Today in Digital Marketing - Weekend Edition: Social Snowball

Episode Date: July 17, 2021

Social Snowball is a platform that converts all of your customers into motivated affiliates. But it's not just "another" affiliate platform. When a new customer purchases from your Shopify store, they are automatically created an affiliate account and given materials to promote their custom discount code right from the thank you page.Your newly turned affiliate will receive an email to log into their account and collect their funds immediately after they get their first referral purchase.The customers referred from your affiliates also become affiliates and share their codes, creating a rapidly expanding network of micro influencers all over the world working hard to bring you new customers!This episode is a paid partnership with SocialSnowball.io.--- Want to reach thousands of digital marketing decision-makers with your own Weekend Edition? See the options at http://todayindigital.com/ads--- • Get each episode as a daily email newsletter (with images, videos, and links) — b.link/pod-newsletter• Join our weekly listener Zoom every Friday at 3pm Pacific. Join here: b.link/listenerzoom  ADVERTISING:- Ads: b.link/pod-ads- Classifieds: b.link/pod-classifieds- Brand Takeovers: b.link/pod-takeover JOIN THE COMMUNITY:- Slack: b.link/pod-slack- Discord: b.link/pod-discord- Podcast Perks: b.link/pod-perks ENJOYING THE SHOW?- Rate and review: b.link/pod-rate- Leave a voicemail: b.link/pod-voicemail FOLLOW TOD:- Twitter: b.link/pod-twitter- LinkedIn: b.link/pod-linkedin- TikTok: b.link/pod-tiktok Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin (b.link/pod-todsite) and produced by engageQ digital (b.link/pod-engageq). Subscribe at https://TodayInDigital.com or wherever you get your podcasts. (Theme music by Mark Blevis. All other music licensed by Source Audio.)Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Hello, and welcome to a special weekend edition. Sometimes we use these episodes to dive deeper into a specific topic. Today, a paid partnership with Social Snowball. You've heard the advice before. The single best form of marketing is happy customers telling their friends about your product and you've tried, God knows, to set up an affiliate program for your brand, but it didn't integrate well with your store. It was complicated.

And that is why Social Snowball exists. It's at socialsnowball.io. And with me to talk about it is CEO Noel Tucker. Hi, Noah. Hi, how's it going? Good. So tell me, what is Social Snowball at kind of a high level? Yeah, so high level overview.

Social Snowball is an affiliate marketing platform for Shopify merchants. Right now, exclusively for Shopify. We'll expand to other platforms down the road. And basically, we do a few things different for merchants. We, one, automate affiliate acquisition. So we convert every single customer that you get into an affiliate automatically. They're auto-generated a discount code with their name in it and given to them natively on the post-purchase thank you page as soon as they purchase. And then we also make payouts very simple. So we have an integration with the bank transfer API

that allows you to send commission payouts directly from your bank account to the affiliate bank account with two clicks all within the dashboard. It's so important, I think, when you're trying to get these affiliates on board or trying to convert people. You know, in the past, as I mentioned in the intro, there have been these sort of separate platforms. So yours through Shopify just kind of like automates it. So does it literally show up like right on their receipt and it's created everything for them? Right.

So there's been some, there's some other apps out there that like will have a post-purchase pop-up where you'd have to like click to generate a custom tracking link and stuff like that. But we wanted to remove as much friction as possible. Like the thinking that we had is there's no reason a brand wouldn't want to have as many affiliates as possible. Like the worst thing an affiliate could do is go out and promote your brand and not get you sales, which is still like free content on the internet brand awareness and still value.

And then the best thing they could do and what they very often will do is actually generate you revenue. And those are customers you're acquiring without having to pay ads to acquire. So we wanted to remove as much friction from the affiliate acquisition process as possible. So yeah, natively on the post-purchase thank you page in Shopify, there's a little promotion box, which you have the ability to customize that just creates an affiliate account for the customer, gives them their discount code with their name in it pulled

from Shopify and presents a nice little offer right there on the thank you page. And then you could also integrate with email apps and send follow-ups as well. How did you get the idea to make it? So for the past like five years before I started building it, I had been working with a lot of e-commerce brands. I built my own e-commerce brands and I was running paid traffic for a lot of other brands. I had a little agency and for all the brands that I was working with, my own and other people's affiliates and ambassadors were just a huge traffic source. I realized like from the very beginning of me starting like anything in e-commerce that people love to be an ambassador for a brand. They love to have that discount code with their name in it. They love to put that in their Instagram bio.

They like to show it off to their friends. It's like almost a little thing of clout. They think they're like a part of an exclusive club if they're an ambassador for this brand. So I realized there was a lot of value in that. And for all the stores I was running and then doing consulting work for ambassadors and affiliates were always a huge part. So having had that experience, I'd played around with a lot of the other affiliate apps out there. And there were a few key things that they just did that seemed that just didn't make sense to me. It seemed unintuitive. It seemed overly manual. It seemed very outdated. And I think a lot of the affiliate softwares in the Shopify ecosystem that are our competitors today, they were not built specifically for the Shopify ecosystem. They were built to be

affiliate marketing platforms for every type of business. So we wanted to build something with specific features just for the modern DTC Shopify brand owner. And like I explained before, the biggest pain points that I noticed in the other softwares was the making it difficult to acquire affiliates or at least non-automated. So the way they would have it be in a lot of these other platforms is you'd have to embed a signup form on your website. And then if traffic is interested in these other platforms is you'd have to embed a signup form on your website. And then if traffic is interested in becoming an affiliate, they'd have to find that signup form, which most of the traffic signing up or that's on your site is there to look at products or buy products.

They won't even see the signup form, which doesn't mean that they necessarily wouldn't want to be an affiliate. They just don't know about it. So they'd have to find the signup form. They'd have to fill in all their information. They'd have to submit the signup form. And then the merchant would have to go in on the back end and either manually approve or disapprove that account. And then once approved, that would generate their tracking link or discount code. So what we realized is that like everyone, there's a good chance everyone wants to be an affiliate,

we might as well give them the offer to be one. Everyone's, you know, especially 2021, a lot of people working from home, trying to make money online, very open to a side hustle. And people already, you know, sharing the brands they love via word of mouth anyway. We just want to make the process of incentivizing them to do so as frictionless and easy as possible. I love that it creates, it's like every person gets their own automatically generated code as well. Because I think you're right. I think that there's something these days about being an affiliate that with certain demographics, that's, you know, kind of a badge of honor, sort of like a sign that you've made it in a way. And so having your own kind of custom code and so you as a store owner don't have to really do anything. Yeah, all you would have to do is after you set up your payout

integrations, just send commission payouts to your affiliates for the referral sales that they bring you. But that's pretty much it. It's very, you know, hands off. We wanted to make it as plug and play and simple as possible. A lot of the other affiliate platforms I find when it comes to those payouts. And I think part of the reason that people don't become affiliates is because there's only like one payout option. It's usually something like PayPal, which, you know, I can go on forever about it. Is that you guys as well? Or do you have other payout options?

No, we have others. So yeah, we have, we have some manual options just to give people the option. So we have Cash App, Venmo, Zelle, and a manual bank transfer as manual options if people wanted to. We do have PayPal because it's, you know, some people still want to use it. And like you, I could go on for a while about why I don't like PayPal. But we also built an integration that's unique that's with Veeam, which is essentially like a business Venmo. And they have a bank transfer API that we integrate with. So from the merchant's journey, all you would have to do is connect your bank account via Plaid. It takes like a business Venmo and they have a bank transfer API that we integrate with. So from the merchant's journey, all you would have to do is connect your bank account via Plaid. It takes

like a minute and then connect that to Social Snowball with just a couple of clicks. And then once that connection is made, as soon as you get affiliates and they get their referral purchases, they're prompted to do the same thing because they have their own affiliate dashboard that Social Snowball provides. And then once that connection is made on both ends, you could send commissions to your affiliates with just two clicks within Social Snowball. Yeah, I was going to ask, for those affiliates that are like really, really engaged and they want to sort of check their dashboard every day, there's a place for them to do that? Yeah, we provide them with the dashboard. As soon as they get their first referral purchase, we send them an email with login instructions for their dashboard.

Until they get that first referral purchase, we just send them like reminder emails with their code or tracking link, follow up information, etc. And you could also customize all that stuff with email integrations as well. Why the name? What is a social snowball in your head? So we wanted the I want well, I wanted the name to be something that like, would really ingrain the vision of growing on like growing rapidly. So we were tossing around the names wildfire uh virus which this is pre-covid so i'm happy we didn't go with that one yeah no kidding and then snowball so like the snowball effect you know you picture a snowball going down a hill it continues to get bigger and bigger and bigger exponentially and so that's kind of like the the picture with it um so we were playing around with domains it definitely came down to domain

availability at one point snowball.io was taken was taken, Snowball.com, Social Snowball, we came up with because the snowballing of getting extra customers, extra revenue, boosting your word of mouth, it's happening from all social interactions. So the snowball is growing from social interactions. So Social Snowball, that's how it came about. Oh, I gotcha. And then it came down to domain availability yeah as it often does yeah for sure um and i get that it's automated which is which is great but what about for people that are not customers but still you know i'm thinking like an influencer for something like that that just finds a product of of someone on shopify and really wants to get an affiliate code for them but doesn't want to like buy it first in order to generate that do you have like a manual form that you can put up to capture those people yeah we do we do so we do provide like a standard sign up form that you can embed into your store um and we're actually

building a lot of uh new like cool templates for that as well which i'm excited about but yeah we do uh have a template that you could just embed into your store and then an influencer or any really any cus you know anyone who's just on your store for whatever reason um they could sign up through there and that'll also generate their custom code. What about if someone's using a different affiliate marketing platform somewhere, they installed it three years ago, they're, you know, not thrilled with it, but it is working, it is running, is there a way to kind of more easily port it over? Are you doing all that from scratch? I mean, what we recommend people do if they are because this has happened a lot,

we've had a lot of people who are using a lot of, you know, more of the outdated affiliate marketing platforms and want this solution. And but they already have a lot of affiliates with their old platform. So we're working on a way to make it easier right now. What we have them do is we just have them send an email to all their current affiliates and you could actually embed the social snowball signup form for your affiliate program into the email directly. Or you could just drive traffic from the email to your website and just basically explain, Hey, um, you know,

just be as transparent as you can with your customers, with your affiliates. Like, Hey, like we're a transitioning software. This is going to make it better for you guys as well. You guys are going to be receiving your pads faster. You're going to have a nicer dashboard where you can track everything, et cetera. Um, and then basically, you know, the signup for me, make it as frictionless as possible. I just have to put their name and email and it'll send them their new code and all their new info. It's probably an easier way in the long run to go that way as well. You know, like I was thinking maybe there was some kind of weird API thing you hack together or maybe, you know, there's it. But then I would imagine sort of with all the complications around the bank transfers and the account balance and the connection with Plaid

and it's just so many different things in there. So the idea is just you've got your affiliate email list, you send them to the new platform and you say, hey, this is why we're doing it. And it's really quick to set up. Right. Yeah. And we're definitely working on a more like API hacky way to do it. That may be like a one click transfer type thing, but that's in the works. What's the ideal store? Are we talking like a part time person who sells jewelry on the side? Or is this like a Fortune 500? You know, they've got a thousand, ten thousand products in their catalog.

In terms of Shopify stores, who's like the ideal client for you? Yeah, I mean, our vision is to be the solution for every Shopify store. So, you know, the way our pricing works, it's a very scale with you model. So you only pay if we're making money. And if you're doing low volume, then you're not paying a lot um so it's really ideal for any store we've i mean it's been really cool like just uh since launch we've seen so many different stores of every different niche niches that i didn't even know existed just things that you would never think of um do really well with an affiliate program so honestly there's i couldn't say there's one niche that does significantly better than the rest. I'd say overall though, what I've noticed is

the stores that are selling products to people's emotions more. So things that people are more passionate about rather than like cleaning supplies. So maybe like a merch store for influencers, those always do really well, or just any sort of product that people are buying for emotional reasons, not just like household necessities, those always tend to do better because people are more motivated and passionate to share with their friends and followers, et cetera. Although I have to say, I follow on TikTok, I follow this cleaner. She's like a famous cleaner. She was, I don't think she cleans anymore. I think she just gives it away because she'd make so much money on it, but she was a house cleaner and she was like

had affiliate deals for i think scrub daddy is the brand that the sponge and she did so well that they hired her as like a as like their official influencer for sponges yeah i mean i'm not even surprised with tiktok i've seen so many random products like that go viral so that's really cool so let's talk about pricing one of the things that's always bothered me about SAAS products is that they, and I don't think they do this on purpose, but just the way the pricing structure is set up is they penalize brands or their customers for growth. So in the case of Social Snowball, what happens if you grow from 20 customers a month to 20,000 customers a month? Does the price per affiliate change? Yeah. So we actually don't do a price per affiliate per se. We do a flat fee plus a percentage of revenue that we generate for you. So any affiliate sale generated through a social

snowball affiliate, we take a percentage of that. And the way we structure it is that it scales with you. So the lower the flat fee that you're paying, the higher percentage of revenue we take. So for example, if you're like a brand new store just starting out and you're paying, the higher percentage of revenue we take. So for example, if you're like a brand new store just starting out and you're doing a couple thousand dollars a month, realistically, your affiliate program isn't going to do any huge volume off the bat. So it would make sense for you to pay that lower flat fee and give us a higher percentage of revenue. But if you're a store that's already doing seven figures a month, chances are once you implement an affiliate program, that's going to do high volume as well. So it makes more sense

to pay that higher flat fee and for us to take that smaller rev share. So there's no like when I hit, you know, 200 affiliates, I'm forced up into the next tier. There's no force. No, it's totally up to you. It just makes fiscal sense to upgrade at certain points. So each each additional sort of tier up is just basically a cheaper cut that social snowball takes. That's it. Huh. That's interesting.

Yeah. And what if someone wants to kick the tires without committing? Do you have a free trial? Yeah, we have a 14-day free trial. And we're actually rolling out, possibly by the time this podcast is live, I don't know the timeframe on that, but we're rolling out a free forever plan that's just a rev share and no flat fee. Oh, really? Okay. And how will that work so it's

it's very similar to what we have now it's going to be free plus a percentage of revenue that social snowball generates for you so if you install it and you know you're not launching any you know you're not launching your store for another six months but you want to just keep the app installed we're not going to charge you that monthly fee we're not really providing you anything at that point so we don't want to take anything so we'll just take a percentage of affiliate revenue once those affiliate sales start coming in. And then, you know, obviously, if you start getting a lot of affiliate sales, then it makes sense to upgrade. But we wanted people to not feel like they have to uninstall or like rush to get their affiliate program launched in that 14 day free trial if they're not ready to do so.

I wish that email lists that option. I don't know how many years I paid for my MailChimp account and didn't send a single email, but I was just terrified. I didn't want to close it because I'd lose, you know, the traction that I built up in terms of, in terms of the list quality and everything like that. And, and then eventually after about three years of not sending any emails, I decided, you know, I'm probably not going to send any emails. So does have a freemium plan, but it's based on subscribers. So even though you're not, you weren't sending, you still had their subscriber list. So they were, they were billing you for that, I think. So it's Shopify. How does, how does someone install it? Does it

literally just go to the Shopify app store and click install? Yeah. I mean, it's on the app store. You can just search social snowball, or you can just go to our website, social snowball.io either. Any plans to expand outside of shopify yes uh down the road definitely right now we're very laser focused on building more functionalities and features for our shopify merchants and we want to grow a lot in the shopify ecosystem before we consider anything else but we definitely have a vision down the road to expand to uh wix wordpress magento woocommerce big commerce all the other big names all the other insert word in your commerce platform yeah yeah is there anything i haven't asked that you think is important for

people to know about social snowball no i think you i think you covered pretty much anything um i mean if people do have more questions they could always message us we have live chat on the website or they could just dm me on instagram i'm always happy to answer people's questions i love talking with people about social snowball so i would say, if anyone has more questions about it to reach out to me or to our support, and we'd be like super happy to help anyone with anything. What's your Instagram account so people can DM you? It's Noah Tuck, but it's spelled kind of weird. It's N-O-A-T-U-C-K. N-O-A-T-U-C-K on Instagram for questions via DM. Noah, thank you for this.

Thank you so much for having me. Social Snowball, you can find it at socialsnowball.io. Plans start at $12 a month, plus a small cut of revenue generated by Social Snowball. All plans include unlimited affiliates, six payout methods, a dashboard, data reports, full customization, and live chat support. That's all plans, including all of that. This weekend edition was a paid partnership with Social Snowball. If you'd like to introduce your brand to thousands of digital marketing decision makers, visit todayindigital.com slash ads.