Safelinks, an innovative affiliate link system by Social Snowball, is set to redefine the affiliate marketing landscape in the thriving $16 billion influencer marketing industry, offering a unique solution to a persistent problem — the leakage and misuse of coupon codes. Specifically designed for Shopify stores, Safelinks presents a new way for influencers and affiliates to promote products while ensuring fair and accurate sales attribution.
The introduction of Safelinks addresses a major issue that has long bedeviled the affiliate marketing sector: the rampant leakage of coupon codes. Affiliates often use discounts as a marketing strategy, but these codes frequently end up on popular coupon sites like Honey and browser extensions. This scenario leads to a vast discrepancy in affiliate attribution data and results in incorrect commission calculations. Merchants often overpay affiliates, leading to unnecessary financial losses.
With Safelinks, the process gets a significant upgrade. When a customer clicks on affiliate link, a popup appears acknowledging the referral from the respective affiliate, and allows the customer to generate a one-time-use coupon code from within the popup to use during their purchase. This feature ensures accurate attribution of sales to the affiliate whose Safelink was used, with each customer receiving a unique single-use coupon code.
The idea of providing affiliates with single-use coupon codes emerged as a potential solution but had its pitfalls. Affiliates would share these codes across various platforms, and after a single use, these codes would become ineffective. Given the impracticality of manually creating a new single-use code for every referred customer, a new, more efficient approach was necessary.
This is where Safelinks comes in. Safelinks provides a shareable mechanism that affiliates can promote (a link), and customers still receive their discount. The problem of single-use codes ending up on coupon sites is rendered moot due to their one-time nature, making them worthless to such platforms.
“Promo code leaks have been a big challenge faced by many eCommerce brands when trying to work with affiliates & influencers. The ability to effectively mitigate these leaks is crucial to safeguarding profits and accurately measuring the effectiveness of these partnerships. By implementing Social Snowball’s Safelinks we’ll be able for the first time to use unique codes at scale to ensure promotions are used as intended and protect our business.” – says early tester and customer of Social Snowball, Ben Yahalom, the President of True Classic.
Safelinks’ introduction brings a significant shift to affiliate marketing, particularly for Shopify stores in the influencer marketing sector. By ensuring accurate sales attribution and preventing coupon code leakage, Safelinks is fostering a more transparent and efficient future in affiliate marketing.
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