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The Target Affiliate Program: What You Need To Know
Target is one of the largest retailers on the market today. What most people do not realize is that anyone can sell their products online through the Target Affiliate Program. This article will discuss what the program entails, what it pays, and how to get signed up.
Target Affiliate Program Overview
The Target Affiliate Program awards commissions for sales on select products at a variable rate of 1.00% – 8.00% based on product category and commission tier level. Affiliates will direct users to the Target website and the user’s cookies will be tracked for up to seven days. This means that if a user clicks on a link to the Target website from an affiliate post, as long as a sale is made within seven days, that affiliate is credited and receives a commission on the sale.
Target also provides affiliates with a weekly newsletter on new promotions and sales in order to help direct customers to attractive offers. Affiliates can use a variety of tools, such as banners, widgets, or text links, to direct customers to the website and gain commissions on resulting sales. In order to qualify as an affiliate, your website’s viewer base must be primarily located in the US.
Products Included In The Target Affiliate Program
Target offers a wide variety of products and, luckily, the Target Affiliate Program includes a large portion of them. The categories included in the program are Apparel & Accessories, Home & Outdoor Living, Baby Gear & Furniture, and Health & Beauty. Since those categories are pretty broad, the Target Affiliate Program describes what items are excluded from the program as follows:
Excluded: Grocery, household commodities and essentials, baby care items (diapers, wipes, food, and toiletries), pets, electronics, toys, sporting goods, movies, video games and consoles, Target Pharmacy and OTC, Target Photo, Target Optical, Target Café, prepaid and gift cards, music, books, SweetJOJO, contract mobile
Knowing what is included is important to help understand what affiliates can and should promote. In short, anything fashion-related, home decor, furniture, and baby accessories (not care items, as they are excluded), are good starting points in finding the right products to promote.
Additionally, the program extends to referrals for store credit cards and gift registries, as described in the below Commission Structure.
Target Affiliate Program Commissions: How Much Can You Earn?
The Target Affiliate Program Commission schedule is set up in eight tiers with four product categories. As outlined above, certain products are excluded from commissions, but the four main commission categories are Apparel & Accessories, Home & Outdoor Living, Baby Gear & Furniture, and Health & Beauty. Each category has it’s own commission rate based on the number of products (net) sold monthly. The tiers start when you sign up at zero orders and then increase in variable increments. Here is a snapshot of the current tier and commission structure:
screen capture from affiliate.target.com
As you’ll notice, the most attractive item categories for affiliate sales are Apparel & Accessories and Home & Outdoor Living. An affiliate will need to sell over 10,000 products a month in order to reach the top tier of the structure, which is the advertised 8.00% rate (for the two top categories only). However, don’t let this discourage you because a 5.00% starting rate is attractive as well, and good incentive to promote products you may already be using and purchasing.
The Health & Beauty category remains at a 1.00% rate throughout, making it the least attractive category to promote. An affiliate should keep that in mind as s/he makes decisions on what products fit best into his/her media presence. Commission-wise, this program would be best suited for those who have a presence in style and fashion, home decor, or outdoor living.
Affiliates can also earn a referral fee for new users signing up (and receiving immediate approval) for a credit card (REDcard), and users creating a new registry:
screen capture from affiliate.target.com
How To Get Signed Up
Signing up for the Target Affiliate Program is simple and it’s free to join. Target lists the criteria for becoming an affiliate as:
Any website operator that runs a family friendly website and has mainly US-based viewership is eligible to join the Target Affiliate Program, subject to the program’s terms and conditions.
The application asks for basic details such as website address(es) and your personal information so that you can receive payment. To fill out an application for the Target Affiliate Program, click here: Target Affiliate Program Application
How To Start Promoting Their Products
Once you have built up a following and establish yourself as a subject-matter-expert (SME), you can use your web presence to promote relevant products. Since Target offers such a wide variety of products and is such a recognizable brand, it is easy to find the right products that also fit your personal brand within the Target Affiliate Program. Whether you prefer blogging, vlogging, or posting on social media, you will find this program a great fit. Additionally, you can add this program to one or all of your sites.
Method 1 – Social Media
Social Media applications such as TikTok or Instagram are great methods to promote products. A quick shot of you wearing or using a product and directing followers to a link can be an easy promotion. Most social media posts are quick and to the point, but a great tip for posting is to make it relevant and timeless. TikTok’s algorithm will continue to show videos, regardless of the amount of time that has passed since posting. This means, if the 15- to 60-second clip is timeless, it will continue to draw audiences to the link to purchase products.
Method 2 – Blog
A blog post should be timeless in the same way a TikTok post is. Since a blog has more flexibility to add multiple links and ad banners, make sure if you are directing readers to a specific product, you also have links to the website itself or a relevant search so that years from now the links remain active and you can continue collecting revenue on orders received.
Method 3 – YouTube
YouTube is a great method to promote products through product reviews and “shopping haul” videos. YouTube videos give you the opportunity to use length and visuals to show the usage of a product and practicality that other methods of promoting may not convey. Like blogs, you can include multiple links in the description and throughout the video. This allows viewers an easy way to shop for the items you are promoting.
For any accounts you will be promoting products for the Target Affiliate Program, make sure to provide the direct address to Target when signing up. This will ensure that you are assigned credit for sending the customer and will, in turn, receive your correct commissions.
To sign up and learn more, check out affiliate.target.com
Who Is Dom Bavaro?
Content Creator Turned "SaaSpreneur"
After cutting my sales & marketing teeth in the retail car business, I decided to venture out into the world of entrepreneurship in 2017 with an app based car rental business. I marketed that business using social media and had some success, but ultimately it would fail in January of 2020.
After losing that business, I turned to content creation and marketing digital products. After launching several successful information products, I realized that the real staying and compounding power was in selling software as a service. Another pivot in 2022 led to earning the coveted "SaaSpreneur Gold" award from HighLevel in 2023.
