They say that there are no shortcuts to success. We agree… but just partly. We have once again roamed the web over this past month to pick out some apps and helpful services that could make your lives as ecommerce entrepreneurs just a little bit easier… so you don’t have to.
Getting started with affiliate and referral marketing
Affiliate and referral marketing are the types of terms that pop up almost every time you talk about ecommerce. Many times, your road to success largely depends on the kind of partners that you take on this journey with you. This time around, we have picked out 6 solutions that will help you drive traffic to your site through affiliate and referral marketing, increase retention and reward your clients.
Have you ever wished that there would be an easy way of getting started with affiliate marketing. One that would allow you to jump right in and start reaping the benefits without having to go through the whole boot camp only to realize that the details are too overwhelming for any normal person without a phD to comprehend. Omnistar will help you get started. Voted #1 affiliate software, their solution will let you drive referrals through an easy-to-use interface. You can create affiliate programs and easily integrate them with your website to let your customers start referring you to their friends and family. A wide selection of pre-existing integrations are available, including all major ecommerce platforms so getting started with referral marketing has never been that easy.
Nobody is willing to go that extra mile for free
Increasing customer loyalty is one of the greatest ways to ensure the sustainability of your business. But without the right analytics tools, it is kind of difficult to decide where to focus your efforts. Retentiongrid makes that easy for you. Integrated with Shopify, BigCommerce and Tictail, their solution lets you analyze your customer loyalty segments and track their lifecycle as it develops. You can then create super-targeted campaigns to take on each and every one of these segments with a custom-tailored marketing message. It even comes with an autopilot! You can use triggered lifecycle campaign to reach out to your customer when they are most receptive to your marketing.
One of the challenges for referral marketing is sometimes the lack of an appropriate, proportional reward. Nobody is willing to go that extra mile without something in it for them. Unless you have a super exclusive product that everybody is willing to die for. But there aren’t enough of those to go around. Swell has come up with a solution that allows you to reward both engagement and retention – on a single platform. With over 10 different options, Swell can reward your customers for a bunch of different things – visiting your Facebook Page, following you on Twitter, retweeting and sharing your social media content, subscribing to your newsletter, buying from your store etc. The system will give your customers points, the redemption of which is entirely up to you to decide. You can give small prizes, enter them in drawings or whatever serves your business interests. Isn’t that swell?
Social proof and reviews help you sell more
“In reviews we trust!” Is probably the mindset of many ecommerce shoppers – research shows that items with higher scores for reviews tend to sell better. So what if there was a way to get a head-start on collecting product reviews on your site. Kudobuzz offers such a solution. With a simple addition of some code to your store, you are set to go in the matter of minutes. You can collect, display and share reviews by connecting your business’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, G+, Yelp and Help desk accounts and let the system handle the rest. The solution is enjoying some very good traction with over 1000+ small and medium businesses already using the system with over 840k reviews collected. Additional perks include a built-in communication widget for communicating with your clients landing on your page and SEO optimization of reviews.
Refersion, integrated with Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento and Paypal is another affiliate management platform that adds the ability to manage payments to affiliates into the bundle. After a very simple installation you can start paying your affiliates directly from within the control panel. Refersion also features a unique Post-Purchase Channel to automatically register your customers as Affiliates by offering them a straightforward sign-up form right after they have made a purchase on your store.
If you aren’t quite sure which are the activities you should be rewarding your clients for, then check out Beans. Beans is a suite of over 10 choices to include in your business’s’ customer rewards program. It offers you to reward them for purchases, subscriptions, Twitter follows. You name it. It comes with an API, so you can even build your own reward program based on characteristics you choose yourself.
That’s it for this time – we hope you find our picks useful and get your referral and retention rates to new heights. We will be back with more picks in a couple of weeks!
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Sven has a background in communication with 10+ years of experience. At Printout Designer he makes sure our messages are short, simple and to the point. On our blog he writes mostly on ecommerce and related topics, but occasionally likes to take a sidestep into other realms of life aswell.
