clicks on that link and gets taken to your storefront in real time, a unique single use discount code will be generated from Shopify and given to the customer to use during their shopping session. So if an influencer posts, like use my link for a discount or click here to get a discount and 10 people click on the link.
Greg Shuey (26:52.766)
Hmm.
Noah (27:11.438)
Everyone will get the same discount, but they’ll all be unique codes and they’ll all be single use code. So if any of those codes were to get scraped by honey or leaked to a coupon site, it doesn’t matter because they’re all single use codes and the influencer or affiliate can still share a discount with their audience at scale without having to worry about any attribution discrepancies from leak. so that’s, I mean, I mean, obviously safe links is great for the brands using social snowball for other brands. Like I have seen.
Greg Shuey (27:15.23)
Huh.
Noah (27:35.694)
code leaks be a reason where they’re just like, I’m not even going to bother running an affiliate program, especially brands that are like high eight, low nine figures. Like it’s when a code leaks and it’s an affiliate code and you don’t catch it and you’re paying commissions, like you can lose six figures. Like it could be a serious loss. So it matters, you know.
Greg Shuey (27:37.438)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (27:49.982)
my gosh, wow. Well, that’s awesome that you provided that solution. That in and of itself should pay dividends for a long, long, long time. So that’s awesome. In terms of kind of wrapping up, what other final words of wisdom do you have for anyone who’s thinking about doing affiliate or is actively engaged in affiliate marketing?
Noah (28:14.19)
Yeah, I mean, I would just say like, there’s a lot of little incremental things you could do that can make a big difference. So if you’re not doing anything, something as simple as turning customers into affiliates could add 10 % of GMB. Like I’ve seen that happen over and over again with brands, especially the ones that have like a passionate customer base or like a, you know, like a cold, cold ones or something like that. if you are running an affiliate program already, little things that we talked about, like the email sequences, the giveaways, training your CS team, like those can.
If you’re, let’s say you’re already generating 10 % of GMB from affiliates, that could change it to maybe 15. And like that makes a huge difference. And eventually when you have 15, 20, 30 % of GMB coming from an acquisition channel, that’s something you own, that’s not meta. Your business is just in a much safer place than it’s ever been before. So those little tweaks can really go a long way.
Greg Shuey (29:01.534)
That’s awesome. So in short, I’m, I’m, well, I’m not even gonna summarize. I’m just gonna say, just do it, right? There’s nothing to lose. Just do it. Would you agree?
Noah (29:07.694)
Ha ha.
Yeah, 100%. 100%.
Greg Shuey (29:14.142)
Awesome. Cool, man. Well, thank you. Thank you for taking time out of your day. I know you’re traveling. That was a really, really awesome discussion.
Noah (29:24.558)
Yeah, thank you for having me.
Greg is the founder and CEO of Stryde and a seasoned digital marketer who has worked with thousands of businesses, large and small, to generate more revenue via online marketing strategy and execution. Greg has written hundreds of blog posts as well as spoken at many events about online marketing strategy. You can follow Greg on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.
