I’m going to show you exactly how I use LeadDyno to manage our affiliate in our reseller program, not only on LeadDyno but also for our sister company that we originally built LeadDyno for. And then we’ll show you some marketing tracking as well at the end there, so we’re going to show you follow up sequences, tracking Google AdWords, so some good stuff there, too.
And then we’ll roll into class shoot, so again, as I go through please do use questions panel. Anything that’s on your mind, or anything that’s unclear, or anything specific that you want to, you know, see shown. That’s why we try to do these twice a week, only once a week this week because I’m traveling later in the week, but we’ll be back on twice a week and this kind of gives me way to show all of our new people all at one time how to do a specific thing and lead that out.
Affiliate Software Dashboard
So with that I’m going to get rolling here. So we’re looking at my Dashboard, so for everyone here I’m going to assume that you either have LeadDyno installed or you will be able to get it installed. This is something that will help with, depending on your setup, what you’re using to collect payments, what you’re using as your e-commerce platform. We can go over specific ones that you’ll want to see later on, but we’re going to assume we’ve got everything hooked into your site and this is what we’re going to see.
So once LeadDyno is hooked into your site we are going to see every visitor, every lead, and then every purchase that’s coming your way. So we do grab the source of that, so that’s going to be not only related to affiliates, but also for other traffic that came through.
For example, these are my latest purchases. I can see this purchase here was from an affiliate, so somebody recommended their colleague, which is perfect; that’s exactly what we want them to do. So Steve will get $100 for referring his colleague.
We’re also breaking it down though from other lead sources, too. So if I show you like this guy here, this is a lead that actually came from an article online, though this article actually was written by an affiliate. I just happen to know that.
In a nutshell that’s kind of how LeadDyno is working. We are taking the source of everything so every new visit lead and purchase we are taking that. I’m kind of showing you from a bottom up level here how that works. I want to give you this background so that as we move into the affiliate side, you kind of keep this in mind that we’re kind of taking a holistic view of everyone who comes to the store and purchases something. That’s going to roll into the marketing aspect that we’ll talk about later on.
Okay, so the first thing is once you get LeadDyno set up the first thing we want to do is start ramping up affiliates for you. So what we have, and I’m going under to the settings tab here to show this, what we do for you is we do host an affiliate homepage for you. This is something that you can either point people to or you can also embed this onto your website. But what this looks like is basically a customizable page, and I’ll show you how to do that, how to get your logo, your colors and such, that you can send potential new affiliates to.
So on the left side if they’re new they can sign up here, or if they already have an account listing affiliates they can sign in and then get the referral link and their marketing materials on the right. The nice thing is you’ve got one page you can send people to and they can just start going.
The one common question we get is where do I start off in terms of getting affiliates? So we say, well first things first; just go to your existing customers, your existing readers, people who have bought from you before. These are the people who you want to set up as affiliates. They are already comfortable with you, comfortable with your product… So to incentivize them to refer you to their friends and colleagues; that’s always the best way to get going.
And then from there you can work on recruiting some of those higher level resellers, the people who already sell similar products into your space. But first things first is to ramp up those affiliates that with LeadDyno now would make that as easy as possible, so you just send people this page. All we require is their email address, because that’s how we identify them, that’s how we communicate with them, and that’ll get them into the system here.
So a couple of other ways that you can also do that, we do have a form for you that’s going to be under the tools section here. There’s an affiliate invite form, and this is something that you can also embed onto your website as well. There is just some code here that you can copy/paste, or have your web person do, or if you have questions you can ask us about how to do that.
And then of course if you’re just talking with someone you can manually create them in the system, too, so to do that we just go under create a new affiliate, and then like I said, the only unique identifier we need is their email address. You can also drop them on different tiers, so for example, I have two tiers. I have affiliates and then I have a different tier for our sort of higher end resellers who get a higher commission. They get a recurring commission and all that good stuff. So this is where we drop people into it if you’re talking to them and you just want to sign them up you can do all that here.
Now that you’ve got people coming in, the next thing that I always like to have you do is go onto your automated affiliate emails. What that’s going to do is it’s going to send automated welcome emails to people. So this is going to be on our affiliate content automated affiliate emails, and this is where you can send the welcome as soon as people sign up, and then get them all the information they need to get going.
This email here is coming out on affiliate signup and all you need to do to get this going is you enable this guy, and then you can type in your copy as you’d like. We’ve got some variables that you can put in for the affiliate, but basically this email is coming from me and welcoming people to our affiliate program. And then I’m saying, here’s your unique referral link. This is going to replace this placeholder with their actual link. And then I’m going to say, okay, here’s how it works. I’m going to click this link, the sign’s up; this will be credited to your account.
And then also you can view, and this is what I’m going to show you next–
this is really what we like to send all of our affiliates, basically their affiliate dashboard. And that’s where they can also get their referral link and get all the marketing materials for their site. They can do the one-
click promotion out to social media stuff. So this is probably the second thing I would turn on after pointing people to your affiliate dashboard.
Automated Affiliate Emails
Again, this is on our automated emails. We have some other good emails here that I will circle back and show you. The nice thing about the automation part of it is that this stuff will run when you’re away, when you’re sleeping, on weekends when you’re not working as hard as you do during the week. So these emails will always go out for you, so that’s why we really like to have you set up the automation stuff, because this will just kind of happen and run your affiliate program whether you’re there or not.
With that let’s talk about the affiliate dashboard, because that’s where we want to get people to, so that’s sort of the third portion here. I’m going to go to an existing affiliate and I’m going to show you what they see on their dashboard. So if I go to my friend, Laurie, here who is like a higher end reseller for us in our industry. So I have her set up with basically a unique referral link, so let me go to Laurie’s dashboard here and show you.
When we welcome Laurie she’s got a code here, and this is sort of her unique affiliate code, so we put her company name in here, which is what she wanted, so this gives her a little bit of unique branding. You can see her referral link; this is sort of like a co-branded link, because it’s our domain.com/ a few things and then Ranacorp [00:08:27] which is the name of her company. So we give her a branded link for our Shopify and for our big commerce users. We also double this as a coupon code, so if a user on checkout puts in this code, even if they didn’t use the referral link, we will still be able to credit it to the affiliate. So this code does double as coupon code for big commerce and for Shopify.
So word comes in, she’s got her link, so it’s cool because the only link you really need to give Laurie is going to be the link that logs her into her affiliate dashboard. And again, this is that link, and a unique link just to Laurie and it logs her in securely. And then what she is able to do is she can copy her link or copy her affiliate code. She can also share her links, so this is all one click stuff, so it’s really easy. If she wants to email it out to her colleagues she just clicks the email button, just puts in up to ten email addresses and then we’ve got prewritten copy here all ready, I have prewritten copy that I wrote for her. I’ll show you where you can write your own in a minute, but this is what you’re going to be able to provide your affiliates… a shortcut like this in terms of the copy.
Now let me go back to that. Now you’ll notice that Laurie can edit this, so this is just a simple email editor, so it works like Gmail or Microsoft Outlook, so she can go in and type her email and she can add any personal touches that she wants. But the good thing about having this messaging already in here is that if she doesn’t or doesn’t have time she doesn’t have to.
And that’s sort of a recurring theme that we’ve found in terms of making affiliates successful and actually promoting you as much as possible, is just to make it as easy as possible on them. So it’s just one-click stuff. If she wants to tweet it out she just clicks the Twitter link, we log into Twitter and then again, we’ve got a message that’s already there.
Now everything has her affiliate link in there, so anything that she sends out via her social media channels or via email is all going to get credited to her, because LeadDyno always puts that affiliate link portion in for her. But it’s really simple, because she can go through and then the same with Facebook. Just go through, click the Facebook button, and it will post to her wall basically then which is one more click.
Now can add something here also, so she can say, you know, I could add a personal touch here. But the important thing is I don’t have to; I could just click to share and then that’s going to go out to my Facebook wall. Okay, and I will show you where to update these in a minute when we get back into the LeadDyno admin screen.
You can also see her progress here, so this is a big part for affiliates as well. As you know, traditionally the affiliate management has been a little bit of a black box where somebody gets a link, they send you traffic, they don’t really know where it goes. They hope that you’re going to give them credit for it, but they’re not really sure. This does a lot in terms of transparency to help with trust of the affiliate, because as soon as they send you a click they will be able to see that in their dashboard, here. So there are a number of friends who have visited you… as soon as they’ve sent you a click or a visitor to your website or to your store this is going to increment by one. And then if they sign up, now a signup is going to be defined as if they signed up for an email newsletter or something free that you have, that’s going to be this. Or if they purchase then that would increment this signup and then the purchase all at one time.
Okay, and then she can also see her commissions, so she’s made $156.60 in commissions. Here’s what’s due, another $8 due, and then coming up another
$17.00. So she can see all of these in progression.
Now where we update these is going to be back within LeadDyno and this is all under the affiliate content section. So this is the next thing that you can work your way down as you’re setting up the system. So you can come in and then the configure affiliate website, this is where you’re going to be able to put in your logo and then put in your color. You can even upload a custom CSS file if you’d like, and then you can also I-frame this into your website. And if you’re multi-level and you want to allow parent affiliates to see how their referred affiliates are doing you can also turn that on here.
So these again are going to be the controls for your affiliate website. The next step down is going to be for your affiliate dashboard, and then this is where you can update the copy and the instructions.
The instructions are going to be what you see here on the Home Page, the instructions are going to be what they see within the dashboard. So this is where you can update all of these instructions here.
And what I just showed you in terms of the content library, this is going to be for your email, for your Twitter handles for your Facebook… That’s where you can update this, so this is going to be under the content library, and then under primary email for Facebook posts, for Twitter. This is where you can edit this stuff. So for example for the email, this is where I had the email stuff in there.
And then if I wanted to change this I can do that right here. So I just go to edit the email, and again, any URLs, so you don’t have to link specifically to a homepage. You can either link to any product page, to any sub-domain, just put the link in there and then LeadDyno’s job is just always going to append the affiliate portion on the end of that. So that when Laurie or any affiliate comes in they’re going to have their affiliate link in here.
Affiliate Software Social Sharing
Okay, the content library is also where you can upload banner ads and then to do that that’s going to mean the upper right. You just go, add content, and you go, add banner or blog post. That’s what’s going to show up under the marketing materials tab for your affiliates. It’s going to be the second link here, and this is where they can grab banners for their site, for their blog, and basically what you’re doing is you’re just uploading the banner and then linking it to whatever page you want it to go. And then they’re going to be able to copy the HTML, so the HTML with their affiliate link is already going to be in there. They just need to copy that or hand it off to their web person and they can upload this. So all of your banners can go here under the marketing materials tab. And again, we’re under the content library, where we’re bringing this stuff up.
Now let’s circle back. I showed you the automated affiliate welcome email before. I want to give you a look at these other three, which I would all recommend enabling these three. So the weekly status email, this is going to be something that goes out on the weekends to your affiliates. It says how they did for the week, so this will give them their stats, so this is cool. It gives them the feedback that we were talking about, it keeps them engaged, helps that level of trust as well, and then on a new lead and on a new purchase these are probably our most popular emails, because these are delivering good news to people. So we say, “Thanks for referring your colleague.” When they sign up, I’m going to go ahead and we’re going to credit you for that.
And then when they purchase… this is probably the most popular one, of course; so this says, “When you have a new affiliate commission you can go ahead and we’re going to give you the credit for that sale.” So this one I get responses to a lot, which is cool, because it allows me to engage affiliates who are doing well and selling stuff, because they’re happy, they’re excited. And what I can then do is kind of get into a discussion with them of what else we can do to get in front of your audience, help you promote us. So do we want to do a webinar with you? What else can we do together?
But the general nice thing is that you’ve got all this communication going out from you without you really having to email everyone individually. So you can just kind of sit back and feel the replies and then naturally you’re going to get replies from your most productive affiliates because they’re the ones who are hearing from you the most. So these are the automated emails I recommend turning on. I definitely recommend turning these guys on.
I see we have a couple hands raised so be my guest. We’ve got two or three people with their hands raised so just go ahead and type your questions in to the panel there and then I’ll get to them either now on the fly or we’ll be into the Q&A here in about five minutes. So you can go ahead, you can type your questions now if you like and we’ll go ahead and I’ll get to those in the order that we receive them.
Okay, and then finally I want to talk about the affiliate newsletter here which allows you to basically email your affiliates. This is the same as sending out a customer newsletter. So if you’re using something like Mail Chimp or Infusionsoft to communicate with your customers, you can do the same with your affiliates and because we already have all your affiliate info here on LeadDyno you can do that here as well.
So this is an email newsletter I sent out at the end of last month. I was at a trade show and I just sent them out a quick heads up letting our partners know that I was there, what booth I was at, and then of course I gave them the link to their affiliate dashboard. What happens… so for example Laurie received this email. So she received it in her inbox and then she can also go into her affiliate dashboard and see the archives here. So that’s where she’d read old emails and then I also say, “By the way I have some new one-click stuff in your affiliate dashboard so click here and you can go in and you can share this with people.”
I should also mention somebody like Laurie, I do let her add leads in because she’s a re-seller. She’s allowed to enter her clients in and then we will match up the email address for them. This is a setting on LeadDyno where you can allow people to edit, to sort of add in leads of people that they talked to.
Let me talk about the final portion here. On the affiliate dashboard, this is a little wizard that we have for people that if they want to create a custom affiliate link that’s not going to your homepage, this is where they would do that. So they can create a link to a specific product page or sub-domain. Basically they just put in the URL here and they hit “create link” and then it’s going to spit back an affiliate link for them.
Okay, quick question: Does the affiliate have to provide a link or can the affiliate be given a promo code to add to the Shopify system and get credit? Yeah, that’s totally fine with Shopify. They do not actually need to visit with a link. With a promo code you can do that with the affiliate code, and again the affiliate code is going to be under affiliate program. So if I’m managing an existing affiliate, I’ll show you where that code is. It’s going to be in the same field as if you were creating an affiliate.
So for an affiliate you basically have an email address, you have an affiliate type which is going to be the tier that they’re on, and then you’re going to have a first name and maybe a last name. This the code here. So this is going to be the code that’s going to sync up with Shopify, so this is the code that you’re going to want to use and create for them.
So this is the code and then the commission is going to be based off of the affiliate type itself. So that’s kind of how that connects up.
Paying Affiliate Commissions
So let’s wrap up the affiliate portion here and we’ll show you how we pay these guys out. Say I usually pay once a month, end of the month, and I pay above a certain threshold, usually above or around $100. It is good to pay out people. I will pay them out a little less just because it’s nice. Even if they’re receiving $50, they’re not going to complain. We talk about good touch points with affiliates, and probably the best one is actually sending them money.
So here’s how our payout works. We do have the ability to pay out with PayPal, Dewalla [00:03:58], even Coin Base. PayPal is probably by far the most popular. There’s no real setup required on your part. What we’re going to do is we’re going to send a PayPal request out to the affiliate’s email address. So that’s how they can log into PayPal and grab their money.
So it will go directly into their PayPal account. We don’t kick it out automatically because we want you to do that final step approval. So this is where you do that. So you just go to pay affiliate commissions, so you can see your currently due commissions and then you can see your upcoming commissions. So why would a commission not be due yet? That’s because I have some time delays on these where I don’t accrue the commission immediately. I say I will pay you out after three months or six months or one month or what have you, but you want to make sure your refunds… you don’t get an immediate refund and then you have to pay out a commission but you refunded the person. So we bake in a little bit of a time delay so we don’t have to worry about the refund portion.
What we do is come in and then at the end of the month, it’s only four clicks for me but I just click PayPal, it logs me into PayPal and then it’ll send the money out to these people. So pretty straightforward. If I pay them offline what I can do is I can just say, “Okay, I manually paid this one,” and then that will mark them as paid so they’re done. So if you cut someone a check or you pay them somewhere else you can just mark them as manually paid and then otherwise you can just go out to PayPal for the rest of them. So pretty easy, straightforward to pay them. Again, I recommend doing it at the end of the month or so.
All right, let’s move on and we will finish up talking about a couple marketing things and we’ll take more questions. So the first thing I want to show you is if you have signed up with us, with LeadDyno you probably got an email immediately from Adam who is our customer support extraordinaire, and you may have talked to Adam on our website as well. So this email comes from Adam. Don’t want to break your heart, but it doesn’t really come from Adam. It’s an automated email we have set up from LeadDyno. So it sends it on day zero when you sign up but we do have it set up to come from Adam, and then here’s the subject line and here was the body of the email that you read.
So we talk about this webcast that we do. We also have some other details, installation guide and such. So we’ve got a series of these emails that go out within our free trial period which runs for 14 days, so that’s why we’re pretty heavy here in terms of coming out between day zero and day 15. So these leads are sent after registration. You can also send them on a purchase. So for a new customer after a new purchase, you can send an automated email.
You can also send one out after cancellation or a refund, and for us these have been really good emails as well because if someone leaves you want to know why, why didn’t things work out, in our case why didn’t our product work out? We do get a lot of good feedback from this and to be honest I wouldn’t have the discipline to email everyone who leaves individually, so this is nice because we get a lot of replies from these people and we don’t have to consciously think about sending out these emails.
We do have these follow-up sequences. This is something people don’t always know is there. It’s kind of a more advanced email marketing feature that you’ll see in things like Fusion Soft is pretty well known for it. So we do have a pretty solid basic offering within LeadDyno. Just want to make you aware of this if this is something you’re interested in taking advantage of.
And then the final portion which is a little more advanced also on the marketing end but can be very useful. It’s very useful for me is doing things like Google AdWords tracking where can create a tracking link and you can put this as a target URL in your Google AdWords ad group. You can say, “Okay, any time someone clicks on this link I want to track that.”
Now the advantage of doing tracking with us versus only Google AdWords conversion tracking is that we are already plugged into your site, so we can give you a real good read on the purchase side. So you’re not just putting a pixel on a page, we know specifically what that person bought.
So for example, this ad was something I was spending a lot of money on, like $3-$4 a click. We got 326 clicks but only one customer, and then also I know that they canceled because I have LeadDyno plugged in with our billing system. So this is not a good ad and I ended up canceling it and saving a lot of money, redirect our marketing dollars somewhere else.
On the contrary there are ads like this one which from a click tracking standpoint would have been a big loser. Now this was actually an email marketing thing that we bought, and what I did was I just gave them this LeadDyno tracking link. So instead of linking to our domain, we basically gave them an affiliate link except we’re not tracking commissions. So that’s basically what a tracking link is. It’s the same as an affiliate link but you’re not tracking the commissions, but you’re still able to then see what your return on your marketing dollars is.
So I would have thought this was a total loser because we only got 14 clicks from it which would have been really low, except our click to sign up ratio was pretty high. And then we got four purchases out of it and most of them stuck around. So this is actually a very good exercise for us, a good investment for us and I wouldn’t have known that just doing regular click tracking off the front. This is available to you as well. This is under tracking campaigns and you can just go on here and create a new tracking campaign that’s going to give you a new link and then you can use that as you like as you’re doing AdWords and other email marketing, if you buy banner ads and so on.
So that’s what I got. Please go ahead and type in your questions if you have… I still see someone with your hand up. You’re welcome to type in a question and we’ll answer that, so just go ahead in your questions panel… I’ve got one question here on the affiliate code portion that we still need to cover off on.
So the affiliate code goes into the promo code on Shopify, correct? Yes, that’s correct. So we don’t do, to your previous question, they don’t really even need to put in the email address of the affiliate. They just need to put in the promo code and then you can make the promo code whatever you want. So when you sign up a new affiliate, what you do is you say create a new affiliate and then you can put in your email address, affiliate type, and then you put in the affiliate code here. So first name, last name, and the affiliate code. So that’s going to be… this field here is basically the affiliate code, and then this is the discount or promo code field on Shopify.
Shopify Affiliate Tracking
Okay, can you show me how to set up the Shopify integration? Yeah. So the Shopify integration is going to be pretty straightforward. You just go under manage integrations. We have Shopify under e-commerce services, so you’re just putting in your shop name. So your domain dot myshopify.com and you click connect to shop, and then that’s going to bounce you over to Shopify. It will ask for your login and then you just verify that, and then everything’s set up.
So when you go back to the dashboard that I showed you earlier, you’re now going to have your visits, your leads, and your purchases coming in from Shopify. And then same with Big Commerce. We do have a one-click that hasn’t quite rolled out yet for Big Commerce, so we’re still using their Legacy setup which is usually easier if you ask us to help set that up for you. It usually takes us about ten minutes to set you up with Big Commerce.
Okay, if someone has an email address for a potential customer, how long does that connection last? Okay, so an email address for a potential customer such as this one, this connection basically lasts forever. So this… Laurie will always get credit for these people if they sign up with us in the future. So this one is forever.
Then I’ve got another question very related to this. How long do you store cookies in terms of when someone clicks through an affiliate link, how long does that connection last? And then that lasts effectively forever as well. For all intensive purposes we basically store forever on the click through. The affiliate will always get credit for that person, even if they click but they don’t buy, and then they buy a year or two later.
Okay, can you show me organic search? I’d be happy to. So for organic search terms, that’s going to be under analysis and then search terms… So we do, if Google puts it through. Google does a lot of encrypting now. Even in Google Analytics you’ve probably noticed a lot comes up with secure search, so unfortunately we don’t have visibility into all of those. But if it’s another search engine or if Google is not masking it for whatever reason we will have that for you under search terms, so you can actually see how each organic search term is doing for you as well.
So for your AdWords, your best bet is to go under marketing and create a tracking campaign, and then I do split those up by ad group, and then for organic search I would use the search terms here. This is a good read for it, and this can give you good ideas also in terms of what you want to sponsor or what certain keywords you want to buy.
Mailchimp Affiliate Tracking
Okay, I use Mail Chimp. Do you have a way to integrate with Mail Chimp? We do. Thanks for asking. Let me show you that one. That’s going to be under settings, and then we’ve got… our CRMs are under here so we’ve got Infusionsoft under the CRM and then Mail Chimp here. So basically we’re going to connect this up to Mail Chimp and then we’re going to go from here.
Actually let me show you on our Elite90 account because I already have this one connected. Okay so I go manage integration. So all you do, it’s basically the same idea as Shopify to connect up with Mail Chimp, and we actually run the MailChimp integration ourselves. So when a new lead comes into LeadDyno, we put them into this list on MailChimp. So we, being LeadDyno, we will pull your specific list from MailChimp and then you can select which list you want the new leads to go into.
Another way to do this as well is if you’re using an existing MailChimp form, you can actually just plug LeadDyno code onto your page here. So this is going to be under tools, tracking code. And again, this is something we can help you out with, but there’s a little check box here that says automatically track lead forms. So a lead form would be something like a MailChimp form. If you already have it up, and you just click this, what this does is it inserts a little extra line here and then you copy paste this onto the page with the MailChimp form and then we’re going to be able to pull those leads into LeadDyno for you. So that’s another way to do it.
But again, on the setup stuff I know every site’s… we do work with almost all websites, but each site I know is a little bit different. You can’t find us on Live Chat within the application or on the homepage itself for help on this one, so lower left here will get the check box open.
And with that I think we’re all caught up on questions. Thank you for joining me and if you do think of anything, when you registered to the webinar you’re welcome to reply to the email that came from me. That will go back to me, or you can hop on Live Chat or basically every email address you have for us actually goes to replies, so you can actually reply to that or give us a call and happy to talk thorough any specifics that either I didn’t cover for you today or that we need to circle back with you on. So hope to hear from you soon and thanks again for joining me, and we’ll talk to you later.
