The 5 Best influencer marketing tools for eCommerce

Gymshark

Gymshark is a fitness apparel & accessories brand from the UK. Consider them the next giant in the sportswear industry.
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Top Brands
Tool Category:
Influencer

GRIN

World's first end-to-end creator platform
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The 5 Best influencer marketing tools for eCommerce

Here’s a post that lays out the 5 best influencer marketing tools in D2C and breaks down their different propositions

I work with a number of D2C brands who are looking to diversify their acquisition channel mix. They’ve got a good handle on Facebook, Adwords, Amazon and in some cases, they’re experimenting with retail. 

Influencer marketing is a channel we inevitably end up chatting about. It’s a great way to expand the awareness of the brand, as well as the customer base. But. It’s tricky. 

It’s tricky because some influencers charge a ton of money for a single Instagram post, others have smaller yet engaged followings, and it’s not only difficult to forecast ROAS - but it’s also tough to manage everything that comes with a partnership. From identifying the right influencer, to sending them products, to monitoring their activity and tracking their performance - down to paying them for their work. It’s a real hassle. 

Luckily for us - there are a number of companies out there that are spending their days removing that friction for us. I see those businesses, and I personally struggle to keep up with their different value propositions and feature sets - So here’s a post that lays out the 5 best influencer marketing tools in D2C and breaks down their different propositions. 

One last final callout: Many times you can mix and match these tools together. This isn’t a “pick one” type of post. You may see real benefit in combining some of these. 

  1. Grin
  2. Carro
  3. Gatsby
  4. Hashtag Paid
  5. Social Snowball

Grin 

Used by 137 brands, including Cuts, Darn Good Yarn and Skims

Quick summary: 

Grin is an influencer marketing suite. It basically does everything you’d hope for to manage influencer marketing at scale.

To start, they’ve got 33 million influencers with verified emails that you can invite to your ambassador program. From there, you can automate email sequences to prospective influencers and upload all of your creative assets to maximise the efficiency of getting them onboarded. After, if you want to send your influencers some product, you can manage all of the shipping directly within GRIN (it integrates to Shopify and others). 

Finally - Issue all of your affiliate links, discount codes and payments etc directly within GRIN and track the results of your influencer marketing efforts in a powerful dashboard. 

Pricing: Custom

Analytics dashboard of Grin
Analytics dashboard of Grin


Carro

Used by 63 brands, including Chubbies, Pura Vida and Blendjet

Quick summary: 

Carro’s got a very unique model. It’s got 2 products that are quite different from each other, but can be intertwined. 

The first product is a standard influencer marketing product, with a twist: Identify influencers from a pool of 6 million who are interested in promoting your brand, or influencers can reach out directly and pitch you on an promotion. The great thing is that they can access your products you’re making available for promotions, so an influencer is able to pitch you on quite a specific initiative, such as “I’ll give you 2 Instagram posts in exchange for this Lamp”. 

The second product is called “brand partnerships”. Essentially - you can sell goods from brand partners on your own store, and get a kickback in return. For example: If you’re selling underwear, but don’t sell socks - partner with a sock brand and get a kickback. The coolest thing about this is that the customer profile gets shared across both stores - and the supplier (here the sock brand) is the one responsible for shipping the good out to the customer. So there’s absolutely zero friction in selling other brands’ goods on your store. It’s a similar approach to the newly launched app: “Canal”. 

Pricing: Starter plan: $50/mo + 5% of sales generated through Carro

Carro influencer
Carro influencers just select the brands and products they wish to promote


Gatsby

Used by 7 brands, including Princess Polly, Bev and Pair of Thieves

Quick summary: 

Gatsby’s approach to influencer marketing is quite unique. They’re completely focused on uncovering the influencers who are organically purchasing from your brand, and empowering them. 

The way it works is that, Gatsby asks for your customers’ instagram handles at multiple touchpoints in the buyer journey. They can ask it via popups, via the checkout or even in the post-purchase stage. Once that Instagram handle is captured, they store in their backend and analyze the profile’s following and engagement. This is all done to uncover powerful influencers already purchasing from you. 

Once you’ve identified influencers you might want to engage with, you can do that automatically via your favorite tools: most crucially Klaviyo, Yotpo and Gorgias. 

With Klaviyo you can create custom segments such as “Purchasers with IG following of >15K followers” for example. Once you have that segment in place, create a flow to pitch them on a partnership idea - or even automatically give them a discount or points via a direct integration to Yotpo.  And finally - this IG follower data can also be passed onto Gorgias, so that your customer reps get a quick insight into the social clout of every customer. 

Pricing: Basics plan: $299/mo

Gatsby klaviyo integration
Easily automate outreach to your customers with a significant IG following


Hashtag Paid

Used by 4 brands, including Misen, Hydrant and Frank and Oak. 

Quick summary: 

Hashtag Paid’s also got its own unique twist to influencer marketing. At the core, you have an ability to identify influencers and creators who are a good fit to promote your brand. They’ve built their own product called “Handraise” which does some clever influencer matching for you. 

Similar to Grin, you can manage your comms with influencers directly within the platform and share assets in a streamlined way. But here’s where it gets really interesting: 


Instead of relying on the organic reach from the creators you’ve partnered with, you can advertise / boost the content they’ve put out into the world with your brand - via Facebook Ads. So prospective customers will now be shown ads promoting your brand, but in a more “organic” way - because your brand will be promoted via the personal profile of a creator that’s aligned with your brand. 

So you win on brand exposure, and authenticity. Which hopefully translates to a higher ROAS. That’s the hero feature of Hashtag Paid.  

Pricing: Grow plan: $699/mo

Hashtag Paid Whitelisting
Promote your influencers post, via FB ads


Social Snowball

Used by 2 brands, including Vibe, Gym Gum

Quick summary: 

Finally, we have Social Snowball. Social Snowball’s a new “kid on the block”. I wrote a more in-depth tool review on them here, but if you want the short-hand version, here it is: 

Social Snowball blurs the line between an classic affiliate marketing solution and an influencer marketing tool. The way it works is that, On checkout, your customers are given a custom shareable link (read: affiliate link) that will earn them rewards upon referring to their network. It’s an automatically generated link that you find natively on the thank you page. 

So now your customers no longer need to “enroll” or be accepted for a “partnership opportunity”. They’ll just automatically become a part of your affiliate network on purchase. This gives your brand an opportunity to massively grow your brand ambassadors - without any friction.

Pricing: Grow plan: $39/mo + 5% of sales generated through Social Snowball

Social Snowball automated affiliate links
Automated affiliate links at checkout


There you have it - the 5 best tools to get serious about influencer marketing. Again, you may be able to use a few of these at the same time, for example Grin and Social Snowball are quite complementary. Have fun with it - and really invest in getting this done properly because if done right, influencer marketing can be your rocket ship - take inspiration from Gymshark ;)

-Tim