Affiliate & Referral Growth for Shopify Brands: Social Snowball

Noah Tucker

The easiest strategy, for sure, to turn customers into affiliates is: set it and forget it.

Chase Clymer

Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game. 

On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating  real results. 

I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.

Let's get on with the show. 

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. 

Today, I'm welcoming the show Noah Tucker. He is the founder of Social Snowball. Noah, welcome to the show. 

Noah Tucker

Thank you for having me, Chase. I'm excited. 

Chase Clymer

Yes, absolutely. Second time's the charm. We had some unfortunate technical errors in the last episode. It was going to be 10 times worse than this one because we're gonna make this one way good. We're gonna go in deep. 

So for the listeners that aren't aware of Social Snowball, at the top, can you let them know what your product is, what you guys are doing for Shopify merchants? 

Noah Tucker

Absolutely. Yeah. So the highest level overview, how I like to explain it, is that we are an affiliate and referral platform for Ecommerce brands. 

So if, as a brand, you want to partner with influencers or turn your customers into ambassadors, we provide the software to track sales, give everyone coded links, give them a dashboard so they can see their sales and payouts, actually create the commission payouts and let you send the commission payouts, make sure codes are leaked to coupon sites, do all the product seeding and gifting, discover new influencers. 

Just all the management that goes into building out these types of programs. 

Chase Clymer

That's amazing. Now take me back in time. 

It's interesting to chat with a non-technical founder about building this SaaS app. So what was going on in your life when you realized there was a problem that you decided to solve?

Noah Tucker

For about 5 years before I started building Social Snowball, I was on the brand side of the Ecommerce world. So mostly paid ads and consulting. 

But with any brand I would work with or even when I was building some of my own stores, I would always build an affiliate program. And so having that experience, I was using all of the existing tech that existed within the Shopify ecosystem to power these affiliate programs. 

And at the time, I was just thinking that, ‘Wow, these are all super clunky and manual.” Things that should be automated are not automated and a lot of the functionality that I wish existed did not exist. So I was super frustrated with the existing tools. 

And at the time, I just thought, “Wow, these tools all suck.” In hindsight, now looking back, I realized that the tools didn't suck. They were just built for a different type of affiliate than what I was trying to partner with. 

And so if you were to zoom back like 10 years ago and say the word affiliate to anyone in the Ecommerce space, they would think of things like publishers, listicles, review sites, bloggers, media buyers.

That's what the word affiliate used to mean. And although those types of affiliates are still important today, it's undeniable to acknowledge that there's also a new type of affiliate that brands partner with. And I call these the modern affiliates, which are influencers, creators, and even a brand's own customers can be affiliates. 

So when I was on the brand side, I was trying to partner with these modern affiliates, but I was using technology platforms that were just built for these legacy affiliates. And what I learned is there were no affiliate platforms built for this new type of affiliate. So that's essentially how the idea for Social Snowball started. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. 

I think it's definitely worth pointing out that when you're talking about influencer technology and influencer tracking stuff, I remember back when we did a lot of this stuff at the agency, people were trying to take these old school affiliate softwares and make them work with this new school influencer traffic. 

And a lot of those old school softwares are based on smart URL links, right? 

Noah Tucker

Yeah, I mean, beyond just attribution. I mean, attribution would be a big piece of it, but I would say like everything that we do at Social Snowball looks and feels super different from the user experience and functionality you'd find in these legacy platforms. 

So attribution would be a piece of that, but also just like affiliate onboarding, payouts, gifting, discovery. Everything kind of had to be rethought from the ground up to power these programs with the new, more modern affiliate in mind instead of these publishers or bloggers. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. 

Now let's talk about a modern, typical Shopify merchant. Let's say I'm doing a million dollars a year. I sell apparel. Okay?

Noah Tucker

Sure.

Chase Clymer

I haven't really thought about referral, affiliate, influencer, whatever. What should I be thinking about? Is it a good time for me to start looking into this as a growth channel?

What are some questions I should be asking myself or things I should be exploring within my business? 

Noah Tucker

For sure. I'd say at that stage, it's definitely the time to implement this channel. There's two different strategies that would come to mind as the lower hanging fruit but pretty significant lift. As far as results, that I think would be a good fit. 

One would be turning customers into affiliates. If you're already doing a million or even less of annual revenue, you obviously have customers coming through the door. You want to capture referral value out of them. 

If customers are loving your product, they're probably already sharing with friends. So now we can create a program that puts an incentive in place to pour fuel on that fire. And also, that incentive will create attribution for the existing referral. So we just can know who are our super fans, who's driving the most referrals. 

Turning customers into affiliates is not the same as referring to a friend program, because this is not like a loyalty program where the incentives are just coupons or points. We can actually turn customers into affiliates and reward them with cash and make that whole cash redemption experience super simple and frictionless. 

Basically, the user experience for how this looks like is whenever a new customer purchases on your store, we're able to take their order data from Shopify checkout and use it to automatically create them an affiliate account, automatically generate them a custom tracking link or discount code with their name in it, and then give all of that information to them natively on the Thank You page as soon as they complete their purchase.

So without any signup form or without any pop-ups or click here to get your code or any of that, all their affiliate info and tracking info is generated and given to them right on the thank you page. 

And then of course, we'd have follow-up touch points in the post-purchase journey through email and SMS to send them reminders and more information about the program. 

But if you're already doing a million in GMV, that's definitely a super easy program to build and launch and just capture more customer acquisition and referral value from your existing audience and your existing customer base.

So yeah, that would probably be the first one I would do. 

And then I think influencer partnerships would be the second. Influencer partnerships take a little bit more work because you do have to find and reach out to influencers, which we do help you find and reach out to them at Social Snowball. 

But there's obviously just a little bit of work that goes into maintaining that. But if you could find brand fit influencers that are posting…To use your example, a fashion brand that is posting about their wardrobe or their outfit, and you could find relevant ones at scale. Those can be really powerful affiliates for you too. 

So what we usually have brands do is a seeding campaign where they'll source a bunch of influencers for them that are relevant to their brand. And then they'll do a seeding campaign where they'll basically gift those influencers their product. And then those influencers will film content with the product, post about it with their affiliate links and codes. 

And then obviously, retracting the sales and rewarding those affiliates for the referrals they're driving. 

Chase Clymer

That's amazing. Now, if I was to dive deep into this world of turning customers into affiliates. I'm going to start reaching out to these influencers and helping them grow. 

Do you have any success stories that are going to light a fire under my ass? 

Noah Tucker

Yeah, absolutely. There are so many different brands that have been crushing with seeding. I'd say one brand in particular that did things a bit unique, that I think is a really cool example is Tabs Chocolate.

They created a system where instead of gifting to influencers and the influencers creating content on their own pages, they had every creator make a new page that was branded as Tabs Chocolate. 

And so every creator, if you search Tabs Chocolate on TikTok or Instagram, you can see there's literally thousands of accounts that are called some variation of Tabs Chocolate, like, tabs_chocolate or tabs.chocolate. 

And they gifted all of these creators the product and the creators would film content with the product and post it on those branded pages all across TikTok, all across Instagram with Reels, and YouTube with Shorts. 

That generated crazy results for them. That essentially blew up the brand. I think that was a cool example just because it's a more unique approach instead of just relying on the influencer's audience. 

These influencers are creating brand new pages, but it still worked really well for them. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah, that's amazing. 

Is there anything I didn't ask you about today that you think would resonate with our audience?

Noah Tucker

No, I think those are the basics, honestly. If a brand is looking to implement affiliate and referral, and this is something new for them, the easiest strategy is, for sure, turning customers into affiliates. It's set it and forget it. 

But once they're willing to scale with influencers, then seeding and these more intricate strategies like what Tabs is doing is definitely very powerful as well.

Chase Clymer

I've been seeing a lot of success on the interwebs with people using influencer seeding to grow their brands. 

Noah Tucker

Yes. 

Chase Clymer

How does Social Snowball help with that? 

Noah Tucker

For sure. Yeah. We help with everything from sourcing and finding new influencers and getting their contact info so you could reach out to them, as well as the whole gifting experience for influencers as well. 

So instead of having to, let's use the fashion brand example again. Instead of having to ask an influencer once they agree to receive a gift, “What product do you want? What size do you want? What color do you want? What’s your address?”, and then having to go and manually create an order in Shopify, we just let merchants select products from their Shopify catalog that they want to be eligible for gift redemption. 

And then they could send a gift directly to the influencer which gives the influencer their own portal where they could log in, choose a product and variant from the ones that you've pre-selected as eligible, enter all their shipping details self-serve. 

And then when they click Claim, it'll automatically create an order in your Shopify for $0 and just tag it as a gift for reporting.

We help with all of that from finding the influencers to actually sending and letting the influencers redeem the product. 

Chase Clymer

That's amazing. 

Now if I'm out here and this sounds like something that I want to do, where should I go? What should I do to take advantage of Social Snowball? 

Noah Tucker

Yeah, if you want to check us out, our website is socialsnowball.io. You could book a meeting with us right from the website. Or just feel free to hit me up on LinkedIn or Twitter. I love talking about this stuff. 

So my Twitter is @noatuck, and my LinkedIn, if you search Noah Tucker, I'm sure you'll find me. 

Chase Clymer

Awesome. We'll try to link to those in the show notes. Noah, thank you so much for coming on today and sharing all this knowledge about affiliates, influencers and referrals. Thank you so much. 

Noah Tucker

Thank you. 

Chase Clymer

We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes. 

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Lastly, if you're a store owner looking for an amazing partner to help get your Shopify store to the next level, reach out to Electric Eye at electriceye.io/connect.

Until next time!