Leslie Green recently joined the team of ShopMy, a platform that aims to help brands and creators collaborate. Today, she shares details on everything we have to know about ShopMy — what it is, what it does, and how it impacts performance marketing and brand collaborations today and in the future. 

Who is Leslie Green?

Leslie Green is the VP of Content and Communication of ShopMy. Her responsibilities include looking over marketing-related activities, like PR and content development. And while ShopMy is still a small team, they’re growing quickly. 

But despite its size, ShopMy has already made waves in the industry. Leslie shares, “We were featured in Glossy, a Digiday article. We’re excited to be involved in that because we are a smaller player, but we were next to the big names, which was a really big moment for us.” 

What is ShopMy?

ShopMy is a premium affiliate and influencer marketing platform for creators and brands who want to supercharge their growth. It was founded in 2020 by Chris Tinsley, Harry Rein, and Tiffany Lopinsky, a trio of technologists who graduated from MIT and Harvard. 

The mission behind ShopMy is to simplify the monetization process for creators who share their product recommendations over social media. It offers access to millions of commissionable products and uses a data-driven approach to better connect brands with creators who love their products.

Leslie adds, “The intention behind it is to bridge the gap between creators and brands. We want to empower both of them to feel like they can collaborate and take charge of their growth.” 

How Does ShopMy Work, and What Features Does It Offer?

ShopMy offers a beautiful and easy stores for creators to monetize recommendations in seconds. Its best-in-class product catalog has over 50,000 merchant partners to choose from, with industry-leading commissions. It’s a flexible platform that allows creators to link to anything, even if it’s non-commissionable or on a different affiliate network. 

Leslie shares, “It’s not necessary to use our links and the people we’ve negotiated commissions with. We allow a very flexible experience for creators to showcase everything they could earn from.” 

ShopMy can also be a way of passive income where brands and creators don’t have to work as hard. Being an influencer and creator is already difficult, and ShopMy, through affiliate marketing, wants to help take some of that pressure off. It also aims to help influencers and creators take on bigger projects while they have something working in the background. 

Leslie adds, “Yes, you need to update your shelves and continue to update with your audience, but you have these five shelves out in the world that can continuously make money without having to constantly promote them.”

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Affiliate marketing seems difficult, but with a solution like ShopMy, everyone can make the most of this business model. Leslie shares, “We’re really excited for people to start adopting affiliate [marketing].”

ShopMy has worked with many different brands since it launched, like Victoria Beckham Beauty, Topicals, and Tatcha.  

Why Should Creators Choose ShopMy?

“The biggest reason is how easy it is to use and what it looks like. As a creator, you should always think about the experience you’re giving to your audience.”

The “stores” in ShopMy are clean and simple. It has a nice black-and-white theme, and everything is clear to see, like where the product is.

Another thing that differentiates ShopMy is its data. Leslie explains, “Every link you create within ShopMy creates a record of exactly how much money was made from that link and how many clicks were on that link.”

Having access to this kind of data is a way for ShopMy to help creators make bigger moves for themselves. Most of the time, tracking someone’s performance within affiliate marketing and influence marketing feels like a black box — creators can produce results but don’t have any understanding of how the process works. 

Leslie continues, “A lot of people say, ‘Oh, I have 200,000 followers, you should collab with me’ or ‘I have a 4% engagement rate’. These are great indicators, but when we have creators who say, ‘I drove $20,000 worth of product sales in the past three months to this specific item, this many clicks,’ creators now have the power to do deeper collaborations and go beyond being affiliates.”

ShopMy lets creators monetize their influence within seconds and build more authentic relationships than just being an affiliate. Plus, its analytics help them improve their content strategies. 

Businesses Best Suited for ShopMy

“We always talk about two kinds of audiences: brands looking to scale their influencer in affiliate programs and brands who understand that this world is about developing relationships — it’s not a quick fix, and we’re not just trying to push sales.”

ShopMy cares about generating quality, professional relationships. So for brands looking for a quick fix, ShopMy won’t be the best platform for them. 

ShopMy offers scaled partnership packages for brands. From brands looking to tap into ShopMy’s affiliate network tools, all the way to fully managed influencer marketing programs. This scaled structure provides a tailored approach as brands start and grow their affiliate marketing programs with ShopMy. Leslie adds, “We want ShopMy to grow with your program.”

The team behind ShopMy also recognizes that brands are at different growth stages. Some brands will come into the platform and are ready for an affiliate program, while others are already more sophisticated with their influencer managers. Some brands developed a certain lineup of influencers and would want that entire set onto the platform. 

Leslie concludes by stating, “We want to focus on brands committed to scaling and understanding that influencer marketing is a relationship-driven world, that it’s not purely transactional, and brands can’t drop in, make money, and then get out.”

And we couldn’t agree more with Leslie’s statement. The success of influencer marketing largely depends on the relationship between brands and influencers. 

How ShopMy Measures Success

With ShopMy, brands can see exactly who drives purchases and how much they earn. Brands are also given access to see their total order volumes, the number of clicks being driven back, and many others.

Unlike other platforms, ShopMy measures success with the amount of money brands earn. Leslie adds, “It comes down to money versus they had this many engagements. You can see all that, as well, but the metrics we use are all about who’s driving ROI.”

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How ShopMy Connects Brands and Creators

Leslie credits their internal talent team responsible for making sure brands find the perfect creators and vice versa. They also reach out to agencies and use industry connections to bring more people on board. On top of that, the team behind ShopMy also wants more people with the right mindset about affiliate marketing.

Leslie explains, “We want people excited about looking through affiliates and partnering with brands. Just because somebody has a super large audience doesn’t mean that they’re interested in that. But if they say, ‘Yes, I have this dream partnership,’ ‘I want to work with this brand,’ those are the type of creators we want on the platform.”

ShopMy also wants to bring individuals trying to develop a good relationship with their audience, share their recommendations, and be authentic online. 

How ShopMy Handles Issues Like Inappropriate Content or Fraud

ShopMy is currently invitation and application only. Creators who join the platform need to connect their TikTok and Instagram to have a true experience. Leslie adds, “It allows creators to have shoppable posts. So if I post an Instagram of my outfit, I can create it in my ShopMy store and connect it to that post. I will have a shelf of everything that I’m wearing in there, which is a cool experience.”

Besides providing the full experience to creators, this process also serves as a sort of identity and validation for ShopMy. 

The platform also monitors high-traffic activities and has safeguards, which will be used when they see any suspicious activities. Inappropriate conduct and content are handled by removing the user or the items from the platform. 

How ShopMy Will Evolve as a Response to the Changes in Performance Marketing and Brand Collabs

For ShopMy, the future of performance marketing with creators is based on real results rather than follower counts and social engagement rates. In the past, brands have struggled to quantify their influencer and performance marketing efforts. ShopMy mitigates this issue by providing an easy-to-use solution with tangible results in terms of sales and customer engagement.

ShopMy envisions brands to have an affiliate-based strategy as it allows them to put products in the hands of individuals who are giving recommendations. 

Leslie also shares how ShopMy wants to correct common misconceptions about affiliate marketing. 

“People have had a misunderstanding that affiliate marketing is cheap marketing. Those two things shouldn’t be confused. We want people to understand that affiliate marketing can be a powerful revenue stream and help them scale their own influence. So, we’re trying to bridge that knowledge gap where affiliate marketing can be powerful to both [brands and influencers].”

What might have once had a negative connotation about affiliate marketing is now viewed by sophisticated creators as a way to generate new revenue streams, save time, and have a plan in place if brand collaboration budgets shift or dwindle. ShopMy is demonstrating to tastemakers that affiliate marketing is a winning strategy that can be both profitable and simple.

As for Leslie’s take on performance marketing, she shares that this area is based on data. She says, “That’s something we talked a lot about internally. We don’t want our brands to keep on guessing what is moving; we want to be able to say to them, ‘Hey, Leslie sold $20,000 of products.”

ShopMy has a lot of things on the roadmap to ensure that brands and creators make decisions based on the platform’s data. ShopMy will integrate new features moving forward, especially on analytics that display ROI.

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Want to enjoy what ShopMy has to offer? If you’re a brand, apply through this link. If you’re a creator, use this link.