What Is An Influencer Affiliate Program?

We’ll start with a quick explanation of what an influencer affiliate program is. An influencer affiliate program is a program in which brands provide a commission to influencers who successfully drive a customer action through a unique affiliate link and/or discount code. For example, a brand could offer the influencer 20% of the sale amount for every customer they drive to their DTC website through their affiliate link. It’s a way to reward influencers for the customers they send your way.

Affiliate Programs Are Not Content Creation Programs

Affiliate programs are not designed to generate brand-aligned content. The goal of working with influencers in this capacity is to drive traffic and sales. Many brands think that encouraging more influencers to post by offering them affiliate links is a great way to build more content for their organic social channels. However, if content creation is the primary goal, then we would recommend working with content creators, instead of building an influencer affiliate program.

When influencers are trying to drive sales through affiliate links, they try to direct their audiences off of their social channels, blogs, Substacks, and newsletters and onto your website (or TikTok Shop). They aren’t focused on creating beautiful, elevated content, but rather on educating their audiences on why your product is a must-have. For example, on Instagram, influencers are likely to lean more into Instagram Stories, where they can include a link sticker. That Story could be a simple ecomm image on a white background with copy on stories (and we’ve seen that format drive great sales!). This content also disappears after 24 hours unless it is saved in an Instagram Highlight.

Target Carefully

Building a target list for an influencer affiliate program is also very different from building a target list for brand awareness or content creation. Follower counts and engagement rates often have no bearing on affiliate performance. We’ve seen influencers with under 20,000 followers and under 1% engagement rates be top affiliate performers. It’s helpful to tap into platforms like TikTok Shop and ShopMy that showcase past conversion data and allow you to see which influencers drive sales for other brands. However, keep in mind this conversion data should simply be used as a starting point - someone whose audience shops their kitchen tool recommendations or $10 lip balms may not have the audience who would shop a $200 skincare product.

Setting Competitive Commissions

Finally, when considering your commission strategy, keep your competitors and the affiliate landscape in mind. Influencer affiliate networks like ShopMy are seeing brands offer between 15-30% commission to influencers, with beauty being at the higher side of that range. We generally recommend that beauty brands offer a 20% commission for influencers (whereas a cashback site would be offered a much lower commission, i.e. 6%) and consider higher commissions for key time periods like BFCM.

Creating an influencer affiliate program requires many considerations, but keeping these elements in mind will be key to building a successful strategy.