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Despite the current economic downturn, these end-of-year holidays offer eCommerce stores a significant chance to increase revenue and brand exposure.

ICSC’s 2021 Post-Holiday Survey shows that consumers spent an average of $1,011 this holiday season, with 226 million individuals buying gifts.

Now it’s time to ramp up your affiliate influencer marketing efforts and generate serious revenue in the last month of the busiest sales season.

Influencers with sizable followers can use their social media presence to interact with and reach out to potential customers for your business. Collaborating with them can increase brand recognition, provide more genuine ad content, and, most importantly, generate high-quality leads, clicks, or purchases.

Influencers can be a fantastic element of your affiliate marketing strategy.

In this post, we’ll get you cover everything you need to know about influencer affiliate marketing, including

• What influencer affiliate marketing is
• Why influencers should be part of your affiliate marketing strategy
• Ways to use affiliate marketing to recruit influencers fitting your band
• Get your brand ambassadors prepared for the holiday season

What is influencer affiliate marketing?

Influencer affiliate marketing is when an influencer promotes a product or service on their social media channels and earns a commission on any sales they generate. It’s a win-win situation for brands and influencers – the influencer gets paid to promote products they love, and the brand gets exposure to a new audience.

Usually, the brand works with influencers through an influencer/ affiliate marketing solution, which connects influencers with businesses and manages the tracking and payments.

Influencer affiliate marketing can be an effective way for businesses to reach new audiences, as influencers already have a built-in audience of followers who trust their recommendations.

Furthermore, influencer affiliate marketing can be less expensive than other forms of marketing, such as paid advertising. To succeed with influencer affiliate marketing, businesses should choose influencers who align with their brand and have engaged followers.

When working with influencers, brands should also provide clear guidelines for the influencers to follow and ensure that the influencers are compensated fairly for their work. When done correctly, influencer affiliate marketing can be a powerful tool for businesses.

The way influencer affiliate marketing works

The influencer shares a unique link to the product or service on their social media channels. The influencer earns a commission when someone clicks on the link and makes a purchase.

The amount of commission varies depending on the brand (percentage of sales, flat rate per order).

For example, let’s say an influencer has 100,000 followers on Instagram and posts about a new skincare product she’s trying. She includes a unique link in her post that her followers can use to buy the product. When 10,000 people click on the link and buy the product, which costs $10, the influencer has generated $100,000 in sales for the brand. In return, she would earn a commission of 5-10% on those sales, which would be $5,000 -$10,000.

Why should influencers be part of your affiliate marketing strategy?

The concept of influencer marketing and affiliate marketing often overlap. Both marketing tactics rely on brand ambassadors to sell your brand’s goods/ services. Because of the similarities, influencers can quickly join your affiliate marketing program and start promoting your business.

So why should influencers be a part of your affiliate marketing campaign?

Influencers offer outstanding value; they help to promote products and services to their engaged audiences. In return, businesses get access to a broader range of potential customers.

But what are the benefits of influencer affiliate marketing specifically? Here are just a few:

• Tap into influencers’ audiences
• Create more content for your marketing efforts
• Increase your brand awareness and reach
• Boost your sales and ROI with social proof

How to recruit influencers for your campaign?

Recruiting influencers for your campaign can be simple. Using the tips and techniques outlined here, you can quickly and easily find the right influencers for your next big marketing push.

One way is to use social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram to search for influencers who have a large following and are talking about topics related to your industry through hashtags or leverage powers filters and tools inside the platform.

You can also reach out to influencer networks and agencies that specialize in connecting businesses with influencers.

Finally, you can search for influencers who have written or written about topics related to your product or service and invite them to join your affiliate program.

Once you’ve found some potential influencers, the next step is to reach out and pitch them your campaign idea. Be sure to explain how their involvement will benefit them, and make it easy for them to say yes by providing all the necessary information and resources upfront. With a little effort, you can quickly recruit influencers who will help you take your marketing campaign to the next level.

Influencer marketing strategies for holiday

Now is the time to implement holiday influencer tactics. Building brand loyalty and reaching customers where they are this year, whether online or in-person, are the top priorities.

Include these tactics in your holiday influencer marketing strategy this year.

Offer creative holiday resources to your entire affiliate network

As the holiday season approaches, it’s time to start thinking about how to help affiliates best promote your products.

Getting your creative gadget ready and accessible for ambassadors. To ensure that your affiliates are successful and can start promoting right away on content creation, early preparation of your holiday creative is key for attaining the best affiliate campaign results possible.

Get your creative assets ready with:

• Content copy: help affiliates deliver the appropriate message to the audience 
• Holiday-spirit pictures: including banners, brand-holiday kits featuring the brand’s logos, color profiles, typography, slogan, brand images
• Video clips: useful for affiliates using Instagram/ Facebook reels, Twitter, TikTok, and Youtube. You should offer both horizontal and vertical videos

Build a holiday product landing page

Holiday sales events must include high-quality, optimized landing pages because this is a crucial point in the buying process for customers. Holiday-themed landing pages are popular with customers and may be a powerful tool for increasing conversions.

A converted landing page should include these elements:

Customers get discounts through affiliates/influencers’ referral

Consider carefully applying a discount code strategy to your affiliate program with your brand and marketing objectives.

Overusing might damage your brand’s reputation over time and lead to a reduced perceived value of your products. Why would anyone want to pay the total price for your items if they are always on sale?

However, the holiday season is the best time to run an affiliate promotional campaign. By partnering with an affiliate, you can offer your customers discounts and deals they won’t resist.

Run an influencer affiliate program to provide cost-saving possibilities. Share special discount codes with your influencer partners’ audiences and give them commissions for any sales they bring in.

The loyal supporters of your influencers will be eager to purchase from your brand at a discount, enabling your brand to increase sales. Your influencer partners will get money if they help your brand convert.

Consider a holiday giveaway

Use this opportunity to host an easy and effective way of increasing your brand’s follower count, and engagement, by running a holiday-themed giveaway on social media.

You can partner up with influencers for them to promote the sponsored prize pack giveaway that you have set rules such as following our account or leaving us to comment about it through the social post but only after having told their followers how they can enter! 

We also suggest collaborating so everyone has more chances at winning something awesome while building solid relationships along the journey too!

Measure affiliate’s results through links and coupon codes

Assigning coupon codes to your affiliates is not enough without monitoring their effectiveness. So you need to measure holiday influencer campaign results.

It would help if you saw how much traffic was directed to your store, how many purchases were made, how many new customers were acquired, and what feedback was received about the campaign will all help you evaluate how your partner(s) performed. What can you do to improve, and what can you learn? After the holiday campaign finished, how did sales change? Was it worthwhile to run it?

Monitoring the outcomes will also allow you to compare which partners fared the best if you conduct several comparable campaigns.

With Uppromote, the top-recommended Shopify affiliate solution, you can track every sale, click seamlessly, and quickly process payment, helping you better manage your ambassadors.