8 Best Practices to Launch a High Ticket Affiliate Marketing Program

Selling high end products through traditional channels like paid ads isn’t always effective. Since these items are more expensive, your Cost Per Acquisition is going to be high. Plus, customers want to see the ROI of buying from you and make sure that your products are worth it.

Therefore, running ads won't be enough to educate your audience, building trust, and acquire new customers profitably. 

Running an affiliate program for your high ticket ecommerce store is one of the best ways to build credibility for your products. When your affiliates recommend your products to their friends and followers, you leverage their credibility and authority to expand your customer base. Plus, partnering with influencers with authority within your niche is one of the strongest ways to educate your target audience.

In today’s blog, we will talk about how to run a high ticket affiliate marketing program for your Shopify store to boost your sales and lower your paid ads customer acquisition cost.

What is high ticket affiliate marketing? 

High ticket affiliate marketing is a type of affiliate marketing in which your brand sells high value products and pays a much higher commission for each sale. These campaigns are usually more targeted, focusing on a group of people with specific needs or interests in your products. Compared to less expensive products, they also require more educational materials, more nurturing, and have a slightly longer sales cycle.

Since high ticket items are more expensive, your affiliates must be more persuasive, persistent, and educational with their marketing efforts. That’s why the commissions they’ll earn for every single sale are also significantly higher than regular affiliate income. 

How to identify the right affiliates for high ticket affiliate marketing programs? 

To run a successful high ticket affiliate program, your affiliates should be able to convince your target audience to buy from you. This requires more than just promotional posts and testimonials on social media. 

High ticket affiliates need to strategically build trust with their content marketing, maintain regular communication with their audience, and encourage them to engage with their content. The way they promote your products should be personalized and detailed enough to showcase the affiliate’s expertise in the field, and the unique selling point of your product. 

Unlike traditional affiliate marketing where you could partner with anybody, for running high paying affiliate programs, you need to qualify your participants based on certain parameters.

Here are the qualities you should be looking for: 

• Authority and credibility in your niche
• Proven track record of promoting premium and high value affiliate products.
• An online presence and a loyal following among your target audience.
• Skilled at affiliate marketing content creation.

8 Best practices to build an affiliate program suitable for your product

High end products involve a more complex, lengthy, and demanding sales process than lower priced items. These products generally appeal to a smaller, more selective audience. That’s why your Shopify affiliates require an acutely methodical approach to drive results.

Here are the eight best practices that business owners should follow to get better results:  

1. Analyze your past campaigns

High ticket affiliate marketing is all about educating the prospect, showing them the ROI upfront, and building trust with problem-solution content. This requires precision which you can only achieve through rigorous experiments. 

So if you have launched a high ticket affiliate marketing program before, you need to analyze which of its aspects worked for your brand and which ones didn’t. Were the affiliates in your previous program fit to promote high end products? Did they struggle to drive conversions, resulting in fewer sales? Did you provide them with enough resources and assistance? 

Your goal here is to find: 

• The strengths of the Shopify affiliate program you ran. 
• The mistakes you made. 

2. Define your goals

If this is your first time launching a high ticket affiliate marketing campaign, we suggest you go slow. Otherwise, you may end up wasting time without any tangible results. Here are some crucial steps to define the goals for your marketing program: 

• Clarify your value proposition. It should define exactly what makes your product unique. Is it luxury, exclusivity, or premium quality? Outline the key benefits and pain points your product solves.
• Analyze and segment your target market’s demographics, buying habits, and preferences. It will help you with accurate targeting throughout the program. Keep refining them in regular intervals. 
• Set SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) goals. For example, instead of “increase average order value of high ticket products”, your goal should be “achieve a 30% increase in AOV of high ticket products over the next 6 months. 

3. Analyze your competitors

Conduct competitor analysis to see how other brands are running their affiliate or referral programs. Try to find out:

• What does their commission structure look like? 
• What kind of engagement do their affiliates drive? 
• Are there any common traits between their chosen affiliates? 
• Try to learn the challenges, avoid mistakes, and create differentiation in your approach.

4. Decide the commission you want to give

Design competitive commissions to incentivize affiliates and keep them motivated. Remember, high ticket affiliate marketing requires significant effort. So, to keep your affiliate marketer interested throughout the long sales cycle they should be able to make a substantial income through commissions.

The goal here is to offer commissions that are attractive enough to retain affiliates while maintaining your business’s profitability. 

Note ⛄: If you’re working with macro affiliates or celebrities with a huge follower base (5M or above) and reputation in your industry, you will probably have to pay an upfront fees. Or, they might charge on a per-post basis apart from the commission per sale you've agreed upon.

Here are some things to keep in mind while deciding commissions for high ticket affiliates: 

• Calculate COGS (Cost of Goods Sold), including production, shipping, and operational expenses, and measure profit margins for each product. This will help you determine how much room you have to offer commissions without hampering profitability. 
• Look into different high ticket affiliate programs in your niche. See their average commission structures to identify common practices. Do they offer monthly commission (if this applies to your product), revenue share, or commission per sale?  
• Look at your current Customer Acquisition Cost through other channels and see if you want to set your affiliate commissions as high as that or right below it to incentivize your partners.
• Go through the best affiliate programs in your industry and bechbenchmarkt are the typical commission rates they offer. You will understand what affiliates experienced in high end product promotions expect.
• Offer additional bonuses for achieving specific milestones like reaching a specific number of affiliate sales within a set period.
• Create higher commissions and bonuses for specific campaigns and limited-time promotions, encouraging them to drive more sales.

5. Build a tiered program for affiliate retention 

When you're selling high ticket products, you want to put in the effort to retain your affiliates for the long term. However, the higher the price, the more time it takes to build trust and sell something. So, if your affiliates get demotivated and decide to not promote you, you will be stuck in a loop of finding new promoters and putting in the resources, only to be left with an ineffective program.

Here, high commissions may not be enough. You need to keep them engaged by creating a tangible sense of achievement — a tiered program is an excellent format for that. 

Since it provides different commission levels based on performance, tiered programs encourage affiliates to strive for higher sales and engage more deeply with the product and brand. Every level the unlock privates them to go high, keeping your program effective. Plus, a tiered program helps in balancing investments with ROI, as the rewards increase based on sales and performance. 

Here is what a tiered program can look like: 

6. Prevent code leaks and fraud

One of the biggest challenges in affiliate marketing is code leaks and fraudulent promotions. This can result in heavy losses, especially if you are running a high ticket affiliate program. 

The products are expensive, and the commissions are high. So, duplicate code usage will skyrocket your spending for the same amount of sales. Moreover, these instances also make it very difficult to judge an affiliate’s merit, losing you a lot of money. 

To safeguard your program, consider using scalable affiliate management software with built-in security features like a unique link generator, tracking, and reporting.

Social Snowball offers Safelinks that will put an end to code leakages once and for all. It generates unique, single-use discount codes for every customer who clicks on it. Your affiliates can share these links on every channel, just like regular codes. Here's how they look:

7. Activate your affiliates with email flows

Enrolling affiliates into your program isn’t enough for your campaign's success. You need to make sure they are actively promoting your brand. One excellent way of doing this is through automated email activation flows. 

Here are some tips to do that: 

• Send them welcome emails to thank affiliates for joining. This email should introduce them to your brand, detail your program’s perks, and set clear expectations about performance, tiers and rewards. It should also include their affiliate link, or codes.
• Create and share swipe files of the best affiliate posts so your new affiliates have a clear point of reference.
• You can even segment the swipe file as per different customer segments so that your affiliates know which posts will resonate better for which segment.
• Share your style guide in the next email to help keep the affiliate’s effort on-brand from the very start.
• Share specific case studies from your top performers and point out exactly what made them work.

To make things easier, Social Snowball syncs with two top email marketing solutions, Klaviyo and Sendlane. You can set up email flows for affiliates from your dashboard and automate email campaigns for better communication.  

This will set your affiliates up for success with relevant and consistent support in their promotional activities. 

Besides sending timely activation messages, Klaviyo will also track email KPIs and add them to your dashboard so that you know the activation campaign’s effectiveness.

Bonus tip ⛄: Maintain regular communication with your affiliates. Ask them about the difficulties they are facing and check on the relevance of your rewards. Adjust according to the feedback.

8. Track your metrics regularly

Launching a high ticket affiliate program and driving good sales is not the end of the road. You must be diligent to make sure it continues to grow. For that, you must monitor its performance through KPI tracking. These insights will tell you what aspects need to be adjusted, to maintain the effectiveness of your program. 

Here are some crucial affiliate program metrics you should be tracking: 

• Revenue
• Orders
• New Affiliates
• Average Order Value
• Commissions
• Conversion rate
• ROI
• Cost Per Action
• Link Clicks

Our analytics dashboard lets you keep a close tab on all these metrics without any manual intervention. 

How Sleep.me built an affiliate program for their high AOV product category 

Here's an example for you to take inspiration from before you start building your high ticket affiliate program.

Sleep.me, a luxury sleeping product brand, built one for their high-end affiliate programs with S. 

After a business outage, Sleep.me wanted to relaunch their affiliate program and reactivate their existing affiliate network. However, managing the network became a time-consuming process. They tried to integrate multiple affiliate management tools, but they were too clunky for their small team.

Moreover, their star product, the Chilipad, requires significant demonstrations and education to explain its benefits, making it difficult to scale sales through traditional marketing channels.

Once they opted for Social Snowball, our Klaviyo integration allowed the brand to automate affiliate communications, reactive old affiliates, and streamline program management. Safelinks helped Sleep.me prevent code leakage. They also saved hours with our bulk payment feature through the Trolley integration. Moreover, we offered personalized support to Sleep.me’s internal team, helping them grow strategically.

The results were exponential: 

• Affiliates and referrals generate over 10% of Sleepme’s GMV (Gross Merchandise Value). 
• The brand could lower the affiliate program’s CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) by 50% than that of paid ads.
• Sleep.me’s small team saved hours of manual work each week, allowing them to focus on growth and strategy.

Conclusion

Running a high-ticket affiliate program comes with some unique challenges. It’s difficult to keep affiliates motivated throughout the lengthy sales cycle. Moreover, from deciding commissions to crafting resources, it’s a lot of work. 

Therefore, invest in a tool like Social Snowball, which will allow you to:

• Automate your affiliate communication.
• Pay your affiliates in bulk with just two clicks. 
• Integrates with other marketing tools and payment tools for streamlined processes.
• Prevent code leaks and fraud.
• Tracks all necessary metrics and generates reports with actionable insights.

Book a demo today to implement a successful high ticket affiliate program for your Shopify store!

Frequently asked questions 

Is affiliate marketing useful for high ticket products?

Yes, with the right strategies and brand advocates, affiliate marketing can be very useful for high ticket products. Here are a few reasons: 

• Considering your products are high ticket, even your Cost Per Acquisition will be very high if you're running ads to increase your sales. Therefore, selling your products via affiliates will be more cost effective compared to paid ads. Plus, your costs will be predictable since you'll be able to decide the commission you want to pay for each sale.
• Affiliates often have established relationships with niche audiences which is difficult to access through traditional advertising. High ticket affiliate marketing lets you leverage the influencer’s credibility and reach an already engaged audience who are more likely to consider high-value purchases.
• High ticket affiliates know how to put forth your expensive product’s value so that it justifies the high price. They know what makes their specific audience click. This makes the promotions more targeted and effective.  

What are examples of some high-ticket products? 

Here are some examples of some high-ticket products: 

• Real estate
• Vehicles
• High-end electronics and gadgets 
• Software (SaaS tools)
• Art and collectibles
• Jewelry 

What commission rates should I offer for high-ticket affiliate programs?

Typically, the commission rates for high ticket affiliate programs can range from 10% to even 50% in some cases. However, you must consider your profit margin and the length of the sales cycle for each promoted product to determine a fair commission rate for your high-ticket affiliates. 

You can also consider a flat fee for each sale for very pricey products. This simplifies the payout process, offers clear earning potential for affiliates, and lets you balance profit better. 

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