For ecommerce brands, word of mouth has always been one of the most powerful strategies to drive more sales. Brands have set up structured programs— affiliate marketing and customer referrals— to incentivize word of mouth and scale growth through trust. 

Affiliate marketing lets brands partner with influencers and creators who promote products in exchange for commissions on sales. Meanwhile, customer referrals leverage the power of happy customers to bring in new buyers, often with incentives like discounts or rewards.

But, to run these programs, you need a tool that consolidates your efforts, reduces time and effort, and simplifies tracking. This is why you need Social Snowball.

Social Snowball lets medium to enterprise-sized ecommerce brands run these programs by automating onboarding, communication, and payouts, preventing fraud, and offering a consolidated dashboard for easy and accurate tracking.

Why leading DTC brands choose Social Snowball

Leading direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands choose Social Snowball because it solves common pain points that most affiliate and referral programs struggle with, such as:

• Manual tracking and payouts: Traditional programs require a lot of manual work like tracking sales, calculating commissions, and processing payouts. This can be time-consuming and prone to errors.
• Coupon code leaks: Managing coupon codes can be challenging, especially when codes are shared outside of the intended channels. When affiliate or customer referral codes end up on public forums or coupon sites, it often results in unauthorized discounts, reduced margins, and lost revenue.
• Lack of automation and segmentation: Without proper automation, managing different affiliates, influencers, and customer segments becomes inefficient and complex.
• Poor influencer attribution: It’s difficult to track how much revenue is being driven by each influencer, leading to unclear ROI and potential mismanagement of influencer relationships.

Social Snowball was built to eliminate those exact issues. It helps brands:

• Automate processes: Social Snowball automates onboarding, communication, product seeding, payouts, and tracking. New customers and influencers can easily become affiliates, and the platform streamlines all operations without needing manual intervention.
  
  
• Manage multiple programs in one place: Social Snowball allows brands to manage customer referral program, DTC and TikTok Shop affiliate programs, all in one place.
  
  
• Turn every customer and influencer into a performance marketer: Social Snowball enables brands to turn every customer into a potential affiliate and every influencer into a dedicated partner, driving consistent results and growth.
  
  
• Prevent fraud and attribution loss: Social Snowball’s Safelinks feature generates unique, single-use discount codes, eliminating the risk of coupon code leaks and ensuring accurate influencer attribution.

Setting up affiliate and referral programs inside Social Snowball

Setting up affiliate and referral programs using Social Snowball is quick and simple, with features that let you instantly start driving sales through customer and influencer partnerships.  Here’s how you can do it:

1. Automatic enrollment

With Social Snowball, you can turn your customers into affiliates instantly. As soon as a customer makes a purchase, they are automatically enrolled into your affiliate program, instantly receiving their personalized dashboard with unique referral links or codes.

 This feature makes it simple for your customers to start sharing your brand with others, turning them into brand advocates.

For example, Triquetra Health used Social Snowball to streamline their affiliate process. They implemented an automatic referral program that offered a 15% commission to all customers, allowing them to promote their products easily.

This automated system helped the brand onboard 6,246 new affiliates, saving them time and significantly boosting their sales through customer referrals.

2. Customizable program types

Social Snowball allows you to create distinct programs for affiliates, customers, influencers, and ambassadors, all with customizable tiered commissions and segmentation. 

This flexibility helps you differentiate between high-performing creators and one-time referrers, ensuring that your top affiliates are properly rewarded for their ongoing efforts. 

For example, Triquetra Health took advantage of this feature by setting up three structured affiliate programs:

• A referral program offering a 15% commission for all customers.
• An ambassador program with 20% commissions, free products, and community access for their top creators.
• A loyalty program for repeat customers with multi-use referral codes.

This tiered approach allowed the brand to segment affiliates based on their activity, rewarding their most active creators while also nurturing casual referrers. 

It helped streamline affiliate management and incentivized ongoing promotion from their most engaged partners.

3. Safelinks & code protection

Social Snowball’s Safelinks feature has completely changed how ecommerce brands handle discount codes by generating unique, single-use coupon codes tied to each affiliate link. This feature prevents code abuse, fraud, and ensures accurate attribution without requiring manual policing.

With Safelinks, brands can also offer personalized shopping experiences. Each affiliate referral generates a unique discount for every customer, and the system ensures that no code can be reused or shared outside the intended audience. 

This level of protection ensures that your affiliate program runs smoothly, without the risk of fraud undermining your sales. Here’s how it looks:

For instance, Tumble, a brand known for its innovative home products, faced a significant issue with coupon code leaks. By integrating Safelinks, Tumble was able to automatically generate unique codes for every customer who clicked an affiliate link. These codes expire immediately after being used, making them impossible to reuse or leak.

As a result, Tumble achieved a 22.86x ROI and saw a 4% growth in total revenue, allowing them to focus on expanding their affiliate program and rewarding genuine partners.

Managing your programs

1. Self-serve payout portal

Social Snowball offers 700+ global payout options (PayPal, Venmo, bank transfers, store credit, gift cards, and more), allowing affiliates to choose how they want to be paid. For brands with hundreds or thousands of active affiliates, this flexibility means you don’t need to manage payouts via spreadsheets.

The platform also automates the entire process. You can set up payout thresholds and schedules, and execute bulk payouts with a single click.

For ecommerce teams handling large-scale programs, this eliminates finance bottlenecks and frees up your time for high-value activities, allowing you to scale your affiliate base without adding manual finance overhead.

2. Automated communication

With Social Snowball, you can set up fully automated email and SMS flows that engage affiliates at every key moment without manual effort. These communications are triggered by specific actions such as new referral sales, periods of inactivity, performance milestones, payout updates, or special program offers.

Whether it's celebrating their first sale, nudging them to re-engage after a lull, or announcing limited-time bonuses, these automated touchpoints ensure your affiliates feel supported and driven while your team stays focused on growth.

3. Social listening

Social Snowball tracks brand mentions across various platforms, giving you real-time access to user-generated content (UGC). This allows you to identify emerging influencers and gather authentic content you can repurpose across marketing channels.

Instead of relying solely on outbound outreach or influencer databases, Social Snowball’s social listening makes creator discovery an organic part of your affiliate strategy.

Social listening also enables brands to capture authentic UGC (unboxing video, product review, or transformation posts) that can be repurposed across marketing channels, like paid ads, emails, landing pages, etc.

4. Tiered rewards and performance triggers

Social Snowball’s tiered reward structures let you set performance-based milestones that unlock higher commissions, exclusive products, early access perks, and even custom branding. 

You can automate affiliate promotions to higher reward levels and trigger bonus communications when affiliates meet specific goals.

This allows you to differentiate between top performers and casual referrers, incentivizing long-term loyalty and growth without adding an administrative burden. 

Your affiliates are rewarded for consistently driving results, making it a powerful tool to scale your program efficiently.

5. Real-time analytics and tracking

Social Snowball provides detailed real-time reporting on affiliate performance, giving you insights into key metrics such as:

• Revenue generated per affiliate
• Conversion rates by campaign
• Clicks, AOV, and opt-in rates by channel
• Commission payouts over time
• LTV of referred customers

This lets you to track ROI accurately and optimize commissions for each program based on performance. Use these granular insights to identify high-performing affiliates and optimize commission structures or reward tiers to maximize revenue and engagement. 

6. Integrations with popular ecommerce tools

Social Snowball integrates seamlessly with essential Shopify apps built for DTC brands to enable affiliate marketing, such as:

• Marketing tools: Klaviyo, Postscript, and Sendlane integrate seamlessly with Social Snowball to trigger automated email and SMS flows based on affiliate behavior, such as sign-up, first sale, or inactivity, helping you stay connected with affiliates without manual work.

• TikTok Shop: Social Snowball's native integration with TikTok Shop lets you manage both TikTok Shop and DTC affiliate programs from a single platform. Recruit new affiliates, track performance, and streamline payouts, while maintaining visibility into how affiliates are performing across both channels.

• Thank you page: Social Snowball integrates with KnoCommerce, enabling you to convert new customers into affiliates through your post-purchase survey. This lets you capture more affiliate referrals by priming customers to share their referral links or codes right after checkout.
• Subscription apps: Set up recurring commissions for affiliate referrals that drive subscriptions for your store by integrating Social Snowball with Loop, Skio, Stay AI, or Recharge. You can set different commission rates for first orders and recurring subscriptions, making sure affiliates are rewarded consistently over time.

What makes Social Snowball better than other affiliate and referral marketing tools?

Social Snowball stands out from other affiliate and referral marketing tools because of its flexibility, automation capabilities, and comprehensive features designed to scale programs easily. Here’s why:

• Custom tiering and multi-program flexibility: You can create multiple affiliate programs with custom tier structures, allowing you to segment your affiliates. This way, you can reward your top influencers with higher commissions or even offer special incentives to VIPs. This flexibility lets you cater to different affiliate groups and motivate them based on their performance.

• Automated onboarding: Social Snowball automates the onboarding process for all your affiliates. New customers, even those who haven’t bought, can become affiliates with just a click.
  
  
• Automated and timely communication: Social Snowball lets you set up automated, triggered messages to be sent to affiliates, sharing timely updates, milestones, and performance insights, keeping them engaged and motivated.
  
  
• Safelinks for fraud prevention: One of the biggest issues with affiliate programs is coupon code leaks. Social Snowball tackles this with Safelinks which generates unique, single-use discount codes for each affiliate link. This prevents fraud and ensures that only real referrals are rewarded.

• Social listening for creator discovery: Social Snowball offers a social listening feature, which allows you to track user-generated content (UGC) and mentions across platforms like Instagram and TikTok. This helps you find new creators who are already talking about your brand, even if they haven’t been recruited yet. You can save and repurpose this content to boost your marketing efforts.

• TikTok Shop integration: Unlike many affiliate marketing tools, Social Snowball is fully integrated with TikTok Shop. This allows you to manage both DTC (direct-to-consumer) and TikTok Shop affiliate programs in one place. You can automatically recruit new affiliates to your TikTok program, track their performance across both platforms, and manage payouts seamlessly from a unified dashboard.

Ready to get started with Social Snowball?

If you're serious about turning customers, influencers, and fans into consistent revenue, without getting buried in administrative tasks, then this platform is built for you. Social Snowball automates every step of your affiliate and referral program, from activation to payouts, allowing you to scale effortlessly while maintaining control.

Stop wasting time on manual processes and start focusing on growing your business. With Social Snowball, you can turn every customer interaction into an opportunity, track real-time performance, and ensure accurate payouts easily.