Smile.io
When I started working at Country Life Natural Foods, they were using a software called GoAffPro to manage their influencer program. In the past, RatedVFoods worked at Country Life, where she was responsible for setting up the program. Let’s just say it highly favored the influencers and not so much Country Life. What happened was that platforms like Honey and other coupon crawlers began code stuffing, resulting in almost 10% or more of the orders being attributed to them. This meant that influencers were receiving sales that they had no influence over. This was a massive issue because our margins are very slim, being a food business. 80% of all revenue covers COGs, which leaves 20% to cover operating costs. Now, imagine that these affiliate orders come with a 10% discount and a 5% commission payout to the affiliate, leaving 5% for the business to cover operational expenses. We were bleeding money badly, and something had to be done.
Burning cash
Social Snowball was recommended to us by Michael Rathman. They are the Cadillac of all affiliate software for sure. Max (far right) explained how they had the technology we needed to prevent code stuffing, known as “Smart Links.” However, due to the number of affiliates complaining about losing their codes, I caved to their demands and allowed some codes to remain, while everyone else had smart links. We went from under 2,000 affiliates to 13,000 in a matter of months. They have software that allows you to auto-enroll everyone as an affiliate. That approach worked well for us in growing the list and helping us attract more active affiliates. However, our business model and the fact that I hadn’t completely transitioned to smart links meant that we needed to find another software to manage the affiliate program, yet again. Now we're spending even more money on software to give money away.
Smile.io
This is where Smile.io comes in. This software made complete sense for our business because it’s a loyalty program that rewards shoppers for spending, as opposed to an affiliate program software, which rewards customers for driving referral sales. However, here’s what’s awesome: the Smile software also allows us to have a referral program, which enables us to give Smile Points (essentially store credit) to customers for referrals instead of cash. The CEO was thrilled about that one!
We used the software seamlessly from October to December 2024, with zero issues. However, in January, I announced that we were ending beta testing, and now only Country Life+ members could continue earning rewards points as they shop on our website after March 15. This did a few things for our store. The most positive thing was that it drove a frenzy of sales as customers wanted to redeem their hard-earned points. (I might have encouraged them a little bit…)
Here is where things got a little complicated. Before the switch, we had only two customer types: wholesale customers and regular shoppers. Now I've added subscribers to the mix, which is the smallest set of customers but the most valuable, as they're paying to shop on our website. It makes complete sense to give them reward points or even bonus reward points. Unfortunately, at the current price point, I can only offer one program at a time, so instead of two credits per dollar, we have increased it to four credits. We encountered some issues with how their software categorizes customer types. Since their app is injected into our store through third-party software, I am unable to use a script to prevent the software from loading based on the customer tag.
We started receiving a slew of emails and phone calls from customers asking why they are being reminded about smile points when they know they cannot participate in the program. I, feeling distressed, made a video and shared it on LinkedIn. Immediately, the CEO, the COO, and the Head of Partnerships reached out to me and reassured me that they would look into our case to ensure it gets resolved.
Smile leadership reached out
I was blown away by how human this company is. Anyone who has tried interacting with big tech companies knows how cold and heartless it can be sometimes, being just another credit card in their database. Our account manager reached out with a booking link, and we met the next day, and they started working on our case immediately.
I forgot to mention that we realized how we were being billed, and it wasn’t fair pricing because only a small subset of customers were now participating in the program. Smile.io thoroughly understood our usage and reduced our bill accordingly. As our subscription program grows, so will our bill, which makes sense. But now we’re only paying for those users and not everyone else.
I can’t speak highly enough about this company. If you're considering adding a loyalty program to your e-commerce store, I highly recommend consulting with the Smile.io team first.
Till next post.
