5 impact.com features Shopify merchants need for partnership success 

About 96 percent of consumers don’t trust advertising, and it’s valid. Today’s savvy consumers can sniff out shady advertising practices from miles away, and audiences don’t want interruptive online ads telling them what to buy.

People want to buy things based on trusted recommendations from other people. It’s why the partnership channel, already worth billions, will continue to grow as traditional marketing channels become less effective.

Did misconceptions prevent you, a Shopify merchant, from tapping into the power of partnerships? Luckily, it’s a complete myth that partnerships are time intensive, crazy expensive, require a whole team to manage, or drive zero incrementality.

Fact: On the right platform, partnerships can transform your business. Accessible to every business at every budget, partnerships can help grow your business and improve customer acquisition. Discover how you can achieve a possible 16:1 return on advertising spend (ROAS) or a partnership channel that delivers 30 percent of your revenue with one-click integration.  

Go further with a complete partnership management solution 

The impact.com platform provides a marketplace where businesses of all sizes can connect with potential affiliate partners, publishers, and influencers to grow their revenue through these partnerships.

Shopify merchants can easily discover, recruit, engage, pay and optimize the right partners—all in one place.

Here are five impact.com features that Shopify merchants can use to maximize partnership success:  

1. Jumpstart your affiliate program with automated partner matchmaking

Audiences don’t want to click your ads. They want to meet your brand through people, and partnerships offer the warmest introductions. 

They say variety is the spice of life, and with partnerships, it’s no different. Brands that explore diverse partner types—email marketers, content bloggers, social media influencers, and PPC affiliates—optimize customer journey touchpoints and enjoy greater reach.  

Partnership management platforms, like impact.com, allow you to work more creatively by matching you with different types of partners that align with your brand to drive the results you most want.  

Brands often need help finding and onboarding the right partners, especially if they are small retailers without teams or fully-baked marketing strategies. The Starter Edition by impact.com provides Shopify merchants the tools to grow affiliate partnerships at just $30/month.

Once your brand joins, everything is automated. No longer bound to tedious spreadsheets, you can immediately search for potential influencer partners and recruit them at scale to launch your program. 

2. Track partners across devices and analyze performance

Partnership marketing success is measurable. 

In addition to full-funnel analysis, impact.com offers cross-device tracking for deeper insights. This functionality shows which devices belong to the same consumer and links them, allowing users to uncover their partner strengths and identify how they contribute to revenue growth.

With superior tracking and reporting, Shopify merchants can see the whole picture like never before. These businesses can reliably track online sale page visits, asset downloads, subscriptions, and much more.

3. Automate payouts with smart electronic contracts

Flexible custom contracting is essential to Shopify brands, and impact.com has it. 

Since the impact.com platform offers unlimited partner tracking options and payouts, you can customize your payouts to fit your campaign. Choose from many options, like: 

• Cost per action (CPA) model: Only pay a partner when they make a sale for you. Many Shopify brands using the impact.com platform with the CPA model bring in 30 percent of their total revenue through the partnership channel.
• Flat fee payments
• Performance bonuses when partners reach certain milestones

You can message inside or outside the app, and all contracting and payment details are taken care of for you. The best news is that you never need to rely again on (error-inevitable) spreadsheets.  

4. Gain a deeper understanding of the incremental value your partnerships bring

Some assume that affiliate marketing drives zero incrementality and that they would have made the sale with or without the partner, but research proves that’s not the case.

Companies with the most mature partnership programs drive revenue growth nearly twice as fast as those with less mature programs. These companies are also up to five times more likely to exceed expectations on various business metrics, like stock price and bottom-line profitability.

Partnerships can change the entire trajectory of your business only if you understand the exact value that each partner brings. 

With the impact.com platform, you can pull reports on anything like:

• Which partners are doing the best job selling specific products
• Which partners are driving customers for certain locations

You can also create partner commissions based on hundreds of incrementality-driven factors:

• New versus returning customers
• Cart size
• Discount and promo code margins
• SKU category

Compared to manual spreadsheets, these automated reports save immeasurable time, provide complete accuracy, and offer transformative strategic insights.

Payment differs between influencer marketing and influencer partnerships. You get better results when you have longer-term partnerships with influencer partners that deeply understand your brand and audience. With skin in the game and an authentic investment into your brand, these partners will drive high-quality content (and results) over time.

5. Gain knowledge to power partnerships with free online courses

Educating the market on the power of partnerships remains a key mission for impact.com, especially when 56 percent year-over-year growth is possible.

Signing up for The Starter Edition by impact.com will transform your Shopify business, but knowing how to use it, will knock your success out of the park.

Jump into free courses at pxa.impact.com to learn all about partnerships, including these popular courses: 

• Influencer partnership types and content formats
• Managing and tracking influencer programs
• Optimize: Affiliate and partnerships industry training – Associate 

Shopify brands leveraging impact.com to power partnerships

Partnerships work and here are three brands that harnessed the benefits of this revenue-generating channel—powered by impact.com. 

1. Ivory Ella 

Ivory Ella offers high-quality apparel and gear, with 10 percent of net profits donated to Save The Elephants. Since a niche audience wears elephant-inspired attire, the brand wanted its mission to drive sales. Ivory Ella wanted to reach untapped markets and liked the partnerships channel’s low barrier to entry. 

With the assistance of their agency BVAccel, Ivory Ella leveraged various partners, finding the most success with micro-influencers and college ambassadors. They scaled this program rapidly and easily tracked and attributed sales to each partner.

At the end of the first year of this partnership program, Ivory Ella saw:

• 11 percent of their total revenue through the partner marketing channel
• 19 times return on ad spend (ROAS)
• +56 percent Year-over-year (YoY) revenue in Q4

2. Parker Clay 

Parker Clay creates hours of employment for women in Ethiopia by producing handcrafted leather goods, pioneering a better model of making, shopping, and consuming. 

Learn how Parker Clay used impact.com to manage its partnerships efficiently and successfully nurture partner relationships.

3. Corkcicle

Corkcicle designs “cool” products that insulate your favorite food and beverages and elevate your every day. Its growing line of premium drinkware, coolers, and barware products is fueled by innovative design and social responsibility. 

Proving that today’s affiliate partnerships deliver quality customers, the channel became an integral part of Corkcicle’s marketing portfolio, driving as much value as its best-performing channel, paid search. 

Revenue earned by the affiliate channel grew 178 percent quarter over quarter by the end of Q1 2021. 

Power up partnerships with one click 

To be inside the customer journey, you need to be where consumers research before purchasing and partnerships provide the perfect solution to be present at each touchpoint.  

With one-click integration and no technical background needed, Shopify brands can use the impact.com platform to grow their business into a sustainable and significant revenue stream. With unmatched functionality, the impact.com platform also supports you as your partnership program grows.

It’s time to dig deeper into partnerships. Far from parting words, this is your call to action. 

Starter Edition by impact.com provides Shopify merchants with the tools and resources to grow influencer and affiliate partnerships. Get started for only $30/month.