Coupon codes scale your affiliate program with influencers, coupon apps, and offline referrals

Do you know what our favorite Tapfiliate superpower is in 2021?

Tapfiliate solves one of the biggest challenges facing all influencer and referral marketing platforms: how to help your brand advocates share via social media where linking is not supported.

The short answer here is coupons.

However, you can do so much more with coupons besides letting your affiliates share on Instagram.

Using coupons in your affiliate program presents a wealth of opportunities for your business to grow profits.

Using coupons in affiliate and influencer programs: examples

Let’s look at our most favorite examples of using coupons in affiliate and influencer programs and in other marketing initiatives to reach bigger audiences.

1. Scaling Influencer marketing while spending less on it

Influencer marketing is evolving, and the costs are skyrocketing while performance is decreasing. Tapfiliate’s coupons help you tap into the most authentic influencers who can share your brand and generate real-world sales.

As soon as you can use coupons to track sales that happen through Instagram referrals, you unlock a world of Micro- and Nano-influencers. They usually don’t ask for an enormous up-front fee, have higher trust and conversion rates, and are generally a huge marketing channel that’s currently on the rise.

Read more: A brand’s guide to influencer affiliate marketing

2. Reaching a new, larger, and more determined audience via coupon sites and apps

Coupon sites and apps definitely help an eCommerce business reach a much larger audience than they could reach through their own marketing lists or email campaigns.

But these audiences are also more determined to buy, which gives you better chances of going viral, and can help you target and explore new groups of customers within your target geographies. (And it’s cheap!)

Read more: How your SMB can use coupon apps to drive more sales for your affiliate program

3. Tracking offline referrals to explore new opportunities

Coupons allow you and your referral partners to get creative. Are they speaking in a workshop or podcast? Or are you printing flyers with a referral code for your existing customers to share with friends? Or probably sending a sample product to an influencer and including a nice card with a coupon to share with their audience. That’s easier with coupons than with links.

How do you make use of coupons via Tapfiliate?

In a nutshell, you need to create coupons in your eCommerce platform’s admin panel and then assign them to affiliates in Tapfiliate.

Your affiliates will see coupons in their Assets section, next to their referral link:

If you’re running on Shopify, WooCommerce or Teachable, this will work immediately and automatically.

With other eCommerce platforms, you need to take an extra step: hook up your shopping cart to our API. Depending on your specific eCommerce platform, you might be able to do it on your own, or you might need a developer for this.

Quite often, there’s a way to do it in-house using Zapier or Integromat, and then it’s easy and doesn’t require a developer.

To determine whether you can do it on your own, you need to see if your eCommerce platform has an integration with Zapier or Integromat. If it does, watch this quick video (below) on how to hook up your shopping cart with Tapfiliate to enable coupon tracking.

If Make (former Integromat) or Zapier do not support your eCommerce platform, you might want to do the integration via an in-house or external developer. To do that, find more detailed documentation on setting up coupons here. And check out this article: How to find a developer for your integration (with sample job descriptions for freelance sites). If you are interested in tracking customer referrals, Tapfiliate is a great referral tracker too.

Don’t hesitate to contact our customer support via chat if you have any additional questions.

• Already a Tapfiliate user? Create coupons in your eCommerce platform, and go right to the Affiliate overview inside your app to assign them to affiliates.
• Never tried Tapfiliate? Check it out with all the features enabled: get a 14-day free trial.
• Used it before but canceled? Get your Tapfiliate back: log in to restart your account.

Alexandra Klimashevich

I’m a growth strategist and a keen storyteller. In my free time, I’m a bookworm, a foodie, and a Beatles admirer. Connect with me on LinkedIn