Want to elevate your influencer marketing? Influencer promo codes and affiliate links might be the tools you need! Both will help you track creator performance and provide the information required to evaluate campaign performance.
Whether you’re new to the world of discount codes or just looking for fresh ideas, we’re here to help you understand how these little codes can make a big difference in your campaigns.
What is an influencer promo code?
An influencer promo code is usually a four- or more-digit code that followers get from a content creator to use at checkout to receive discounts on items in their cart from a particular brand.
Why use influencer promo codes?
If you’re new to promo codes, understanding how they work and using them in your influencer strategy can offer significant benefits.
Ecommerce and DTC brands use promo codes to increase sales and better understand where their customers come from. For influencer marketing, promo codes are among the best ways to boost and track campaign success.
Influencer promo codes are also easy to customize – you can create public, private, or restricted codes – and incentivize social media users to act now rather than later. It isn’t easy to run a robust influencer program without discount or promo codes.
Pros of influencer discount codes
- Convert tentative fans
- Track sales attribution
- Encourage customers to try new things
- Enhance the shopping experience
Convert tentative fans.
Some of your audience may be “window shopping” for your products and hesitant to purchase them. Promo codes can be the final nudge they need to take the plunge and try your products. In influencer marketing, followers gravitate to brands their favorite creators love. While gaining more fans is a happy side effect, promo code use furthers your ultimate goal—boosting sales. Promo codes are a powerful way to turn those hesitant followers into paying customers.
Track sales attribution.
Depending on how you structure your promo codes, they can help you track sales attribution with surprising detail. While you may share the same promo code across multiple influencers, you can segment them by campaign, discount, product, and season.
Examining the redemption data, you can see which promo code offers the most incentive for your customers to buy. You can also track seasonality and which products are best suited for specific promotions.
Encourage customers to try new things.
Discount codes are great for bringing new customers and can encourage your existing customers to try new products or services. New product lines, clearance items, and more are good reasons to integrate promo codes into campaigns targeting your existing customers.
Enhance the shopping experience.
“Getting a coupon, as hard as it is to believe, is physically shown to be more enjoyable than getting a gift.”
– Paul J. Zak, Claremont Graduate University’s Center for Neuroeconomics Studies
Fewer brands are holding back on discounts and promotions, realizing they’re a great way to attract new customers and enhance the customer experience.
DTC brands, in particular, understand consumers love deals on products they want or need. Influencer discount codes offer audience members an exclusive shopping experience, making your brand even more appealing.
What is the difference between an influencer discount code and an affiliate link?
An influencer discount code is a unique series of numbers and characters that content creators share with their audience. It offers an exclusive discount on a brand’s products, directly benefiting the consumer and helping track the effectiveness of an influencer’s promotion.
On the other hand, an affiliate link is a unique URL that tracks sales or clicks generated by an influencer or affiliate. The link user earns a commission from the sales made through this link, but it doesn’t necessarily offer a discount to the consumer.
Both tools measure the effect of the content creator and reward them for their influence in driving sales.
Why do brands use both discount codes and affiliate links?
Affiliate links are web pages (usually landing pages) containing your brand’s domain name with a unique affiliate ID at the end of the URL.
Because affiliate links point to your domain, they drive traffic to your site.
Discount codes work whether or not the web visitor used an affiliate link. These digital coupons do not necessarily drive website traffic, but they do offer a larger incentive for a potential customer to purchase.
Using both allows you to control offers and track sales more accurately, giving you a comprehensive approach to influencer marketing.
How to set up discount codes and affiliate links for your influencers
Understanding how to set up discount codes and affiliate links before getting started in influencer marketing is critical. Broken affiliate links can seriously impact your influencer campaigns, and savvy shoppers may misuse unmonitored discount codes.
Discount codes
How you create and maintain your coupon codes will depend somewhat on your ecommerce platform. For example, Shopify allows vendors to make as many as 20 million discount codes. You can customize these codes in the Discounts section on your Shopify admin account.
When creating these codes, you’ll want to consider the code itself (the combination of letters and numbers), the discount type, and the duration. You’ll also want to pay careful attention to any discount restrictions or conditions you wish to have in place.
Affiliate links
You can create affiliate links using marketing automation software or your CMS. You’ll want to create landing pages, each with a unique affiliate ID. Creating and managing these affiliate links can be tedious if you have more than a handful of affiliates/influencers. However, if you have a small roster of content creators, ensure you have a Google, Excel, or Numbers sheet that tracks essential information.
After creating the links, use tags to track visitor traffic and conversions. If you’re using a free analytics tool like Google Analytics, you can create Goals under the Conversions section. By doing so, you’ll be able to watch consumer behavior on your links and optimize your website’s UX design for greater influencer success.
How to set up your discount codes and affiliate links for campaign success
Anticipating the challenges with each approach will help you set your campaigns up for success. With more experience, you’ll be able to leverage discount codes and affiliate links for best results.
Challenges with discount codes
Some promotions will resonate with consumers better than others. Depending on your product and target audience, percentage discounts might perform better than dollar-off discounts and vice versa.
Another challenge is your profit margin. You shouldn’t sacrifice sustainable profit margins to drive more sales. Discounts should be mutually beneficial to your brand and the shopper. At Organifi, they’ve found their sweet spot in modest “percentages off” discounts.
“As a company, we’re much more strict about the percentage off, so all our influencers are at 15% off. The reason for this was that we have a very high quality product. We wanted to make sure that the quality was still evoked even with the discount.”
– Organifi
Lastly, some leading coupon websites try to take advantage of coupon codes in ways you may disapprove of. Monitoring who uses your codes and setting expiration dates can prevent misuse.
Challenges with affiliate links
Affiliate links are far less complicated than discount codes. Neglecting your affiliate links could result in broken links, untracked traffic/conversions, and a poor user experience.
Your influencer program needs a system for organizing and maintaining these links. Influencers using those links depend on your marketing team to provide their audience with the best online shopping experience.
How to scale
Managing promo codes and affiliate links on spreadsheets and CMS platforms is possible if you have a small influencer team. However, once your content creator roster grows beyond ten people, you will likely need a more efficient process to manage your influencer program and its resulting web traffic.
Automation software can save you hours of tedium and web development costs. Without an influencer-specific automation platform, you will likely burn out and miss opportunities to achieve maximum influencer ROI.
Brands using influencer discount codes and affiliate links right
Body Angel Activewear
Body Angel Activewear has been working with content creators and influencer discount codes for some time. They’ve nurtured a sizable community of fitness and fashion influencers to promote their brands.
What they’re doing right
Body Angel Activewear’s promo codes are influencer-specific, as in the example above. This approach allows them to attribute discount redemptions to each influencer without using affiliate links.
They also use these promo codes and influencer campaigns with experiential marketing campaigns, such as pop-up shops and virtual fitness events.
Elizabeth Ardon
Image via Instagram
Elizabeth Ardon is a skincare and beauty brand that makes liberal use of affiliate links when partnering with their influencers—the brand partners with influencers that offer product reviews and tutorials.
What they’re doing right
Elizabeth Ardon is an excellent example of how to use affiliate links with Instagram Stories. Instagram’s “swipe up” feature allows story viewers to transition smoothly to a product page with an influencer-unique URL. The brand also incorporates affiliate links with their YouTube and blogger influencers.
Zalando
Zalando is an ecommerce brand based out of Denmark. It features clothing for men, women, and kids and offers name brands for all lifestyles. Zalando partners with affiliates and influencers to drive traffic to their online store.
What they’re doing right
Zalando uses affiliate links and influencer discount codes to enhance sales and track creator performance. Most Zalando brand ambassadors are exclusive, so they publicize their affiliate links on their social media profiles.
For promo codes, Zalando introduces them for limited-time offers and special events.
Key takeaway: discount codes and affiliate links can power up your creator conversions and enhance your campaigns
Discount codes and affiliate links can help you create compelling calls-to-action that improve your influencer campaign success and help your bottom line. Additionally, they can help you track influencer success and give you insights into consumer behavior.
Whether you’re running your program on spreadsheets or using an influencer marketing platform, it’s crucial to closely monitor the performance of discount codes and affiliate links to determine what is right for your brand.
Learn more about influencer marketing: Influencer Marketing 101
