How to accurately measure influencer-driven sales

When you think of ROI, what is the first thing that comes to mind? More often than not, you’ll think of revenue growth from direct sales. 

For most brands, sales is arguably the most important of the 4 primary influencer marketing objectives. Unlike brand awareness or content, sales is an obvious marker of revenue growth and typically a big priority for businesses across the board. However, sales attribution can be tricky with influencer marketing. 

So, let’s dig deeper into how brands can accurately track influencer-driven sales — plus, examples of how some of our favorite brands drove more sales through influencer marketing.

How can brands boost sales through influencer marketing?

Each of your influencer marketing activations will lead to sales in some way — both long-term and short-term.

Long-term sales will happen as a result of your brand-building initiatives over time, while short-term sales will be through seasonal activations or special sales-focused campaigns like Black Friday discounts, summer flash sales, and the like. 

How do brands track influencer-driven sales?

When it comes to measuring sales, it’s important to look at both direct, trackable sales as well as overall sales growth. This approach will inform you of how your influencer marketing efforts are contributing to your business. 

So, how can you track all of these sales? 

Unique links

This is a specific, trackable link that you can use to attribute where visits originate. 

On Aspire, you’re able to track affiliate sales and pay influencers based on performance. Using our new sales tracking tool, you can easily generate unique affiliate links for every influencer to capture any major conversion event, like sales, email signups, app downloads, and more. In addition, if you want to create incentive structures for your influencers, you can pay them based on conversions.

Promo codes

This is a distinctive discount code, usually personalized to an influencer. 

If you’ve got Shopify, you can use Aspire’s Shopify integration to automatically generate unique promo codes for every influencer in your program and easily track the results.

Influencer whitelisting

Influencer whitelisting is a tool that allows you to put spend behind influencer content and seamlessly turn them into paid social ads that run under the influencer’s social handle. Whitelisted ads can be fully tracked and measured, from impressions and clicks to conversions.

While you can manually whitelist influencers by asking for access via Facebook Business Manager, you can streamline this whole process by using Aspire’s Brand Access Manager (BAM). BAM allows brands to:

• Repurpose influencer-generated content directly on creators social accounts to create high-performing ads or boost existing posts
• Create new audiences using creators’ followers and engagers
• Test and optimize ads with creators’ social accounts directly in Facebook Ads Manager
• Gain access to creator accounts to fully control your media buying in-house
• Request for advertiser access directly in the collaboration terms
• Automatically connect to your Facebook Business Manager to reduce the back-and-forth with creators

How do brands determine sales success?

Use the tools mentioned above to track every sale that can be directly attributed back to influencer marketing through promo codes, swipe-up tracking links, and analytics. Pay special attention to these metrics:

• Number of sales driven through influencers
• Dollar amount of sales driven through the program as a whole

Then, when it comes to calculating the impact of your sales campaign, divide the total amount paid to influencers by sales driven through trackable links to find your sales ROI. 

For example: $5000 (Influencer payment fees) / 30,000 sales = $100 cost per sale

What brands leverage influencers for sales? 

Many brands have driven massive sales through influencer marketing. Here are just a few examples of how leading brands have leveraged Aspire’s sales tracking tools to build out their influencer strategies and boost conversions.

Mountain Rose Herbs

Since 1987, Mountain Rose Herbs has been serving its loyal customer base with the highest quality organic herbs, spices, teas, essential oils, and DIY ingredients used in herbalism. As Mountain Rose Herbs has grown up throughout the years, the legacy brand has tapped affiliates to stay relevant while continuing to express its steadfast, authentic values.

Affiliate marketing is a win-win. Mountain Rose Herbs gets increased traffic and sales, while affiliates get commission. Plus, the sales that are generated are easily tracked in Aspire with each unique affiliate link. This strategy has proven to be extremely successful, with affiliates bringing in over $140K of revenue and generating another $1K each day.

COOLA

For organic skincare brand COOLA, driving sales is all about spreading word-of-mouth based on real, authentic brand love. Since influencers act as tastemakers in the beauty space, their recommendations provide social proof that today’s consumers require when making purchase decisions. The brand started investing in influencer marketing to build a community of COOLA fans who can not only promote products, but produce authentic content that can draw in new customers.

To do so, COOLA uses Aspire to identify on-brand influencers and build long-term relationships with creators who have proven to work well with the brand. Mykella Gannon, COOLA’s Marketing Director, invests in these relationships by helping creators hit their professional goals as well by giving them unique discount codes for them to share with their communities, repurposing their content, and much more.

As a result of these efforts, COOLA was able to boost its online presence, as well as sales. Since scaling its program, the brand has acquired and retained more than 37,500 loyal followers on Instagram, who have proved to be valuable community members with high purchase intent. In fact, after its “Drop It Like It’s Hot” campaign, sales for the Sun Silk Drops were up 60% from the year prior. 

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Invest in influencers to boost sales

Influencers have immense power to increase sales for your brand. Utilize the right tools to track influencer-driven sales, then re-invest in creators who bring in successful results. Remember to keep track of these direct sales as well as overall sales growth to understand how your influencer marketing efforts are impacting your business as a whole. 

Want to learn more about influencer marketing ROI? Visit our resource center.