From Runway to Revenue: How to Scale Your Fashion Brand with Affiliate Marketing

In the e-Commerce space, fashion sales account for more than 20% of all purchases globally. With so much opportunity, thousands of apparel brands pop up online each year. Some find their audience, while others fizzle out quickly. The ones who survive do so because they’ve worked strategically to get their brand seen in the right places. 

Businesses looking to grow an apparel brand online often turn to affiliate marketing as a primary strategy for gaining attention. Today, 69% of shoppers look to influencers for purchasing recommendations. Brands can take advantage of this through strategic affiliate marketing campaigns, reaching their target audience more quickly and affordably.  

Today, we’ll show you how to scale your fashion brand using affiliate marketing, including a few tools that can help you get off on the right foot.

Let’s get started! 

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How fashion brands use affiliate programs to stand out from the crowd

When it comes to building a fashion brand online, the competition is already fierce. Companies across the globe compete daily to capture the attention of both consumers and algorithms. Businesses can’t rely solely on getting found through Google searches and Pinterest pins like they did in the past. So how can you get your products in front of your ideal customer without siphoning thousands of dollars into paid ad campaign cycles? The answer lies in affiliate marketing. 

Affiliate marketing creates brand visibility through strategic collaborations with influencers, bloggers, and fashion enthusiasts. Harnessing the power of charismatic fans of your brand, you can build a powerful word-of-mouth campaign that can even outperform your strongest paid ad campaign. In fact, according to Impact, affiliate marketing offers an average ROI of $15 for every dollar spent. That’s an impressive figure for such an affordable marketing channel. 

But what makes affiliate marketing such a lucrative strategy? It’s all thanks to the rise in influencer marketing over the last several years. The global influencer marketing industry has more than doubled in value since 2019, now exceeding 21 billion dollars. As profits skyrocket with no signs of slowing down, now’s the time to start taking advantage of influencer marketing to build visibility for your brand. 

The easiest way to get started is by investing in quality affiliate marketing software that can assist you with building out and managing an affiliate program that can be scaled significantly over time. The right affiliate software will help you automate affiliate tracking, handle large-scale commission payouts, and tailor all aspects of your affiliate network to your brand, including email and social media marketing. Investing in the right affiliate software lays a strong foundation for successfully expanding your affiliate network. 

How to scale your clothing brand with LeadDyno

Affiliate marketing is responsible for 16% of all online sales. In other words, if you’re not taking advantage of this marketing channel, you’re leaving a major source of potential revenue on the table. So why choose LeadDyno to help you start strategically building and scaling your affiliate program? Here’s why LeadDyno’s affiliate marketing software is ideal for creating an affiliate program that can help you grow your brand quickly and cost-effectively:

Automated, multi-tiered commissions

With LeadDyno, you can customize your commission plan to fit your affiliate program needs. Multiple tiers help to incentivize affiliates by rewarding higher performance with higher commission rates. You can decide how affiliates get paid from an assortment of options, like:

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• Payment For - Choose whether affiliates receive commissions for purchases, leads, or visitors (Advanced and Unlimited plans can also reward for line items, new customer bounty, and affiliate-specific products).
• How Much - Reward a percentage of the purchase or a flat rate commission.
• When - Customize when payment is due to your affiliates.
• Who - Define specific commission plans for each affiliate group.

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LeadDyno also offers specialized commission features like MLM, time-boxed commissions, and recurring commissions, so you can continuously motivate your affiliates to stay engaged and consistently promote your brand. With so many different options for commission structure, you can offer high-performing affiliates a competitive advantage that will help you further scale your brand and reach your target audience. 

User-friendly affiliate reporting and analytics

LeadDyno makes it easy to track affiliate performance by allowing you access to real-time metrics on clicks, conversions, and revenue. Use our intuitive progress dashboard to identify top performers, optimize underperforming campaigns, and measure ROI accurately. With up-to-the-minute performance reports, you can provide further incentives for active affiliates, quickly adjust your marketing strategy, and rely on robust data analytics to guide your program decisions as you expand your business to new markets. 

Versatile, no-code integrations 

LeadDyno integrates with popular eCommerce platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce, simplifying the process of connecting your affiliate program with your current sales framework. Integrations with payment tools like Stripe and Paypal allow you to send payments to thousands of affiliates quickly and securely. 

You can also easily sync your current CRM and email marketing tools for a fully-unified workflow. And for more complex integrations, LeadDyno’s Zapier integration allows for additional access to over 5000 other apps. With so many easy-to-use integrations automating each part of the affiliate marketing process, you can scale your brand much faster, even with a smaller team.

Multiple affiliate dashboards

Navigating a complex affiliate network? With LeadDyno, you can create multiple affiliate dashboards for different affiliate groups, whether you’re categorizing affiliates by location, product, performance level, or status (influencers, VIPs, etc.). By tailoring each affiliate group’s experience to their specific needs, you can provide them with better tools for targeting followers while making it easier for them to navigate the program themselves. Not only does this help prevent turnover from confused affiliates but it can also improve engagement levels through stronger messaging based on the group’s specific focus. For a product-specific affiliate group, you can offer tools and resources to help them give a more effective push. For region-specific groups, you can tailor messaging to suit the needs of the local market. Utilizing user-specific dashboards to niche down your marketing efforts helps your affiliates to better serve their community, making it easier to scale across the board.

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Not only will these features help automate the workload that comes with running a large network of fashion affiliates, but they also can help you to avoid the common pitfalls that often occur when building out an affiliate program. When you can automate your payment and communications processes, you guarantee consistent payouts and helpful onboarding communications for your affiliates, two important factors for maintaining a quality affiliate program. By making data-driven decisions for your affiliate strategy, you also avoid missing out on lucrative opportunities for growth. And by tailoring your commission structure and dashboards to specific affiliate needs, you can incentivize and engage better with every tier of your affiliate network. These strategies will strengthen affiliate relationships and lay a solid foundation for scaling your program efficiently and sustainably.

Case Study: How fashion brand Cents of Style used LeadDyno affiliate marketing to hit $1.7 million in sales

Cents of Style is a multi-million dollar women’s fashion brand that offers affordable clothing and accessories with an empowering message for women. After launching in 2007, the brand experienced steady growth until a period of stagnation in 2011, which led to their decision to establish an affiliate program. 

Initially, they ran into a series of challenges after choosing affiliate software that proved difficult to work with. Affiliates struggled to navigate an unwieldy platform, leading to low adoption and engagement across the board. Simultaneously, their internal team dealt with frustration as the software lacked key capabilities like customization and affiliate communication tools. They quickly realized that they needed to find affiliate management software that was easy to use, customize, and scale. After weighing out their options, Cents of Style chose LeadDyno, thanks to its variety of user-friendly, customizable features. 

With their new affiliate program in place, Cents of Style scaled their affiliate network to over 400 active affiliates, helping them to achieve stunning program results, including: 

• Affiliate sales equaling over $1.7M 
• A whopping $218K in commission payouts for their affiliates
• An 80% increase in overall web sales

It simply took the right affiliate software to help this small Utah-based business explode in growth, transforming it into a fashion powerhouse with fans across North America. 

How they used LeadDyno to scale their online fashion brand

When it came to choosing the right affiliate software, Cents of Style had plenty of options to choose from. Here’s why they chose LeadDyno over its competitors:

1. Customizable Commissions.

LeadDyno’s multi-tier commission capabilities allowed Cents of Style to build a commission system that started affiliates at a 10% rate and allowed them to scale to 18%, a rate virtually unheard of for apparel companies at the time. This set Cents of Style apart from competitors and incentivized affiliates to push for more engagement and higher sales, leading to a monthly increase of up to $15,000 in sales from their top-performing affiliates alone.

2. Payout Customization Options

With an assortment of payout options, Cents of Style was able to choose their ideal payout methods. Rather than offering affiliates a monthly commission, Cents of Style chose to pay affiliates weekly, which regularly boosted motivation for active affiliates.

3. Real-time Data Tracking

For the team, real-time progress tracking allowed LeadDyno to provide affiliates with unfettered access to their own sales and commission totals, bolstering trust by creating greater payment transparency. Additionally, LeadDyno’s Affiliate Leaderboard feature showcased affiliate results across each tier, allowing affiliates to see their progress and motivating them to aim for higher commission levels.

4. Straightforward Vetting Capabilities

Rather than automatically accepting all affiliates, Cents of Style used LeadDyno to put an affiliate application process in place to ensure that only qualified affiliates would be accepted into their program. This helped prevent low-quality affiliates from gaining access to the program, upholding brand standards.

5. High-Engagement Features

LeadDyno’s newsletter tool allowed Cents of Style to send affiliates a weekly newsletter full of engagement tools like featured discounts, to assist their affiliates with promotions. With LeadDyno’s social sharing tools, affiliates could easily share content with their primary audiences across multiple social media platforms. 

With LeadDyno’s versatile set of features, Cents of Style was able to successfully grow their audience through strategic affiliate program reach. By focusing on key affiliate metrics and customizing their program to empower their affiliates to share their content as much as possible, they saw huge profits and an impressive increase in brand visibility. The combination of a multi-tier commission structure, automated communication tools, and real-time tracking helped Cents of Style to boost sales, expand their affiliate network, and transform their affiliate program into a scalable and profitable marketing channel.  

Conclusion

Whether you’re just getting started or you’re ready to take a thriving affiliate program to the next level, LeadDyno can help you get the most out of affiliate marketing for your fashion brand. From our self-guided onboarding to mass payout automation for thousands of affiliates, LeadDyno simplifies the affiliate management process, so you can scale your brand more easily and advantageously. 

Ready to check out LeadDyno’s many user-friendly features for yourself? Sign up for a free trial today to start turning brand awareness into revenue! 

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