Best Shopify affiliate marketing apps? Really?
One thing that many dropshippers and e-commerce entrepreneurs do not know is that they can ask people to sell their products for them. That is right. It is called affiliate marketing, and you do not have to do all the marketing work yourself.
Marketing and promotion are like the oxygen of your dropshipping store. If you do not put the word out there, it will die a slow death, most especially so on the internet where at least 4 million new web pages are created each day.
But you can fix this.
While you are busy writing blogs and fulfilling customer orders, you can have dozens or even thousands of people promoting our products for you.
Today, I will share with you the six best Shopify affiliate marketing apps to help you increase your sales. These products are:
- Referral Candy
- LeadDyno
- Affiliatly
- Refersion
- Enlistly
- Growth Hero
Let us review each of these apps, and then help you decide which one gives you the best bang for your buck. But first, what is affiliate marketing, and what is an affiliate marketing app?
What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a business model where you, the business owner, will work with promoters. These promoters will advertise and find ways to make a sale. For each sale they make, you pay them a commission.
Here are the two parties involved:
- Company – this is you, the store owner
- Affiliate marketer – this is a person who will promote your product
So, how does it work?
The affiliate marketer will receive a link from you. This link is something that your promoters will paste into their blogs or YouTube videos. Once they make a sale, your affiliate marketing software can track the sale.
You would know who made the sale, what the sale is, and how much. Based on these records, you will pay your affiliate marketers the commission you promised them.
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Now, you cannot do this manually. You need a program that will create a link for each of your affiliate marketers, which can also track the sales of each affiliate marketer. And these are the best affiliate marketing apps in Shopify that we will talk about today.
To use these apps in Shopify, you have to install them, and then access them from your app dashboard like you would for any Shopify app.
After taking a look at the six best ones, I will also provide you with the pros and cons of having an affiliate marketing program.
So, let us get started!
6 of the Best Shopify Affiliate Marketing Apps
1. Referral Candy
Free Trial: 30 Days
Cost: $49 recurring monthly fee
While it may seem pricey, Referral Candy belongs to the best and highest-rated commission-based apps in Shopify. You have 30 days to check what it can offer, and then you will have to pay $49 per month. The other plan is for huge enterprises, and it costs about $4,000 per month!
With Referral Candy, there is no limit to the number of orders you can get from your affiliates’ promotional campaigns. You will also have access to 24/7 customer support, and be protected with its fraud detection and protection systems.
Here are the features:
- Create your branded sign-up page and affiliate dashboards, including emails
- Control the incentives, commissions, and rewards of your performing affiliates
- Automate the rewards payout
- Have a view of the traffic, and clicks, and even integrate the store with Google Analytics
- Track the results of your email campaign with MailChimp
- Allows social media shares on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, FB Messenger, and WhatsApp
With Referral Candy, you can grow your affiliate up to 100,000 people. Even if there is only one package, it provides you with a huge room to scale your business. It also has what it calls an affiliate marketing mode. Here, you can look for influencers and partner with them.
2. LeadDyno
Free Trial: 30 Days
Cost: $29 recurring monthly fee
LeadDyno is one of the biggest affiliate marketing apps in Shopify. It has a rating of 4.5 stars out of 500+ surveys, as it also offers MLM support.
Here are the features of the app:
- Individual reports for your affiliates to view
- Provides links to your affiliates that they can use to promote your products
- Real-time reports to show the results of marketing efforts
- Has an app that you can install on your mobile device
- You can use different types of payment methods to pay the commissions; it is up to you if you want to use PayPal, Coinbase, or Dwolla
You can participate in the LeadDyno marketing network for free; this is a community of dropshippers like you. LeadDyno is free to use for the first 30 days. Use this time to set it up, get some affiliates, and test if the links work.
After that, you have to start with the monthly subscription rate. You will not pay this on an annual basis, so you can cancel at any month if you do not need the service anymore.
The company has an affiliate network. This is a group where your company will be featured, and you need to take advantage of this because this is where affiliate markers look for companies that they will promote.
The package you choose must depend on your traffic size. As you can see, the Starter package limits you to get only 1,000 unique visitors per month. What this means is that the links will stop working once you have met that traffic from your affiliate marketers.
3. Affiliatly
Free Trial: 30 Days
Cost: $16 recurring monthly fee
At the entry price, Affiliatly allows you to get up to 50 affiliates promoting your products. While LeadDyno does not offer a limitation on this, Affiliatly does. This is why the price is much lower than LeadDyno.
Affliatly has a QR code your marketing partners can use for selling, which means they can sell offline if they want to. Apart from this, your promoters will have access to coupon codes that you create for them.
Like LeadDyno, you can choose from several plans. The only difference between these plans is the number of affiliate marketers who can work for you.
Check out the features of the product below:
- Can integrate with Zapier
- Affiliates can use QR codes, and coupons, and even do marketing via email
- You have access to an admin panel where you can view your stats
- Each affiliate has his dashboard
- Once you fulfill an order, your affiliates will be notified if that order came from their referral
- You can create custom codes or links for each affiliate
- You can block some products if you do not want to pay commission from these; you can do it for products that have a small profit margin
- Create banners and ad images for your affiliates to use
- Pay the commissions via PayPal
- You can also pay your affiliates with credits to your store
- Control the cookie duration
- Decide how affiliates earn; you can set it to per user visit, as a percentage of the order price, or a flat commission fee
- Several languages are supported
The only payment system that you can use is PayPal, so your affiliates cannot receive a commission from you by any other means.
With Affiliatly, it is best to go with the Starter package and move up to the higher tiers later if you have enough data to prove that your affiliates are generating sales for you.
4. Refersion
Free Trial: 14 Days
Cost: $89 recurring monthly fee
Refersion is one of the most expensive affiliate marketing programs in Shopify. It only has one plan, which costs $89 per month. The cost is justified because the affiliate marketers who will join your program are verified social media influencers. What this means is that these people have massive followers who can turn into paying customers.
Here are the features of Refersion:
- The cap of affiliate orders is 130 orders per month; you cannot exceed more than this
- Access to more than 5,000 social media influencers and partnering with them
- You can create links and discount codes from your dashboard
- No limit on the partners that can join
- Unique reporting view for every person who promotes your product
- You can create different commissions for different products
The app has a coupon generator. Those who decide to join your affiliate marketing program on Shopify can create these coupons, and then submit them to you.
If you approve, they will become active discount codes for your customers to use. Once they send these coupons out as offers, a customer who uses the code on your store will get the discount.
The influencers can only be found in the Refersion Marketplace. It is in this place where you can look for influencers and work with them to promote your products.
5. Enlistly
Free Trial: 21 Days
Cost: $8.99 per month
Enlistly is an affordable affiliate marketing software in Shopify. It only has one plan, and the billing is monthly, not annually.
The affiliate marketing app for Shopify offers easy integration, an organized management dashboard, variable commission rates, and an unlimited number of affiliates.
Here are the main features of the affiliate marketing app:
- Automated system for tracking the affiliate orders
- Traffic report for each of your affiliates
- Banded sign-up page; each affiliate will be on the same sign-up page for your referral program
- You can assign customized discount codes
- You can also create a different commission structure for each affiliate
- Create banners for your partners to use in advertising or promoting your products
- Messaging platform between you and your promoters
Take a look at a sample dashboard of Enlistly. On the left side is your control panel, and the main screen shows performance.
6. Growth Hero
Free Trial: 14 Days
Cost: $29 recurring monthly fee
At the time of this writing, Growth Hero has a perfect rating in Shopify. You have 14 days to go through the system and review its capabilities, and then you have to choose from any of its three plans.
With Growth Hero, you are not going to pay any fee by the time a sale is made. You only have to pay the commission of your affiliate marketer. It is also one of those tools that allow you to create an A/B split testing.
Here are the features of the tool:
- One-click set-up
- In-depth analytics that will allow you to compare the success rate of different campaigns
- You can use the A/B Test split of different active link destinations
- You can easily change the look of your dashboard and affiliate panels to match your store’s theme
- You can create rewards for your top-performing promoters
- Create discount codes
- Pay your affiliate’s commissions with PayPal
- Offer multi-level marketing – your affiliates can find sub-affiliates; if a level 2 affiliate marketer makes a sale, the level 1 will also earn a commission according to the prices you set
Growth Hero offers an all-week support system, plus you can migrate your existing affiliate marketers from other programs.
For example, you may be using Enlistly now, and you decided to shift to Growth Hero. You can move your affiliates to Growth Hero and then uninstall Enlistly from your Shopify marketing apps.
Pros and Cons of Affiliate Partnership Programs
Let us quickly take a look at the pros and cons of having an affiliate marketing program for your store.
Pros
- Reduce your expenses on ads
- Only pay a commission once a sale is made
- Make use of the time and effort of your affiliate marketers
- Work with influencers in your niche
Cons
- Some affiliates will make false promises just to make a sale
- Reduced earnings as you have to pay a commission
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Summary: 6 of the Best Shopify Affiliate Marketing Apps
As a dropshipper, you do not have to do all the marketing stuff on your own. You do not have to spend a huge amount of money to get sales. What you should do is choose a Shopify affiliate marketing app, install it, and then invite affiliate marketers to promote your products for you.
The beauty of this is you only incur a monthly cost for your tool, but you will not pay your affiliates unless they make a sale. With this marketing strategy, you can save a lot of time and money, and use the time and effort of your affiliate marketers to make sales.
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