Set up an Affiliate Program
Objective: Generate new customers through incentivized referrals.
How: There's two ways to look at affiliate. The first would be your traditional affiliate program where you give an individual, maybe a blogger, a unique referral link and then every time someone signs up to your product from it, you pay them.
The other way could be driven more by business development partnerships. Let's say you integrate your product with another company's product. Then, every time someone signs up to your product as a direct result of the integration, you could give a payout to your integration partner.
The right path to take will largely depend on your product set-up and pricing model. That said, there's not necessarily a cookie-cutter approach to building out a programme. The basic things to consider are:
- The maximum payout you can give to affiliates to retain a profit.
- How you'll compensate affiliates (e.g., per click, per signup, per activation, etc.)
- The system that you will use for tracking affiliate referrals.
- Who would be interested in being an affiliate for your company.
Running a successful affiliate program can offer a ton more benefits than just your conversion goals. Ultimately, for affiliates to build revenue they have to talk about your business. This can have a really positive impact on a bunch of other acquisition channels outside of affiliate.
There's a bunch of different affiliate software out there for you to roll out your own affiliate program, including Post Affiliate Pro, OmniStar and Ambassador. On the other hand, you can plug into pre-built platforms that will advertise your program to their network of affiliates. Some examples of these platforms include, ShareASale, ClickBank and CJ Affiliate.
Here's an example of AdEspresso's affiliate program details so that you can see an example of a SaaS business affiliate program in action.