You’re off to a strong start to build your affiliate marketing program that will help your partners and customers refer your product. Now let’s talk about some concrete affiliate marketing strategy examples for building and empowering your virtual and commission-based sales team.
It just takes three steps.
Step 1: Recruit affiliates through your website.
If you don’t already, you’ll want a dedicated page on your website describing your affiliate program. It should also make it quick and easy for potential affiliates to sign up and get rolling. Make the link to this page obvious on other parts of your website. Good places for the call to action would be in the sidebar, header, footer or in a popup box.
The real key to ramping up as many affiliates as you can, as quickly as you can, is to get them approved on the spot. You can automate this process so that affiliates can sign up and immediately receive their unique referral link. Everything flows better if the affiliate can get started without waiting for the official stamp of approval from your affiliate manager.
Step 2: Plug your affiliate program in follow up emails.
Your best and most enthusiastic evangelists are your customers. So it helps to tell them about your affiliate program — early and often. While having a dedicated page on your website is a good start, experience has shown you’ll recruit five to ten or more affiliates when you plug your referral program in automated affiliate emails to your customers.
Example: SaaS affiliate recruitment
Chrometa, LeadDyno’s sister company that provides automatic time tracking software, uses LeadDyno to manage its affiliate program. Here’s the copy Chrometa users in emails to trial users and new customers.
Refer Chrometa, Earn $100 Per Referral
Do your friends and colleagues also need a hand tracking their billable and project time? Please send them our way!
Earn $100 per referral with your unique affiliate link. Log into Chrometa and navigate to “Account – Refer Us” to retrieve your link.
Here, you’ll also be able to track the leads and new customers you send our way, along with your upcoming commission payments.
As discussed in Step 1, Chrometa’s affiliates receive a unique referral link immediately after signing up. Then they’re directed to their affiliate dashboard, where they can access promotional tools and copy, and track their own progress in real-time.
Step 3: Introduce the affiliate dashboard.
The more you can provide your affiliates with the following, the more engaged they will be in their promotion efforts.
- Tools to promote your product.
- Accurate and immediate visibility into their progress.
We created the affiliate dashboard to display — in real-time — an affiliate’s clicks, leads, and conversions. When they see the results, it motivates them to do more!
Real-time metrics and progress updates from the affiliate dashboard will keep your affiliates interested and engaged.
LeadDyno also provides affiliates with a social content sharing platform, which includes promotional content geared for direct email, social networks like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, and banner ads for websites and blogs. This compels them to promote your product with a single click.
It’s important to provide them with starter copy and materials. It’ll get the ball rolling immediately as they won’t be burdened with creating their own copy and materials from scratch. Pre-written content empowers your affiliates to promote your product ASAP!
When it comes to successful affiliate recruitment, it’s all about convenience and motivation. Make it stupid simple to help your affiliates to get started — and keep them interested and engaged once they are going. And you’ll be on your way to great sales and promotions with your affiliate program.
