Sephora is one of the largest beauty and fashion retail outlets in the United States, with 430+ stores across the country and many more internationally. Their brand is synonymous with the beauty industry and is well-known and trusted. They have a massive variety of beauty and fashion products, including their branded product line, the Sephora Collection. As high as their marks are for products, service, and convenience, Sephora's affiliate program might even be better. Read on if you want to know everything about this top American brand and its top-notch affiliate program. We've got all the details below to help you decide whether Sephora is a good fit for your affiliate efforts.
As with all affiliate marketing programs, you first need to fill in an application and submit it to Sephora. To do this, you can go directly to the Sephora website or go to Rakuten Advertising, the company that manages Sephora's affiliate program (and several others).
The application form is rather typical, asking for your name, phone number, contact information, etc. They will also need information about your primary website, the dollar amount that will trigger your payment threshold every month when it's time to get paid, and other details about your particular online company.
You'll notice that we mentioned your primary website, which is a requirement for becoming a Sephora affiliate. Like many affiliate programs, you can have multiple websites as well as social media pages, YouTube channels, and so forth. Still, you can't become a Sephora affiliate without at least one website. Below is a quick list of the things you need to get started as a Sephora affiliate:
• Fill in the affiliate application and agree to the terms and conditions.
• A working website with its own hosted domain.
• A professional email address connected to at least one of your websites.
• Existing traffic to your website with an established web presence.
• Engaging, interesting, and informative content on your website. (This is critical to your success.)
Sephora is a well-known brand with a very good reputation and wants affiliate marketers that will protect that reputation at all times. To be approved as a Sephora affiliate, your website or all of your websites need family-friendly content. Of course, as a beauty and fashion brand, any website, YouTube channel, or social media page you use to promote their products should have some connection to the beauty and fashion industry. Below are a few tips that will increase your chance of being excepted as a Sephora affiliate marketer:
Tip: Provide high-quality, interesting, engaging, or entertaining content on your website and other pages. This step is critical as Sephora wants to see that you're promoting their brands using excellent (family-friendly) content. Bland, boring, or poorly written content won't make the grade.
Tip: Use a professional email address attached directly to your website. If there's one thing that the Sephora affiliate program team looks for when determining whether or not to approve an affiliate marketer, it's the email address. One from Yahoo or Hotmail shows that you're not a serious affiliate marketer (or are a rank newbie).
Tip: Your website should be well designed, easy to navigate, and provide everything a consumer needs without too much fluff. A website that's stuffed with advertisements or cluttered with unimportant information is a big warning sign. If designing a website isn't your strong suit, you should consider farming it out to a website design expert.
Tip: One thing Sephora looks for in an affiliate marketer is a marketing plan to bring in targeted traffic. Whatever you use, including paid search, SEO, content marketing, blogging, etc., you should be able to show the affiliate team at Sephora what you plan to do for at least the first year. Also, if you've had success as an affiliate marketer with similar brands, being able to demonstrate this to Sephora would be helpful.
Sephora carries a wide selection of beauty and fashion products, and all of them are available to be promoted as an affiliate marketer. One of the biggest perks of being a Sephora affiliate is the ability to promote anything they sell, regardless of the brand, and earn a commission on that sale. When you consider that Sephora carries practically every makeup and beauty category, as well as their in-house brand, the Sephora Collection, that's huge. Some of the biggest categories include
• Skincare
• Hair care
• Fragrance
• Beauty Tools and Brushes
• Bath and Body
• Candles & Home Scents
• Gifts
Finding specific facts about the Sephora affiliate program commission structure was a bit difficult (although we sure did try). To get the full details, you would need to go through the application process, get approved, and then you would be able to see exactly how it's structured.
That being said, the information available online at the time of this writing was that the Sephora affiliate program pays between 8% and 10% commission on all of their products. That's one of the highest commission rates of all the beauty and fashion affiliate programs available today.
Even better, their commission rates aren't based on volume. If you sell one item with an 8% commission, you get paid 8%. If you sell 10,000 of them, you get the same commission. (Super-sellers might not find this to be a positive aspect of the program.) One last bit of good news is that there are no brand restrictions when you're a Sephora affiliate. You can earn affiliate dollars on everything Sephora sells, including its Sephora Collection.
Making $1000 per month as a Sephora affiliate is no different from making $1000 monthly as an affiliate marketer for any other brand. Your website or social media page needs to bring in a lot of visitors (traffic). The more traffic your pages create, the more visitors will convert to sales and the more income you will earn. It's basically a numbers game, and if you play it correctly, your earnings will increase. Below is a quick example of the numbers you would need to make $1000 per month as a Sephora affiliate. (We're using their Charlotte Tilbury Mini Pillow Talk Lipstick & Liner Set as an example, which costs $25.00 and has an 8% commission rate.)
• Product ($25.00) x 8% Commission = $2.00 profit per sale.
• 500 Sales x $2.00 per sale = $1000.00
To generate 500 customers to purchase in a month with a 1% conversion rate, you would need 50,000 visitors per month to your website or social channel.
• 50,000 visitors x 1% conversion rate = 500 sales x $2.00 commission per sale = $1000.00
If you had a 2% conversion rate, you could make the same $1000.00 commission but with only 25,000 visitors to your website.
• 25,000 visitors x 2% conversion rate = 500 sales x $2.00 commission per sale = $1000.00
If you were selling Sephora's T3 Bespoke Labs Evolution Dryer, a product that retails for $300.00, you would make $1000 a month with far fewer sales.
• Product ($300.00) x 8% Commission = $24.00 profit per sale.
• 42 Sales x $24.00 per sale = $1008.00
One of the most important factors for earning with Sephora as an affiliate is to publish excellent content on your website, YouTube channel, Instagram page, etc. If you're a blogger, it's imperative that you publish well-written, interesting and informative content and do it on a regular, ongoing basis. The fact is, many affiliate marketers farm out their content creation so that they can concentrate on everything else that needs to be done to be successful. That includes in-depth product reviews, pro & con lists, product comparisons, etc. Quality written content is the key to affiliate marketing success.
One thing you'll notice right away is that Sephora has quite a few more pros than cons. Whether those pros fit your plans or not, it's up to you to decide.
• You can earn commissions on all Sephora products without any restrictions.
• 8% to 10% commissions.
• Joining the Sephora affiliate program is free.
• Sephora offers free shipping over $50 and free samples with every order.
• You get exclusive newsletters, sneak peeks at products, and exciting promotions.
• A lot of innovative products to use on your websites, like banners and graphics.
• 24/7 customer support from Rakuten
• The application process can be lengthy.
• There is a $50.00 threshold to get paid.
• Payments to affiliates are monthly, not weekly.
• A 1-day Cookie, which is very short. (SHEIN, for example, offers a 30-day cookie.)
Several beauty and fashion brands are comparable with Sephora and have similar affiliate programs. Some are slightly bigger and better, while others are slightly smaller and worse. If you're already promoting beauty and fashion on your website or social media channels, the following brands might be worth a long, hard look, including:
• Ulta
• MAC Cosmetics
• Birchbox
• BH Cosmetics
• Elizabeth Arden, Inc.
• Yves Rocher
• Sigma beauty