When you think about what is needed to grow your brand, you probably come up with a list that looks something like this:
- Advertising on social media
- A virtual assistant to answer all your customer service emails
- Expensive Shopify apps and marketing software
- A/B testing your creative assets
- Growing your social following and email subscribers
- Implementing a retargeting strategy
However, we’d like to suggest one thing that you need for growth that trumps all of these ideas: Partners.
Creating partnerships is the single most important strategy you can implement for the growth of your brand.
You should be building a network of brands, influencers, and customers who want to advocate for your brand. These advocates are willing to sing your praises because you’ve found ways to encourage them that are mutually beneficial. In the case of influencers, they may post about your brand on social media in exchange for discount codes and gifted products. Customers may become your ambassadors because you support a cause that they care about, or because you provided an above-and-beyond customer experience that they appreciated.
For brand partnerships, you should be finding brands that can benefit with you from co-marketing, co-branding, and other types of partnerships. This could be brands that complement your own brand, or brands that share your values.
Carro believes in brand partnerships so much that we built a suite of tools to help streamline your brand partnerships.
Here’s 10 ways that Brand Partnerships can help you grow your business.
What are Carro’s Brand Partnerships?
Our brand partnership platform helps brands work together to lower marketing costs and increase revenue — by cross-selling your products on other amazing Shopify stores.
Carro created this partnership platform to take the legwork out of your partnerships. We seamlessly integrate stores so that you can partner together and list each other’s items in your own stores. You’ll each share the profits and each customer’s lifetime value when they purchase through our integration. That’s right, you can list other store’s products easily on your own site, then Carro automatically splits the product’s sale price when it sells on your store. All the benefits, without increasing your workload or marketing costs.
With Carro’s Brand Partnerships, retailers can add additional products and revenue to their store without any effort, and suppliers can sell their products on trusted brands’ sites. You can choose to be a retailer, supplier, or both.
Sell bikes but don’t sell helmets? Now you can. Don’t let your customers go anywhere else. With a brand partner, you can offer everything they need without having to purchase inventory. You’ll sell the helmets on your site, your partner will ship the helmet automatically.
The best part of Carro’s Brand Partnerships is that there’s no upfront inventory costs or net terms for your partnerships. You can expand into new product categories without the risk of carrying any inventory, or retail your products on additional sites without having to worry about the paperwork and order importing that traditional dropshipping or wholesaling has.
With Carro’s Brand Partnerships, we’ve streamlined the process for co-marketing and co-branding products so that you can focus on what’s really important: selling more together!
Listen to Our Founder's Explanation of Brand Partnerships!
Build Mutually Beneficial Partnerships with Influencers, Press/Media, and Other Shopify Brands to Sell More Together!
Partnering with a brand to expand your product offerings can help your overall customer experience. Your customers are looking for your products, but they may also be looking for accessories or related products that you don’t carry… yet.
Instead of sending customers looking for accessories on other sites, you can partner with a brand to provide these related products. That way, your customers can complete their entire buying journey on your site, including the accessories that they didn’t even realize they needed.
Completing the buyer journey also creates greater customer satisfaction because they won’t have to go searching for something else in order to create the complete solution that they need.
You’re Selling Solutions
The products listed on your website should be solving a problem. Instead of selling products, you are selling solutions. Your customers have some problem in common, and your job is to find it out and solve it. If you can do this smoothly and easily for the customer, even better.
When selling a solution, you should focus your pitch on how this product or products solves their problems. However, the problem doesn’t have to be life or death. A problem could be as simple as finding a matching necklace to the bracelet you just added to your cart. In this case, offering a matching necklace would be a solution to their problem.
Brand partnerships can help you solve their problems and offer solutions by widening your product catalog. If you’re selling jewelry, a brand partnership could allow you to offer jewelry boxes, jewelry cleaners, or organizers. All of these would be solutions to a problem that your customers have: storing and caring for the jewelry that they just bought from you.
Bundling Your Solutions
One way to streamline this problem solving process and make it even easier for the customer is to offer product bundles. Bundles are also an easy way to increase your average order value and to sell multiple items in a single purchase.
Some Shopify apps for bundling:
You’ve probably heard of successful store popups that appear throughout cities, selling fast in short-term rentals and typically offering customers a unique experience with that brand that they wouldn’t have otherwise had.
Digital pop-up stores rely on the same concept. A website offers a collection within their existing store that highlights a certain brand or theme for a limited time.
You’ll always have new releases to share with your audience, and these brands that you feature in your popups will gain increased exposure with your audiences. It’s a great way to garner new interest from your existing audiences and to create extremely targeted marketing for your site, because a pop-up shop is typically narrower in focus than the rest of your online store.
Read more about digital pop-up stores here.
A limited edition collection can create urgency and interest for both brands, as well as opportunities to gain publicity from the partnership. A limited edition collection is also a great set of products to feature in your pop-up shop (more on that above).
Carro’s Brand Partnerships streamlines your limited edition collections when they are made with a partner. You can work with the partner to create a co-branded collection, then you’ll be able to sell the products through only one fulfillment method with one brand, instead of trying to figure out complex fulfillment systems or splitting the costs and the inventory. In other words, both online stores can sell the products and profit, but only one store handles the fulfillment so that all the inventory stays in one convenient location. Let Carro seamlessly integrate the stores and just split the profits!
A limited edition collection could feature items that are best-sellers from your brand partner, or they could be items specially curated for you. You can even do some co-branding and create a collection together that captures both of your brand’s aesthetics.
Co-branded products are custom products that are created with your brand partner. You both have input on the product design and create a product that captures both your brand’s perspectives. For example, Taco Bell partnered with Doritos to create the Doritos Locos taco, a taco that has a Doritos shell instead of a normal hard taco shell. In this case, both food brands contributed what they are known for to create a unique hybrid.
Co-branded products are a great way for established brands to share their audiences and create buzz. They are borrowing each other’s clout so that both brands can benefit.
When you are co-marketing with a brand, you can offer some of their products on your site, and vice versa, so that co-marketing doesn’t just exist on social media, but is actually incorporated into the fabric of your site.
Be sure to ask them what they’re best-sellers are. You never know what you might learn about your own target market through this sharing of information!
The real challenge for co-branding and co-marketing is typically getting the product line set up in both stores and easily keeping track of the inventory from the partnership. Instead of negotiating back and forth with endless email messages, you can create a product collection together that is automatically synced to the stores with Carro’s Brand Partnerships. That way, you can sell each other’s products in your own stores and co-market to your respective audiences about the collaboration.
Carro’s Brand Partnerships is the ultimate solution for cause marketing. You can support the brands that espouse the same values and create unique opportunities to share a cause with your audience through these curated collections.
One of the biggest difficulties of cause marketing is finding a way to donate the proceeds or even finding an organization to support. What if you could list products on your site that already have all this sorted out? Carro’s Brand Partnerships allows you to llist products that already have this giving component on your site in a collection for the cause. Then, you can advertise that a portion of the proceeds go to support a specific cause, without having to handle the donations yourself.
You can also list products that help you communicate your brand’s values. If you want to support women in business, you can create a collection of products by women-owned businesses. The possibilities are endless. All you have to do is connect with these brands and list their items to help the causes closest to your heart.
If you added an extra $5-10 to each purchase, how would that affect your bottom line? Increasing your Average Order Value (AOV) can have a big impact on your revenue growth goals. It also could be as simple as adding small product recommendations right before your customers check out. An up-selling or cross-selling app can help your customers add additional products and services to their cart so that you can increase your AOV.
However, you may not have the products necessary to really offer related products to your customers. With Carro’s Brand Partnerships, you can up-sell and cross-sell with other brand’s products so that you don’t have to worry about inventory. Instead, you can offer a wide assortment of products that relate to your own, then use the sales data to determine which product variations, bundles, and accessories work best with your existing product catalog.
Here are a few examples of cross-selling/up-selling apps:
- In Cart Upsell by InCart Upsell
- Order Bump (for Shopify Plus)
- Discounted Upsells – Cross Sell by Booster Apps
Read more about Up-Selling and Cross-Selling
Let’s face it, dropshipping gets a really bad rap. From the communication deficiencies to the slow ship times, it’s anything but a good customer experience. Instead of struggling through slow shipping and lost packages, partnerships made through Carro’s brand partnerships excel at customer service because they are brands just like you and they already have the infrastructure to answer customer queries. Each brand partner will provide amazing customer service to those who order, so you won’t have to worry.
Elevating your supplier relationships means more than just finding suppliers who are reliable. When your customers purchase a product from a brand partnership, the brand name carries trust and confidence because they are well-known brands. Your suppliers should lend credibility to your brand and you should be proud to list their brand name on your site.
When you’re trying to protect your bottom line, investing in trends can be out of the question. It’s too risky for most brands, so most stores opt to have a more consistent product offering because trends are, shall we say, unpredictable.
However, brand partnerships allow you to jump on the bandwagon of every trend without any of the risk. With Carro’s partnership platform, you can partner with brands who already stock inventory of trendy products, and you can sell them for as long (or as short) as they’re popular.
You’ll be able to offer more products and offer them faster than if you were stocking them yourself. Instead, just look for a partner, sync up in a matter of minutes, and start selling trendy products!
Just like the trendy products, you may not be able to assume the risk of investing in new product categories right now. No problem! Work with a partner to expand your product categories and see what works.
You can experiment with different products to see what your audience loves. If you find a runaway hit with your store, then you can consider purchasing your own inventory to increase your margins, or you can continue to carry the brand partner’s merchandise and continue reaping the rewards.
If you’re an established women’s clothing store and thinking about carrying men’s clothes, you can partner with a retailer to start offering men’s clothes and see if there is a demand for it within your own store. When you work with a partner, you won’t have to carry any of the inventory or handle any of the fulfillment. You’ll just be able to offer exactly what your customers are looking for without the risk.
Partnerships with other brands should fuel your customer acquisition efforts. When you offer co-branding and co-marketing, you are sharing your audiences with each other so that you can both gain exposure to new audiences.
Carro’s Brand Partnerships are built so that both brands get the Lifetime Value (LTV) of the customer. Both the retailer and the supplier will have enough information to run retargeting ads, add their email addresses to your marketing lists, and seek repeat purchases.
The retailer gets to reap the rewards of their marketing efforts, but the supplier benefits too. The supplier can include flyers and inserts with the order, which isn’t allowed by other major marketplaces.
Each customer acquired because of a brand partnership belongs to both stores, so that it’s simple and easy to acquire new customers as a supplier or a retailer.
Brand Partnerships: The New Way to Grow
The future of ecommerce lies with partnerships. With so many customers already tied to different brands in one way or another, the easiest way to acquire new customers and make sales is by sharing the clout and trust of another brand. Brand partnerships are mutually beneficial, as both brands make sales and build their audiences every time a person engages with the partnership.
Carro’s Brand Partnerships is the easiest way to get started with brand partnerships. Carro has a large directory of brands that are looking for partnerships, so you won’t have to scramble to find your best partners. Carro also seamlessly integrates with Shopify stores so that you don’t have to waste time with imports and APIs. Instead, just choose your partnerships and let us do the heavy lifting.
Try Carro's Brand Partnerships
Listen to Our Founder's Explanation of Brand Partnerships!
Build Mutually Beneficial Partnerships with Influencers, Press/Media, and Other Shopify Brands to Sell More Together!
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