The Affiliate Playbook We Run at Obvi

Hey there!

Welcome back for another bite to chew on.

We hope you’re having an excellent weekend with your loved ones and are prepared to take the week by storm.

In this newsletter, we’re talking about affiliate marketing

Why?

Because, let's face it…

Meta is no longer the paid channel it used to be in 2018.

The CPMs and the CACs were much lower compared to what they are now and any kid with a dropshipping store could make money back then.

Nowadays for your content to convert, you need to have significant TOF awareness which is just an uphill battle with Meta post IOS14.

That’s also why you see less dropshipping kids flexing their Lambos nowadays…

Now, the only way to win is to build a “real brand”.

And no “real brand” is built solely through Meta ads. You need to diversify your marketing mix and find new ways of opening the funnel.

So, in today’s newsletter we’ll be talking about ONE of the ways we’re opening up our Top of Funnel at Obvi.

But before we jump into it, we have two things to share:

1). Hundreds of people love our “Daily Chews” SMS service where we’re texting you daily nuggets of valuable information.

We’re sure you’ll love it as well. If you want to subscribe - simply go here!

2). We just released an episode on Thursday where we dived deep into what we learned from getting into 4200 stores in Walmart and our acquisition of Coffee Over Cardio. Go ahead and have a listen to it here

Without any further ado, lets get into it!

The Obvi Affiliate Playbook

At Obvi, we run two different kinds of affiliate programs:

1). One that’s turning our customers into affiliates

2). One that’s turning creators and influencers into affiliates

Let’s touch upon each of these.

Your customers will always be your most effective affiliates and brand advocates. Their content will always be more believable and authentic.

And time and again, it’s shown to us that our UGC (user-generated content, not the fake one) has done much better than CGC (creator-generated content).

That’s why it’s good to incentivize your customers to spread the word for you. And guess what, your happy customers will always do this for you and may not even want anything in return.

BUT…

Your customer’s audience is rather limited since most often they don’t have a big following or a large network.

And therefore...

To cover up for this reach issue, we have an affiliate program for influencers as well.

Now, we won’t go into the entire seeding process of finding influencers here, as we’ll probably write a dedicated newsletter about this in the future.

But, the way we work with influencers after we’ve discussed a long-term partnership with them is…

We give them two incentive structures.

Off the bat, smaller influencers get a 30% commission on all sales and bigger influencers get a 50% commission on all sales.

That being said, if the smaller influencers prove to be very valuable, we’ll move them to the 50% commission model too.

But, there’s a CAVEAT to this.

Just because you throw money at influencers, doesn’t mean their content will perform.

If you don’t give enough guidance on the content, it can hurt your brand.

Obviously, you don’t want a bunch of random creators creating terrible content for your brand.

So, the way we have started doing it is by creating a bank of approved clips (your past winners) and styles that affiliates can use as a starting point.

Of course, that’s just a starting point which they can use to repurpose or expand upon.

However, if you fail at this and ONLY promise a ton of money, it just WON’T work (speaking from experience ;) ).

But, with that being said your incentives & commission structures still have to be powerful enough for “good” affiliates to get on board and create content for you.

Not only that, but they also have to be dynamic and changing over time (as we mentioned above with our structures).

How to track your affiliate sales and send payments

Okay, so now you get the strategy behind creating a great affiliate network.

BUT, you might ask “How do I keep track of all of this?”

That’s where a tool like Social Snowball comes in.

They handle everything for you from payments of creators to tracking and their dashboard makes it super-simple and digestible for everyone.

With Social Snowball, we were able to generate a unique discount code link for each creator which the creators themselves could track and see how much revenue they generated.

What this also does is create full transparency and trust from the influencer’s perspective as they have the full overview in front of them.

Whereas before we had to track it in GA, and he had to keep track of everything in different tables and spreadsheets, and worst of all: communicate with the affiliates about payouts, revenue, etc.

At times what also happens is that coupon codes get leaked to websites like Honey which messes up the program’s attribution and can ruin a brand’s margins.

As soon as something like that happens, Social Snowball will notify us and tag referrals that came from those coupon sites.

We can then ignore all the code leaks, change the affiliate’s code, or if suspicious ban the affiliate altogether.

How to turn your customers into affiliates

We mentioned above we turn our customers into affiliates, but you might question how and what the process looks like?

But don’t worry, we got you covered!

The process is actually pretty simple;

We do it through a simple post-purchase email that we set up once through Sendlane and Social Snowball - and then the ball just starts rolling from there

Here’s a screenshot of one of the emails from our post-purchase flow:

You see, as soon as someone makes a purchase from your brand, their affinity is at its all-time highest.

So, it’s important to take advantage of that and give them incentives to start referring your brand.

We’ve had really great success with this flow and it’s quite obvious! These customers have been purchasing from you for a reason - they love your brand!

When someone loves your brand - they like to support it in every way possible and with an incentive - even more!

Getting constant VIRAL hits

Okay, so now that we covered the strategic and the tactical part, let's talk about how to increase the odds of getting a viral hit.

VOLUME…

As Alex Hormozi says, “Volume negates luck.”

We couldn’t agree more with this when it comes to getting constant viral hits with your affiliates.

In short, the goal is to post tons of content to increase the odds of getting an organic viral hit.

With enough shots on goal (i.e., affiliates creating hundreds or thousands of posts per month for your brand), you are bound to have a few clips that take off.

Just imagine, if a few clips go mega VIRAL (we’re talking 20-30M views), you can generate a huge amount of brand awareness and sales which may not be possible through paid ads.

Or, even better if you’re running paid ads in conjunctions your CACs can massively go down just because of so much TOF awareness you’re driving.

It’s like putting your ads on steroids!

So, we highly recommend you look into diversifying your marketing mix and invest in other TOF channels as well, as it can make your paid ads more efficient.

What brands do wrong with growing their affiliate network

After speaking to quite a few brand owners, here are some of the most common mistakes that we see brands making with their affiliate strategy:

Not giving enough incentives

Let’s be honest, without good incentives you can’t expect creators to be motivated to create good content, hence giving you VIRAL hits.

You have to be willing to share the pie with others, so they can help you expand the pie.

At Obvi, we give much higher commissions (50%) than most other brands for two reasons:

1). To attract good creators, who wouldn’t otherwise want to work with us.

2). To incentivize them enough to put in the extra time for our brand and our content.

Only going for the big influencers

Let’s face it, you probably can’t get Kim Kardashian to become an affiliate for you.

Most brands think that big influencers will happily partner with them if they give a high enough commission.

What they forget is that they probably have the exact same payment structures with much bigger brands, so the ultimate payout is more for them.

Secondly, even if they partner with you, you may just be a number to them and may not be able to establish a long-term relationship with them, which is one of the keys to growing your affiliate network.

That’s why we recommend going for mid-sized to micro-influencers, since the supply-demand sits in your favor and you have a chance of building a real relationship with them.

In our experience, many times we have seen the content of a mid-sized influencer outperform that of a big influencer, which just shows, at the end of the day, the quality of content matters the most.

And to get quality content, the influencer has to be invested in your brand and your product which doesn’t come quite often with big influencers (for the reasons mentioned above).

Not giving proper guidance

We briefly touched upon this a bit earlier, but it’s SO important that it has to be re-iterated.

In theory, having an army of affiliates spamming your chosen platform sounds great, but without proper feedback/guidance, it can result in even 0 sales.

You need to put in the time to create a proper feedback structure for these creators since you wouldn’t want a bunch of random creators posting sub-par content about your brand.

Over time, they will get a hang of your brand tone and the content you’re looking for to which they can start adding their own spice.

Not whitelisting top performers

This is a VITAL mistake that many brand owners make.

All of your top-performing creator’s content should be whitelisted and run as ads. It’s one of the easiest ways to completely juice out that piece of content.

Not only that - but whitelisted ads in and of itself are also just significantly more authentic and therefore perform better (for some brands)

Tool of the week

Given today’s topic, it goes without saying that this newsletters “Tool of The Week” is Social Snowball. 

We’ve tried A TON of different ways to manage all of our affiliate marketing activities, but none of them have been remotely as good as Social Snowball.

A few things we really love about them is;

• They’ll actively support you in moving all of our existing affiliate activities from spreadsheets or other platforms onto their platform

• They actively guide you in how to best approach your affiliate program

• The interface and UX is bar none

• The safelinks features, which we’ve touched upon above is saving us A TON of money

• and last but not least; It integrates with Sendlane - and therefore, we can automate a large portion of the work.

So..

If you’re also looking to go heavy on affiliate marketing, then definitely check out Social Snowball. They’ll help you get set up with everything you need for a pretty insignificant price tag (compared to the ROI)

#ProudPartner

Thanks for reading along

As always, we appreciate you taking the time to read this. We hope we were able to provide some value to you and look forward to serving you again on Wednesday

All the best,

Ron and Ash