Here’s a video tutorial that will teach you how to put your affiliate marketing on autopilot using LeadDyno.
Specifically, we discuss:
- How to send automated emails to welcome new affiliates
- How to turn your current and new customers into affiliates
- Keeping affiliates “in the loop” on their sales and commissions in real-time
Here’s the full video (below). And click here if you’d like to sign up for a live demo of our “affiliate marketing on autopilot” software.
Hi everyone, and thank you for joining me today, this morning, or afternoon, or wherever you are in the world logging in from. This is Brett Owens from LeadDyno, I’m our Marketing Director here. And what I’m going to do in about 15 or 20 minutes, saving time for your questions as well, I’m going to walk you through exactly how I use LeadDyno to manage not only our own affiliate program, but the affiliate program for our sister company here as well.
We built LeadDyno for ourselves, and I’m going to show you exactly how I use the product. We’ll walk through from affiliate signup, affiliate recruitment, and we’ll talk about social sharing, getting affiliates comfortable promoting your product, your website. And then finally how we pay them out.
And as I mentioned, I’ll take questions throughout and afterwards, so as you have them you can go ahead and type them into the GoToWebinar panel. If I can tackle them on the fly I will, otherwise, we’ll definitely save some time at the end and answer everything that’s on your mind.
First things first, if you’ve already signed up with LeadDyno you have a website for your affiliates that we are hosting for you. So in case you haven’t found this yet, let me point you to it. It’s going to be found at your domain.leaddyno.com. So whatever domain you gave us is going to be your domain here.leaddyno.com. So I’m actually showing you the affiliate website that we ourselves use for LeadDyno. It’s a site that you can brand with your own colors, your own logo. You can update the copy here on the top, but basically this is where we’re sending people to sign up for our affiliate program.
So the people who email us or call us and say, hey, do you guys have an affiliate program, well of course we have an affiliate program. It’s hosted on our own affiliate website, and you have one like this as well that you’re able to customize. And here is where they can sign up, on the left side of this.
And this is a link that you can link to from your site. If you would like to have this embed on your site we allow you to do that as well. You’ll do that using iFrame, what we call iFrame mode, and let me just show you some of the settings where those are located in case you have already signed up.
Under configure affiliate website, this is where you can enable your custom header. And you can put in your custom logo, your site colors. If you want to style it as well, we do accept custom CSS. We do allow you to enable to iFrame mode. If these terms are a little jargonny and you’re not sure what these are, then I wouldn’t worry about it. I just want to let people know in case that’s what you’re interested in. But we do have them basically at the website and we host it for you. You can update the colors, and you can update the logo. This is where people sign up and then you’re going to be off and running.
Now as people sign up with you, you’re going to see affiliates come into your program. So I’m in the LeadDyno admin screen and this is what you also have access to. So under Manage Affiliates, this is where your affiliates are going to show up.
If you would like to require approval for people, we have that setting available now. By default they are just going to be approved and go into your system and then they’ll be off and running. Personally that’s what I recommend doing. In my experience, it never hurts you to have an extra affiliate, especially with LeadDyno, because we do have most of their ramp-up automated, so they’re not going to be bothering you. But if you do prefer to approve them, then that is something that we have available for you as well. It’s just a setting that you need to check, and we can show you where to do that.
Aside from putting a link on your website or embedding your affiliate website on your main site, you can also invite affiliates with a new feature that we have, and this is under Affiliate Content. And the fourth one down is called affiliate invitations. This is an email that will go out automatically to new customers as they sign up with you, as they pay for your product, or pay for your service.
That’s a perfect time to contact people. As you know, they’ve just bought from you and that’s when you want to hit them up to spread the word about your site or product. We do that here with this email. I wrote it, and it’s basically ready to go for you. You just need to sign it, and you’re welcome to edit the email. You can just edit it down here, and click on save in the upper right.
And this is going to go to people who sign up with you. And it’s going to encourage them to join your affiliate program, and then we have the link back to your affiliate website here. And this is going to be the quickest way to start ramping up your program. It’s a great way to do it, and I’ve found that a very high percentage of people will sign up to join your program after they buy from you. This is a great way to turn your customers into affiliates and encourage them through the word-of-mouth type of marketing that we’re working to encourage here.
Okay, when people sign up with you, then we log them through that affiliate website and they find their way to your affiliate website. They log in, and we then pass them right through to their Affiliate Dashboard. Their Affiliate Dashboard is going to look like this, and I did just switch companies here, so that’s why we have a different look and feel. But it gives you an example of how you can put in your own colors, logo, and such.
This is my Affiliate Dashboard here. This is for one of our partners, Lori [SP]. Lori has a consulting company called Raina Corp. This is her domain. This is her company name, so what I did was I gave Lori an affiliate code on her company name. So then her referral link, which is down here, this looks like a co-branded link between our site and her company. So just by putting in the affiliate code field for her now we have that going where it looks like it’s co-branded.
Another benefit of the affiliate code, and this is a question that we get a lot, especially from Shopify and from Bigcommerce people, that we can use this affiliate code to match to an affiliate as well. So of course if somebody comes to Lori’s referral link here, we’ll always credit those visitors and those customers to Lori. But in addition, if they don’t come through her link but they use her code as a discount code, we’ll be able to track that to her, too. So in the case of something like Instagram where links are not available, we can use a discount code to track people for those off-line situations. Lori could also give her affiliate code to people when she’s talking to them on the phone, or in person, or at a trade show. So that would allow her to double for effect, for a case maybe somebody didn’t get to click her link.
But our link is the focus, and then at the Affiliate Dashboard here, here is where we have our one-click sharing options. And Lori can click this link here to share on Facebook, and what it does is it basically launches a Facebook post that pre-populates for us, so it has the copy that I, as the affiliate manager, wrote in here. And here what we’re doing is actually promoting the release of a new mobile, a new Android app that we released. So what I did is I rewrote all of our social sharing to focus on this launch, and then used our affiliates as our means of promoting this launch more. So it’s kind of a win/win, because it gave us more PR around the launch, and then it also gave our affiliates something new to talk about.
Now every time that they share this stuff on social media, it has their affiliate link in here, and as you can see, this is Lori’s affiliate link in here. So anyone who clicks through this post on her wall, she is going to get credit for it.
And then we have the same thing going with Twitter. We have a Pinterest integration now, and with Twitter it’s going to be similar. It just logs into Twitter, pre-populates a tweet. With all this stuff Lori could edit this tweet if she wanted to change something, or she can just tweet it out and she’s going to be good to go.
Email as well, so just input the email address of up to 10 of her friends, colleagues, clients, and then LeadDyno will send an email out to them on her behalf. And we are also going to change these basic links, they all go to affiliate links when it goes out on email. So that’s sort of the common theme. Any time we send something out, it’s going to flip from a basic link to that affiliate link, so LeadDyno takes care of that conversion for you.
Okay, this is also where she can see her progress to date. This is a very popular feature. A big advantage of running your affiliate program through something like LeadDyno is that the affiliates have access to their progress in real time, so they don’t need to contact you. They don’t need to wait until the end of the month. They don’t have to wonder where clicks go if they send people your way. They can just view their progress here, and this is in their Affiliate Dashboard, so they can see how many visits. So a visit would be somebody who clicked through their link to your site. That would be a visit.
A sign-up would be if you have an email address as well for somebody, so maybe they bought from you, or maybe not. They just signed up for your email newsletter, in which case that would be a sign-up. And then of course, you know, purchases are.
And then she can also view her comissions. As people buy, these will be payable here in real time, and we’ll keep track of what’s due today, what’s upcoming in the future, and what’s already been paid out. So Lori’s been paid out $319.70 to date. If she refers somebody new to us, it will show up as a commission due here. If it’s not due yet, but it’s upcoming, because maybe we have a time delay on it to protect for refunds, it will show up as an upcoming commission out here.
One question. Can we create the email with the referral link for your affiliates? Yes. Thanks for the question. So you create all of the Facebook posts, the email, the tweets, and all that good stuff. I’m going back into LeadDyno, and I’m under Affiliate Content, and I’m under Content Library. And then this is the email here, so you’re welcome to edit this email and I encourage you to do this. Just go to Edit Content, within the Content Library, and so that email that I just showed you, that’s this down here. So you just edit the email.
We just have an email editor embedded in here. It’s nice, you can add pictures. I’ll show you in a minute how to add pictures, or an example of one where I added a picture. You can add videos. You can add links and stuff. So this email, yeah, you can create and edit all of this stuff.
Basically under the Content Library is where you want to go. So I’m below where we were before, before when we were configuring the affiliate website, I was at Affiliate Website. So I’m just moving down, the dashboard will let you do some content, and then the Content Library is where you can edit the tweets, the emails, and that type of stuff.
And then of course it will automatically populate. The email is going to populate with what you have in here. So when a user clicks from their Affiliate Dashboard, this email came from an email I have here.
So while we’re in here in the content library, we can also add banners. Lori, for example, has a website for her company. She has a blog. She runs a few banners on there, especially on her partner page as well. So I can add a banner for her in here. I just go to add banner. I can say what target URL I want it to go to. And just speaking generally within LeadDyno, you don’t have to send everyone to your page homepage. You can also send to specific sub-domains or product pages within here. This is a target URL for this specific banner here. I’ll show you how to create other custom links in a minute here as well.
And then to choose the banner, you just basically take a file off her computer, so just use the file and upload it.
And then when Lori’s in her Affiliate Dashboard these are going to be contained under the Marketing Materials tab. So what I have here are some 300 x 250 banners that I had our graphics designer crank out for us, again, around this launch that we had a couple of weeks ago. I was initially running these on Google AdWords. I was running it on their retargeting network, so that was my initial purpose for creating the banners.
But why not make these available to our affiliates? So that’s what I did here. I have all these nice banners that they can come in and take. Again, the HTML has their affiliate link in here, so they just need to copy this HTML and they can paste it on their site, or they can give it to their web person. So they are welcome to put any of these banners on their site, and then they’ll get credit for the click-throughs because they have their affiliate links in here.
And a way to create custom links, so our affiliates can do that too. That’s going to be under our Sub ID tab here. This is where we have a very short wizard here. Just give that link a name, and then say what your URL is that we want that link to point to. And then Lori will get a new affiliate link here. And then we do, as you can see, the breakdown by link, so we’ll show the number of visits, leads, and purchases for that given link.
As I mentioned before, we have a newsletter feature, too. We have an archive here, so Lori can get into old newsletters. For example, let me go to the one from earlier this year I sent out. I was at a trade show, so I just sent out a quick text little newsletter here that said, “Hey, I’m on booth 413, if you are at the show, you can come by and say hi.”
Also I updated the one-click social media stuff and email promos that you see on the Affiliate Dashboard, so that’s all there as well. And then that was when the new email invite feature was new in LeadDyno, so it kind of promoted that and said, “Hey, this has worked well, so you can just put in the email address of some of your friends and give them this special offer, and then we’ll credit you if they click through.”
And our most recent newsletter look like this, so here’s my new Android Time Tracker newsletter. Again, this is what I mentioned with pictures and such. So I have pictures, and it actually links to a YouTube video of the app. And then we’re always sending people back to their Affiliate Dashboard. The more we can get them back here the better. The Affiliate Dashboard being their homepage here, so it’s kind of walking them through. This is sort of the battle stage for affiliates where they have access to everything that they need. This is where you want to keep sending them, because first, they see how much money they’re making. They also are just getting credit for the clicks that they send in. That’s sort of a self reinforcing motivational thing for them. And then again, this is where they can do all their quick promotions, just kind of clicking through here.
And then one final option that I’m going to talk about on the Affiliate Dashboard here. This is something that I allow our higher-level resellers to do, but maybe not our base affiliates. So people like Lori. She has her client list. I tell Lori if she wants to enter your client list in here, what we’ll do is we’ll keep track of it for you. So if we ever see these people buy from us, we’ll give you credit for it. Again, this is another way to do stuff that’s maybe off line if these people are not coming through the link.
This is a setting that you can make available. You can do it for different tiers of affiliates. We have a concept of affiliate type where you can split up affiliates and give them different access rights. You can give them different commission structures if you’d like. So that’s an option that we have for you available here. And this lead input is one option that we have available that you can give to your higher-end affiliates and resellers.
Okay, speaking of keeping affiliates motivated, because that’s what we’re all about. We also have emails that will go out like this one. So when you have a new affiliate commission, we can send out emails like this to say you have a new affiliate commission, they signed up.
And then we have everything tracked in your Affiliate Dashboard where when the user clicks through, again, it says, oh, cool. I got a new commission. Let me see what I have. They can see that they have $900 upcoming, and they’ve made $2300 to date. And then they can see all their progress as well. Now again, they’re back at their Affiliate Dashboard and this is where they click and promote their stuff.
I want to point out where these are. These are our automated affiliate emails. So the one that I just showed you is our last one, which is on affiliate purchase. So I would encourage you as you’re setting stuff up to come in here and you can set up these automated emails. The one that I just showed you here is sort of the ‘back end’ for that. Again, this is an email that you can edit. We can put in the person who bought. We can sub their name in to let the person know, hey, your friend Joe bought from us. Thank you. And you can log into your Affiliate Dashboard to see everything.
All of these are good emails. We have a weekly status email that goes out for our affiliates. Our signup email is one that I would highly encourage you to set up, too. This one is really easy, and kind of ready to go. And what we do then is when an affiliate signs up with you, we give them that affiliate link and the link to their Affiliate Dashboard so they can get off and running. So everything we have here is geared to getting these guys up and running in a really smooth fashion.
And then the newsletter that I showed you is going to be our final option here, where you can create a new newsletter. You just write the newsletter. It’s like you’re composing an email. You put in pictures or videos, whatever you want to do, and then send it out. And LeadDyno, of course, has all of your affiliates, so we send out that email on your behalf to your affiliates.
And then the final thing I’m going to show you, and then we’ll get into more questions. Of course the most motivating thing for affiliates is to pay them. This is our affiliate payout, and we give you a little table here which shows your currently due commissions. And we have some choices for you. So if you’re just sending a check to people, you can mark them as manually paid and that will X them out. The easiest way to pay people and the way I do it and the way I’d recommend, is with our PayPal integration. There is really nothing that you have to set up. What we’re doing is we’re just tracking the commissions. We tell you when it’s due and then you click the PayPal button and pay these guys out.
For example, if I want to pay out Steve, all I’m going to do is click the PayPal button and I’m going to log into my PayPal account, so I only need to do this once and I can say remember me for next time.
And what LeadDyno is going to do is it’s going to tee up a payout going out to Steve here. And see, it has already located his account, so I’m going to say, okay, yeah, let’s pay that out. And Steve is paid up. And that’s how easy it is to pay Steve.
And now we’ll refresh the LeadDyno page, Steve is going to be marked as paid, and now we just have our other guys. So you see Steve’s not there anymore. Steve is no longer currently due.
On Steve’s Affiliate Dashboard his payment status, so at Steve’s homepage then, he flipped from commission due to commission paid. So that happened in real time. And then I as the affiliate manager no longer have Steve to pay, so I’ve just got a few others here. It’s pretty simple, a one click that goes out. I recommend paying these people … I pay our affiliates once a month, and I pay them if we owe them $50 or more. If we don’t get to owing them $50, we just wait and let that commission accrue. That’s just for simplicity on my side, but as you can see, it’s pretty easy. You’re welcome to pay out people if you owe them, like these people I owe $5, and it wouldn’t hurt me to pay them out either, if I was so inclined.
And then other ways to pay out, we do have Dwolla payouts, and if you want an alternative to PayPal, Dwolla is kind of like PayPal. I think they are still U.S. only, but that’s an option, and we have an integration with those guys. And then we even have a Bitcoin-based integration if you’re so inclined to want to payout people with Bitcoin.
Okay, that was it. I know we moved fast, so I’m happy to review anything. If you have other questions, please go ahead and type those into the GoToWebinar panel.
And the first one here is, what’s the difference between a visitor and a lead? Thank you, that’s a good question. A visitor is basically someone who goes to your site. Maybe we have an email address for them, and maybe we don’t. So here is our visitor table, and under our lead pipeline LeadDyno does record everyone who is on your site, and so we have everyone on here. We may know who this visitor is, or we may not. They would be a lead if we knew who they were. So a lead would be defined basically as we have their email address. And how do we get their email address? Well maybe they signed up for your newsletter, or maybe they bought from you. So that would be a lead. So a lead is someone we have an email address for. A visitor is just a click, so the person is on your site, but we don’t yet have an email address for them. So the funnel is we have a click. We grab that email address, whether it’s with a newsletter, a signup, some sort of free trial, or an outright purchase. And then you know that a customer is a purchase.
And LeadDyno will give you this original source of all of your purchasers. For example, if I look at our new customers here, we’ll show their original lead source, and not only from affiliates, though it could be an affiliate, or it could be another thing. For example, here our lead, April, she found us from this source. And then LeadDyno will break down the source. So we have the link here if we want to see it. So this is the link that she came to us from. And then we can also see a breakdown for this link. This link, for example, has sent us almost 800 visitors, 64 leads, and then nine customers. So we will literally give you the breakdown for every referral, or referrer on the web in addition to affiliates.
Okay, hey, can you show me how to set up a LeadDyno for AdWords tracking? Yes, and that’s going to be, and by the way, I love using LeadDyno for AdWords tracking and Facebook tracking, conversion tracking as well. Of course you probably are using a conversion tracking for those sites have available. Keep doing that, that’s fine. I did the same. But they are limited, because they can only tell you if somebody got to a certain page.
But in LeadDyno we can show you if not only somebody got to a certain page, but what they bought from you. The way to set this all up is you go under Marketing Tracking Campaigns here, and go to Actions and say, Create A New Tracking Campaign. What this is going to do is it’s going to give you a campaign link. You can think of this as like an affiliate link, but you’re going to use it with your other marketing channels.
And you basically plug in the equivalent of an affiliate link into something like a Google Ad, so you make this your target, your URL. And of course, this funnels through direct to your site, but what it allows us to do is allows us to track this. So as you can see, we always do the breakdown where we have the visits, leads, and customers that came through this specific link, so we can break it down specifically by the ad. And this is where the real value is, because you can see for this ad group not only the clicks, the leads, if somebody got to a certain page, but specifically who bought from you.
So you can compare that with your ad spend and see if this ad is making sense or not. Is Facebook’s making sense for you or not? Well we can compare that with specifically who bought from you. The one point I’ll add on Facebook is that you have to put that link up front with Facebook. They say, what site do you want to promote? So don’t just put in your URL, but put in your whole tracking campaign link, your LeadDyno link there.
Can images be included in social media updates? So in social media sharing, for Twitter, no. Twitter does not allow images. If we’re editing our Facebook posts, the image is going to come from the page that we’re promoting, so you know, Facebook does a little thumbnail, so that’s going to be from the page that you’re promoting. If you want to promote a certain thumbnail, go with a different destination or URL, that has the image that you want to include.
Now with affiliate newsletters, yeah, you can include images, that’s easy to do. For doing social media updates and we have new social media updates for you. We would send out an affiliate newsletter and let people know, and then here’s the image button, and here’s where you can add an image. So you can either upload from your computer, or you can link to it.
Okay, can I send follow-up emails in LeadDyno like I do with Infusionsoft? Yes, you can. We have simple follow-up emails that go out. For example I have one here, and actually this is a great one. You can send out on certain events, so when people sign up with you, and people purchase, or if people cancel or ask for a refund, you can send out emails. This is actually one of our most successful emails. If people cancel their account we send them an email 30 days later and we’d say, we’d love to have you back. Would you like a 60-day free trial? Just reply to this email to take advantage of this. This email works like crazy. This is really a very successful email for us. And to be honest, I would not remember to send this out on my own, so LeadDyno sends it out on my behalf. I say, 30 days after somebody leaves, send them this email. And then, of course, I field the replies, so the replies come back to me. It’s really helpful to have LeadDyno sending these out.
And then you can do the same thing, so when a new lead registers, you can send them something on day one, or on day three, seven days after they registered with you, and the same for after a purchase.
Okay, next question. What kind of events can we track with LeadDyno after a referral link is followed, like sign ups, paid subscriptions, any other type of user behavior?
We can. By default we are focused on after referral link is followed. So the click is going to be a visitor. A signup is going to be a lead. A paid subscription is going to be a customer, so that’s going to be our basic lead pipeline here, and this is going to populate as we go. The visit is going to be a click, again. The lead is going to be a signup. And to your point, the page subscription is going to be a customer.
In terms of other user behavior, we do track every visit. We literally have every visit for you, so we do have a Google Analytics aspect. For example, this person is on our site now. I can see that they are running on their Android phone. They are using Google Chrome, and I can see their specific landing page. And then if there was other activity, I’d be able to see it down here. So this person I do have an email address for, so we know who they are. They are actually a customer of ours, and then we have all their recent activity down here.
Now we also have an integration with a web tracking tool called Clicky, and that’s an easy one to set up, too. It’s just something that we use. If I want to see the specific web history of this person, I can also use the Clicky integration, and then it would give us a page-by-page breakdown. So to your point, the general stuff that we’re tracking is going to be the visit lead, and the conversion, so the paid subscription as I just said.
Can you show me how to set up LeadDyno with my Shopify account? Our Shopify, and I’ll show you or Bigcommerce setups. These are probably our two most popular, and these are really easy to do. It’s under Settings, Manage Integrations, e-commerce Services, and then it’s a one-click. We just need to store your name and then connect to shop for Shopify and then the same for Bigcommerce. So these are all a one-click step to get these set up.
If you need help at any time, I’ll wrap up with this. We have no other questions, so I’ll let you know where to get help. In the app itself we have live chat, or life chat people are really good and knowledgeable and they’re based here in the U.S. And they’ve set up people like yourself with LeadDyno all day, so they’re really helpful. You can ask them specifics, and ask some tough questions, and they’re really sharp at it and happy to help you out.
On the lower left here in the application is where you can find them. Otherwise on our website, and I’m sure you haven’t missed us on our website, so we have the big We Are Here in the bottom right, and to start a chat just pull that up and you’ll have our chat person. So we have Adam on currently, and he’d be happy to help you. And then he’s here until 4 p.m. Pacific Time. So basically it’s until 4 p.m. every day, seven days a week we have someone here. It starts early morning hours, so if you’re in Europe or East Coast we’ve got you covered there, too.
I thank you for joining us and if you do have the questions that you think of after this, you’re welcome to reply to any of the emails that you got from me confirming your attendance today. That will go back to me and I’ll circle back with you. Otherwise all these support channels work as well.
Thanks again, and I hope that we do hear from you soon. If we can help you set stuff up, please let us know. Thank you.
