In this episode of Growth Stage, we interview affiliate marketing veteran and attribution animal Adam Riemer of Adam Riemer Marketing about his thoughts on: 

• What proper affiliate marketing looks like.
• How to weed out fraudsters & shady attribution affiliates.
• How to go about recruiting the RIGHT affiliates to help drive meaningful growth in your business.

If you’ve set up an affiliate program and don’t know what to do next, or you’re looking for tips on how to tame your existing affiliate program, don’t miss this episode of Growth Stage. Listen or watch now!

Are you looking for a merchant of record that will help you grow your subscription software business? FastSpring provides an all-in-one payment platform for SaaS, software, video game, and other digital goods businesses, including software management, VAT and sales tax management, global payments, and consumer support. Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

Jump to video.  |  Jump to transcript.

Podcast Full Interview: Audio

Listen online or find it on more podcast services.

Podcast Full Interview: Video

Transcript

David Vogelpohl (00:04)

Hello everyone and welcome to Growth Stage, a podcast by FastSpring where we discuss how digital product companies grow revenue, build meaningful products, and increase the value of their business. I’m your host, David Vogelpohl. I support the digital product community as part of my role at FastSpring. And I love to bring the best of the community to you here on the Growth Stage podcast. In today’s episode, I’m really excited for this topic.

It was a bit of conversation in a Slack community I’m part of and really wanted to bring this topic live here on the podcast. We’re going to be talking about advanced affiliate marketing for SaaS software and digital product companies specifically and joining us for that conversation. I’m proud to bring to Growth Stage Mr. Adam Riemer. Adam, welcome to Growth Stage.

Adam Riemer (00:56)

Hey Dave, thanks for having me.

David Vogelpohl (00:58)

Awesome. So glad to have you here. And of course, I’ve known you for forever and a day and really looking forward to picking your brain here to talk about advanced strategies for digital product companies. And for those watching and listening, Adam is a digital marketing and affiliate marketing veteran. He’s an attribution animal. He’s really well known for proper attribution models and putting value in commissions where value are due.

and he’s going to share his thoughts on what proper affiliate marketing looks like, how to weed out fraudsters and shady affiliates and how to go about recruiting the right affiliates to help drive meaningful growth in your business. So Adam, I know these are topics that a lot of folks are interested in. And so I’m really excited to have you here. So Adam, I’m going to ask you the first question I ask every guest on Growth Stage.

What was the first thing you bought online?

Adam Riemer (02:01)

I remember. So it was in, I think, 1999 or 2000. I heard a record at a nightclub in Pittsburgh that I really liked and I’d already started DJing. And they told me it was only available from one store. And that store happened to be in the Netherlands called Dance Grooves. And so I had to order the LP to be shipped overseas, like…

I think I was still on an AOL connection and I actually ordered the first thing I purchased was a vinyl record to spin Adorave from Dance Grooves. I thought I was going to be a CD but no, that was the first purchase I had ever actually made.

David Vogelpohl (02:45)

It’s actually been a bit of a theme of people have answered this question as I’ve asked it, is it like that extreme need for something and only being able to get it online? That sounds really interesting. So how long was it after that roughly before you bought music directly, like a digital song?

Adam Riemer (03:08)

I didn’t really have digital back then because iPods weren’t out yet and neither were the… iPod was the first one, yeah, and then it became the iPhone. So yeah, it was a long time before. I was still burning CDs and everything. The first digital product I bought probably wasn’t until the last 15 years.

David Vogelpohl (03:21)

Nice.

Okay, makes sense.

Adam Riemer (03:30)

I just, I really like holding books. I really like, I don’t know, I liked having the movie collection. Now I’ve switched. I prefer my movies to just be a couple of clicks away, but I still love books. Like I don’t find the same pleasure out of an reader that I do holding the actual book, flipping the page, going into the bookstore. I love that. I do shop for books online a lot, especially if I’m on the road and I rip through one, I need the next one delivered. It makes it easier to go online, but I really like holding books.

David Vogelpohl (03:59)

Nice. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about Adam Riemer Marketing and what you do there. And I’m going to go out on a limb and guess you’re the owner and CEO or something like that. Is that right, Adam?

Adam Riemer (04:12)

Yeah, at least for now.

I need to find somebody that can actually manage it for me so I can do the things that I love, which is the marketing and working with my team where I fall flat is working with the clients because I, as you said, I tend to be a little bit hard headed and I get a bit passionate and that’s not always a good thing. It’s a good thing that I’m passionate about the work, but not always for the clients. So what we specialize in what our strengths are is conversion rate optimization, top funnel and value adding affiliate programs.

SEO work as well as content marketing and strategy. We do help companies with their lifecycle marketing which includes email and win back and at different stages in the customer journey what are their needs now and how do you develop and that includes consumer products as well as B2B, lead gen and the service space.

David Vogelpohl (05:03)

Excellent. So kind of a full service digital marketing agency, if you will. And I heard you mentioned as part of that value added affiliate marketing. And so this is kind of a nice segue into my first question on the topic of this podcast, which is what does value added or proper affiliate marketing mean to you? What defines that?

Adam Riemer (05:29)

So the way that we define value adding is would the sale have occurred without the affiliate touch point? Did the affiliate touch point actually have some form of financial gain or does it create a financial loss or is it a neutral financial touch point?

So an example of that would be if all of the sales are happening at the very end of the sale and the transaction, somebody’s just looking for a coupon code, if you removed them from the affiliate program, would that consumer still come through and would they be coming through your funnel and converting at the same rate? If the answer is yes, which most of the time it turns out to be yes, it’s a no value affiliate and you’re probably taking a financial hit.

if that same affiliate also has top funnel traffic suppose you sell t -shirts or suppose you’re a CRM software company and you are showing up from an influencer that does show up for the coupon phrase but also has a lot of traffic coming in from their YouTube channel around the best CRM systems how to optimize your sales funnels and they’re funneling off of that traffic that you cannot reach on your own at that point you have to test is the top

funnel more profitable than the bottom funnel and by allowing that bottom funnel and am I chasing away smaller partners that know they’re going to lose some sales to that.

So it’s a really fine tuned game of cat and mouse, but it’s easy to track. The one thing you’re going to run into is nobody has your best interests in mind as a business owner or as a marketing team. The networks make money off of the actual touch point and conversions that come through their network by allowing this to happen and saying, well, it’s part of the customer journey. They make more money. So they’re going to be encouraging you to work with some of these bad behaviors, use your data and understand how it goes.

One other touch point is a review.

A review does add value and a review can help convince a customer to convert with you over another, same with comparisons. But what happens if you would use an ambassador instead of an affiliate and you would help that ambassador optimize for your terms? That ambassador now shows up for your brand press review. You have to pay a one -time fee and a one -time fee only. You no longer pay commissions every single time a customer’s in the review. You have to pay an upfront cost.

But in the long run, you save a lot of money because you’re no longer paying commissions over and over and over. And now you have the chance for a full value add in top funnel affiliate program.

David Vogelpohl (08:03)

So as I think of folks that are running digital product businesses like SaaS and software, it’s a lot of companies that are 50-, 100-person teams or less. And so they look at affiliate marketing from the outside, and they see this complexity, and they see this need for audits and this need to be picky with who they partner with. And I really like how you simplified it in that statement when you said,

Would the sale have occurred without the affiliate touch point? And you gave a variety of examples there, and I love extremes for a minute. So a really bad affiliate would be maybe someone with malware that’s stuffing cookies in browsers. So that would, that sale would have occurred if that bad actor had not have done that. So that’s an example of someone doing something really bad. And then you were talking about some gray zones a little bit where.

You had maybe a coupon site that was primarily, you know, getting their sales at the end of the sale. And then you were talking, I think about comparison and review sites a little bit where maybe it’s a little bit more in the middle of the decision process. But I like that litmus test of would the sale have occurred without the affiliate touch point. And I guess where your point is, is if the answer is no, then this is where it falls outside the realm of proper.

But when the answer is yes or maybe, how do you think about that blended value? Is it like all commissions are none or do you think about splitting it up or maybe weighting it based on the level of value that you think affiliate’s driving?

Adam Riemer (09:44)

I’d definitely lower the commission if it’s a lower value touch point. And that’s a proper thing to do. It’s the same as when you’re going with lifetime commissions on recurring. What if the person promoted you for a year and then decided to stop should they still be getting paid six and seven years later when they’re promoting competitors. That’s up to you to update your program terms and conditions and make it very clear.

you could add in a clause that says if you stop promoting us and haven’t driven new customers within a year, we’re going to turn off the lifetime commissions.

we’re looking for long term relationships and stability, not one and done referrals to friends where you make money forever. This is a partnership relationship. So it’s up to you to determine. You could set up attribution lines where if there’s a top funnel click and a mid funnel click, you give the top funnel 75% in the mid funnel 25% of the sale and that’s going to split it nicely for you. But if that top funnel has room to grow and someone else comes along and offers them more money and has an

equal average order value and has an equal type of commission, they’re going to be more profitable. So you’re going to lose that top funnel partner. So you have to tread lightly. You have to make exceptions. If it’s a no value, low value, I just say kick them out. Why lose money? You could be actually profitable with your PPC campaigns. For example, there’s a keyword that’s sometimes profitable, sometimes not. Track the low value conversions to see if there’s a PPC click too. We just had this happen.

Turned out if we remove those low value and no value partners, PPC became profitable and we could reinvest that money into the profitable keywords.

David Vogelpohl (11:23)

Okay, so really focusing both on the attractiveness to the right affiliates and then leveraging your budget where it’s most profitable for you relative to the affiliates, especially you’re spending your time on. So again, if I’m a smaller company operating an affiliate program, I guess I’m gonna wanna be really choosy about who I let into it and think about their role in the funnel.

and how much I want to reward that. And then you also kind of brought up, well, there’s other people trying to get those rankings or the spots on those affiliates web pages as well. And so I got to think about that competitive aspect of it. Okay, so we’ve talked about affiliates that can cause problems, affiliates that do very bad things like cookie stuffing or affiliates that just don’t provide a lot of value. So what type of affiliates do you like focusing on recruiting?

Which ones do you want to sign up for your program or which ones do you help your clients actively reach out to recruit?

Adam Riemer (12:27)

So we go after the evergreen ones first, ones that have the ability to show up inside a YouTube search result, inside a Google search result, or a long-term social media channel with a relevant audience. By that I mean Pinterest has a different audience than TikTok, than Facebook, than Instagram. And so if your audience isn’t there, who cares if they have a million followers, you’re not going to reach them. So we go after the ones that have the long-term reach.

a webpage or a YouTube video has the opportunity to drive traffic for a few years versus an Instagram post which might last for a few days. By building the program first with evergreen copy or recruiting insights that are topically relevant and able to show up for those phrases, we’re building a nice foundation. After that, we go after the short-term boosts.

So that would be your influencers, your Instagramers, your LinkedIn people, because a LinkedIn post with a new algorithm could last for a few months. We recruit them and we line up posts about the right times a year, like right before busy season, during busy season, or at slow seasons where they may be able to influence a boost in sales. And that way we can constantly try to hit our numbers. It takes a long time to do because you have to recruit, then you have to get them to sign up, then you have to get them to agree.

Once the content’s created, for example, with the evergreen, you have to then hope it actually shows up in the search engines. Once it does, you have to hope the readers click to your link and then you have to apply your conversion rate. So after all of that, if you have a 5 % conversion rate, you have to wait till 20 unique visitors have clicked through to even have the chance at a first sale. So it’s a very, very long-term thing.

David Vogelpohl (14:08)

Makes sense on the long game. If I boil that down, thinking about the types of affiliates you were talking about going after, it really sounded like it boiled down to people publishing content. And obviously, people publishing content that’s relevant to a recommendation for a particular type of product.

The word affiliate is a big word. Matter of fact, in a lot of affiliate networks, they’re called publishers. But affiliates can take different flavors. With SaaS software and digital product companies, do you find that there are technology partners that use affiliate marketing to refer customers for products that might be symbiotic? Like maybe I have an SEO product that I’m going to recommend some email marketing product as part of my flow. Is that the other, do you look at?

recruiting those types of affiliates as well.

Adam Riemer (15:04)

Yes, anyone that has a relevant audience could be an affiliate. So I’ll give you a few examples. Some of our B2B clients have perks portals and you’ll find affiliate links in there. Other times when I’m speaking of conferences, I’ll disclose that this is an affiliate link and I’ll put up a QR code or a URL on the screen so people can do it and they can follow, people can click,

start a trial and have an experience because the tool or the software is relevant to the presentation or the workshop I’m giving and the way to get that exposure is to have me as a customer and as an affiliate. Others do a loyalty and rewards program with a cross promotion so there’s a lot of different ways you can do it. There’s also email blasts with complimentary companies. You just want to make sure that open rates are a very skewed and incorrect metric. You want the actual click -throughs and conversion rates.

just like an influencer. They only have influence if people are taking actions. The action you’re most interested in as an affiliate is taking out their wallets.

David Vogelpohl (16:01)

I like it. I like it. One of my favorite sayings is sort by conversions. And it sounds like you share that sentiment on some level. So when we talk about recruiting, I think there’s like the idea of like, where do you get a list to recruit from? And how do you go about that? One of my favorite approaches whenever I take over an affiliate program is to look at the short tail keywords that we’re bidding on and search and just see who ranks for them for like a list.

But what do you recommend? How do people start to build a list of affiliates to recruit? And then how do they go about organizing and pulling all that off? They’re using CRM’s help me understand how you like to approach that.

Adam Riemer (16:46)

So what we do is we will use that same PPC data and SEO data because if you already have the top ranking, what are the rankings below you? Anyone that’s a publisher is a potential affiliate and we know that the conversion rate is high. That gives us the ability to create a forecast. If you add us in here, the potential income you could be making over your CPM ads on the publisher site is X, Y, and Z per month and at that point,

we’ve made a strong case for why they should include our client within that post and the money they could be making.

We use BuzzStream that’s our preferred tool for recruitment and it doesn’t actually do the recruitment on its own although I believe they have something in beta right now but it does give our team own ability to share the messages what’s working what’s not working yes we’ve already reached out to this person so don’t touch them I’m already on it or you can reassign it hey this is better suited to David’s needs and David’s skill set so I’m going to tag and pass it over to them it’s just a really nice funnel and system to cross

remote and track your recruitment efforts.

David Vogelpohl (17:50)

So this sounds like, I mean, it’s effectively a sales process. It’s just what you’re effectively selling as a partnership for the revenue for the affiliate, revenue share of the affiliate commissions. Is that a good way to think about affiliate recruiting? Is that it’s very similar to a sales process with like an account management backend or how do you think about that?

Adam Riemer (18:10)

Yeah, unlike a backlink for SEO where you just need the link to your website, with affiliate, you have to get that link and you have to get revenue from it. So it’s all about the relationship. It’s about building trust. It’s about ensuring there’s some form of gain for both companies. It has to be mutually beneficial to work and be copacetic.

David Vogelpohl (18:31)

You know, thinking about using SEO and targeted keyword data to discover affiliates, are there any other, like do you use like Ahrefs looking for like backlinks or how do you, what are some other discovery methods for like affiliate recruiting lists?

Adam Riemer (18:45)

So I personally don’t use Ahrefs, it’s a good tool. The services that they offered, they canceled, they lost their license or something. So I closed my account down years ago, but I know a lot of people that love them and I have a couple of clients that love them. So I wouldn’t count them out. I actually use SEMrush, which is their biggest competitor,

for a lot of tracking and data and discovery. But if you want for specifically SEO style at— affiliates, Majestic is going to be your good one to go to. And I don’t use Majestic, but I do highly recommend them for this. And what you can do with Majestic is you can plug in your competitors affiliate link style, as long as the merchant ID is first in the path. And you can actually find out exactly who’s promoting you and generate a list because it’s the same thing as a backlink profile.

David Vogelpohl (19:16)

Yeah

Adam Riemer (19:34)

which is just all of the links that the database can find and Majestic has the largest in the world.

You can also go in and find citations, mentions of the competitor’s name and then you can do is this on an .edu site, is this on a major media site, and you can funnel through there and figure out where they’re being mentioned with a direct backlink that helps their SEO. By replacing those backlinks with affiliate links, one you’re causing damage to your competitor’s SEO making it easier for you to climb and replace them in the search engines, AND you’re taking the traffic they were getting for free and

you are now getting that traffic. The benefit to the person that was featuring them is they can make money whereas they were losing money previously by sending the traffic for free. So it’s a really compelling place and it crosses multiple channels. If you do get onto the major media and you haven’t been featured before there’s a chance you can now feature that logo in your PR bar which is a trust builder for consumers and may help increase your conversion rates. So affiliate has an impact on multiple channels as long as you’re doing it smart.

David Vogelpohl (20:42)

Awesome. That sounds like some good recruitment and list building tips. I know that that’s a deep well to draw from, and it’s interesting how many opportunities there are to surface when you’re going deep on affiliate recruitment. You talked before about types of affiliates that you like to keep out of the program, those that don’t add a lot of, you know,

I guess value at the bottom of the funnel or to the transaction, would it happen without their presence kind of thing? So if you put yourself in the shoes of, you know, an SMB technology company and they wanted to keep it lean and mean in the beginning, what sort of affiliates would you recommend they say, you know, no, or not now to?

Adam Riemer (21:33)

I would avoid the review sites first and I would look at the types. I would go for complimentary companies. That’s the first one. Number two, look for the people in that space that have email lists and try to get a quarterly blast or a feature. You may have to start with a media buy at first and then when you see the conversions that come through, like look, if you became an affiliate, you would have had this many conversions.

Now you have to remember one thing, an email list is the same email list. It’s constantly growing, which is good, but these people had already seen your business before, so the results may be smaller each time you do it. At the same time, there’s a certain amount of touch points that have to happen in between. So that would be a really good one. And then look at the YouTubers, especially in the SMB and SaaS space, because they have the opportunity to rank in Google search as well as on YouTube. And a lot of people are looking for solutions and a visual and verbal queue

is a really good way to learn how to do something whether it’s a B2B software system enterprise or small business or even fixing something in your house. Having that visual builds the trust and shows you what it’s going to be like to use if it’s going to be adoptable and adaptable to your clients teams and then if you are the one being demonstrated in the video it builds the trust that your software really is a solution.

David Vogelpohl (22:53)

Adam in that response you had mentioned avoiding review sites in the beginning and I feel like many of the technology product companies I’ve worked with over the years. It’s like one of the biggest sort affiliates in their niche is like. I don’t know “top 10 X service” in their review sites, but they’re they’re ranking for like

“top provider does X types of queries.” Do you recommend folks avoid that or are you thinking avoid it where they say like I have a review of your brand? The latter?

Adam Riemer (23:28)

 was your company, David, I would say avoid letting people and going after sites that say FastSpring reviews. This is just your own customers. This is just your own traffic that they’re intercepting. If it’s the best software to do X, Y, and Z, that’s something that adds value. It doesn’t have your brand, but it features your brand as a solution. So that’s a touch point that’s going to bring someone to you.

if they also have a review after but that review is maybe 20% of the traffic coming through and that other 80% has a really strong conversion rate then I would say both are fine and keep them just make sure there’s advertising disclosures on the top of each page.

David Vogelpohl (24:08)

Now, yeah, I was going to say on the disclosure side, so like when you when you have these affiliates that are running review sites about your brand and you’re paying commissions and really in any case, you need disclosures that it’s a paid ad, but in particular when you have these types of reviews or assessments, do you have anything else to add on that front? I’m guessing that’s pretty important.

Adam Riemer (24:33)

It’s, I’m not a lawyer. I’m not licensed to give any legal advice in any way, shape or form. So what I’ve been told by different clients and each client has different policies is to just make sure it’s clear, concise, visible, and states exactly what happens. So if the list and if the rankings on the list are based on how much the affiliates making, well,

David Vogelpohl (24:35)

Right here, yeah.

Adam Riemer (24:58)

they need to disclose that. It needs to say the amount we make influences the review and where they are in our list. Just like they have to say, I’m getting paid to feature you. If they were just featuring you on that list out of the kindness of their heart, they weren’t going to make any money in commissions, probably don’t need a disclosure because there’s no compensation. They just genuinely think you’re a good service. But if there’s money, whether it’s free product, a review, a year subscription or a trial account,

that has to be disclosed and before the brand is exposed to the consumer.

David Vogelpohl (25:31)

Yes, so if I if I really like a product and I write a review about it, but I want to make money from the review and I use an affiliate link, I can do that as long as I disclose it effectively on the affiliate side. And then you were also referencing other types of sites where the ranking is based on the revenue. Now, I think a lot of people think that means the commissions that they’re paid by the affiliates. I’m going to pay you $100 to sign up. My competitor is going to pay you $50 to sign up or $200 to sign up.

But it’s more than that, right? It’s it’s like the number they sell and the total amount of commissions they make, not just the amount per unit is, I mean, is this a factor in how they’ll rank the revenue from these review listings?

Adam Riemer (26:17)

Yes, exactly. So most of those listicle sites and most of the media companies, they have an internal EPC, earnings per click, which is separate from a network EPC, which is also a flawed and fake metric. And what happens with their internal earnings per click? They’re taking the amount of money they make, which is a combination of the total people that have clicked through. So if everyone at your company is clicking on those links, you’ve just lowered the earnings per click.

David Vogelpohl (26:30)

Haha.

Adam Riemer (26:44)

if they’re getting one click in a sale each time because it’s a review or a coupon the earnings per click is going to be massively high. So that’s why they break it down by page and if that page is generating a high EPC the algorithm and some of them are now automating this you may see in the morning you’re in the fifth position and in the afternoon you’re in the second position and at night you’re in the tenth position that’s because their algorithm is automatically updating the template and moving these around to where and when they’re most profitable.

And now there’s actually some affordable software out there. I think they’re called a Affilimate. They came across my radar about a year ago and they built one of those tools that the major media companies use for consumers, or not for consumers, but for some of the smaller publishing houses and affiliates. And I was blown away and that takes a lot. I’ve been doing this for 20 years. So they are building something pretty cool and special.

David Vogelpohl (27:14)

So it’s a.

So if you want to get listed, and whether they use that tool or something else, but if you want to get listed on one of these sites, it’s a game, right? It’s your price point, how much in commissions you’re willing to pay, your ability to convert those users, and all of that together results in an amount of money for them. So you might have higher commissions by three times as much, but if you convert less than three times as often, you’ll have a worse deal with somebody paying lower commissions. And so…

Adam Riemer (28:08)

Correct and use, sorry, you said something interesting there which is your price point. Having the lowest price point means lowest commission if you’re not doing flat fee. So having a medium or a competitive price point or being the brand and having really strong branding and a brand presence could cause a similar conversion rate and because you have a higher price point even with an equal commission, if the conversion rate’s the same, you generate a higher EPC for the affiliate.

David Vogelpohl (28:10)

Yeah, go ahead.

Adam Riemer (28:37)

But as a founder and an owner, you have to remember your baby’s not that special and it’s not the prettiest baby out there. So you have to think of it from a consumer standpoint. Does the consumer understand the brand value? And if not, you need to work with your marketing team and your branding team to say, here’s what we could be saying. How do we get the consumers to understand this better? And sometimes it’s to remove the branding and focus on the selling points and the value, which means getting rid of all the fluff and all the buzzwords. That’s something very hard for founders to let go of.

David Vogelpohl (29:08)

Yeah, it’s a good point. Like, “What do you do?” is a pretty simple question that we answer in very complex ways. My last question for you here today is we’ve talked about what running a proper affiliate program looks like. We talked about recruiting, building lists, reaching out.

What when I have an affiliate and they’re part of my program, how do you think about getting them to keep referring customers or to refer more customers? Like how do you think about the management of those relationships?

Adam Riemer (29:43)

I keep notes on every single affiliate inside their affiliate accounts. That way if something ever happens to me or if I stop managing and I have a team member take over, they’ll see exactly what happened and one of those notes is motivators for that partner.

We have some partners that are making 10 and $30 ,000 a month and they don’t care about the money they’re making enough even though a higher commission is always going to be attractive. Sometimes they just want like a nice food treat and that’s when Gold Belly comes in and I’ll ship them something really cool or something fun like there’s one of my favorite gifts to send is the not fried chicken ice cream. It looks like a piece of fried chicken but it’s actually a really good ice cream and the bone inside the chicken drumstick is like a Kit Kat type of

candy. And so things like that. It keeps us in front of them It keeps the goodwill going and then other people are impacted by money. So what you’ll do is you’ll run cash incentives, you’ll run bonuses if you can hit this goal over last year what you did, then we’ll pay you this type of bonus. Some people want recognition and I’ve sent trophies and plaques for them to hang on the wall if they’re a consultant and they— like a divorce lawyer, for example

and they’re sending people in for housing and to get a new house and real estate leads. What we’ll do is we’ll put a top XYZ company partner plaque for them to put on the wall, which builds trust in the brand. And the person may actually start filling it out from their office through their affiliate link. Everyone’s motivated differently and keep track of their motivators cater to those. It’s not a one size fits all, especially in the B2B space.

David Vogelpohl (31:13)

I like it. What a great point to end on. Adam, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been really educational. And as always, I love nerding out with you about affiliate marketing. Of course, of course. If you’d like to learn more about what Adam is up to, you can check him out on LinkedIn or visit adamriemer.me, R-I-E-M-E-R is how you spell Riemer. Thanks everyone for listening to the Growth Stage Podcast.

Adam Riemer (31:24)

Thank you for having me, David.

David Vogelpohl (31:41)

If you’d like to learn more about FastSpring, you can check us out at FastSpring.com. Thanks everybody and have a great day.

The post EP21: Advanced Affiliate Marketing for Saas, Software, and Digital Products appeared first on FastSpring.

I chatted with Tom Armitage, MapTiler’s Senior Technical Writer, about how MapTiler uses strategic partnerships to grow its global customer base. 

1. Use Affiliates As Local Sales Partners

MapTiler maintains developer documentation in English — and as the primary business language throughout the world, this works well for most of its users. 

“But there are parts of the world that want to do business in a different way,” Tom explained. “Maybe the documentation for developers is great, but they’d like to be sold to by a salesperson that speaks their language.” 

This is when Tom’s team seeks out affiliates who can serve as local MapTiler experts. By understanding a region’s native language and culture, these strategic partners can be a one-stop shop for localized marketing and sales support.

MapTiler has seen significant growth in revenue in countries with active affiliate partnerships. For instance, since they onboarded an affiliate partner in Japan, their sales in the country have increased by over 300%.

Note: MapTiler Uses FastSpring’s Affiliate Marketing platform to easily track affiliate sales and pay out their partners. Learn more about how you can gain access to a network of 10K+ global affiliate partners and increase revenue in new markets.

2. Search for Partners at Global Events and Social media

MapTiler makes a point of being at developer-focused and other tech conferences to spread brand awareness. “We have a very active team of people that are out there making connections all the time: talking to people and telling them about how our wonderful cartography can improve their products.”

But the team also uses in-person events to find affiliates and form strategic partnerships with other companies. 

Conferences and other industry events are useful when you want to cast a wide net and see who is interested in working together. But when you’re looking for something specific, that’s where social media can also help.

“If we know that there’s a country that requires this level of service, we have a look for who might be able to offer that service to us. Sometimes they just come to us via our website, but we also spread the word through social media that we are looking for affiliations with companies.”

MapTiler maintains a partnership page on its website for interested parties and is always on the lookout for new partners.

3. Make Sure Your Pricing and Checkout Are Localized

If you’re using affiliates to increase sales in a local region, make sure that users can easily check out using their preferred language, currency, and payment methods. This will make your partners’ jobs a lot easier.

MapTiler uses FastSpring’s branded checkout platform to localize pricing and the checkout experience, including calculating and collecting VAT, GST, and sales tax. 

Per internal research, we found that displaying local currencies and payment methods can increase local conversions by up to 50%.

4. Identify Your Champion Users

“Every now and again, we get a champion user that really likes what we’re doing. They really get us, and we get them,” Tom explained.

This is especially useful when the champion user is an influencer in their market. “That will really help promote your products without it being any kind of paid relationship.”

MapTiler’s team encourages these champion users by making sure they’re well-supported on the product. But they also make sure that sharing and promoting is a two-way street.

“If they’re a blogger or something like that, then we’ll obviously be sharing and helping them spread the word about what they’re doing, as well.”

5. Make It Really Easy to Get Started

A big part of MapTiler’s success is how user-friendly the platform is. Tom’s team has spent a lot of energy creating support materials that make it easy for a new company to get started and for existing users to find new uses for the platform.

“You come on our website, you’ll find a lot of information about how to develop, integrate, and use the maps in your own services: loads and loads of code snippets and code samples. 

Using a product-led growth (PLG) model, there are free tiers for all three of MapTiler’s subscription offerings designed to offer “quick wins” for new users.

When you sign up for MapTiler Cloud, “there’s a code sample that you can drag and drop straight into whatever it is that you’re doing so that you can very quickly, very simply get started.”

If you are interested in adding maps to your website or apps, you can get a free trial.

Note: We make it easy for companies like MapTiler to sell around the world by taking things like VAT and sales taxes, fraud detection, and global compliance off their hands. Our platform includes branded localized checkout, subscription management, and so much more. Sign up for a free account or request a demo today to learn more.

The post How MapTiler Doubled The Number of Countries They Sell In Using Strategic Partnerships appeared first on FastSpring.

And with the affiliate marketing channel estimated to account for 16% of online purchases in the US & Canada, your affiliate program should certainly deserve your attention.

Here are some recommendations of what you should be doing in order to leverage the affiliate program during Black Friday and afterward. 

1. Align Affiliates and Your Other Marketing Channels 

It’s essential to get all of your marketing channels on the same page so you can work with your affiliates to amplify one consistent brand message. 

If your internal marketing team is planning a 25% discount on your product during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but your affiliate audience is told to promote a 20% discount, you could be missing out on tons of sales.

Worse, you could be eroding the trust of your affiliates and discouraging them from promoting this offer and potentially other offers in the future.

Affiliates should have access to your current holiday discount, if not a slightly better one. This incentivizes affiliates to create content to promote the offer and reinforces the idea that they had a special relationship with the brand. 

It also encourages their audience to follow their links and use the affiliate-specific coupon codes so that the affiliate gets credit for the sale.

Takeaway: Make sure affiliates have access to:

• Any specific holiday brand messaging and imagery
• Special holiday discount affiliate links

2. Create Holiday Assets to Cover Your Entire Network

If you have a healthy mix of affiliate types, they will need different tools and resources to succeed. Keep this in mind when you’re planning special holiday offers.

For instance, your content affiliates may only want the details to build their own resources, while your coupon and deal sites will likely respond well to a custom coupon code. 

Things like reviewer guides, customized links, and offer details are a great start, but try to think back to what different affiliate types have asked for in the past and do your best to deliver that to them without them having to ask so they can get going quickly!

Takeaway: What holiday assets do you need to equip each different affiliate type within your network?

Note: Check out Multi-Discount Coupons, which allow FastSpring users to offer a single coupon code to promote up to ten different offers.

3. Leverage the Strengths of Your Network

As you create your holiday promotion strategy, you might find areas where your in-house marketing resources aren’t as good as you’d like them to be. Your company may have an incredible email marketing engine or excel at paid search, but there is probably at least one aspect of your marketing mix that you would like to bolster up. That’s where your affiliate network can come in.

You might want to give special attention to the affiliates that match where your internal resources are the weakest. You may also need to recruit specific influencers or sites based on your current needs. 

Equally important is understanding the strengths of your network. For example, if you have incredible social media influencers in your network that specialize in reviews, you could ask them to create posts that promote your Black Friday lead generation campaign. Or you might create special holiday-themed product descriptions, offer details, and branded links for affiliates with a strong email list to share in their newsletters.

Knowing where your team is weakest and where your network is the strongest can help you make sure you’ve given them the specific resources they need to maximize their impact.

Takeaway: Identify weaknesses in your internal resources that will impact your holiday efforts and prioritize the affiliates that can fill in the gaps.

4. Plan Far, Far Ahead

For many online sellers, the holiday season is their busiest time of year. This is extra true for affiliates. Most affiliates participate in more than one campaign, so your offer will be competing for attention against other products and offers in the mind of the affiliate. 

By communicating early with affiliates about upcoming offers and providing as many details and resources as possible, you maximize your chances of getting their attention, and you greatly improve the odds of them promoting your offers. 

Planning Tip: Set an embargo date for information to go out about your holiday offer so affiliates can schedule and coordinate offers to go live when you want them to!

5. Don’t Neglect the Post-Black Friday Holidays

Apart from the Black Friday or Cyber Monday deals, Q4 is also about the December holidays and sharing more with the best-performing affiliates from your program.

Though this can usually be translated into a performance-based bonus or an increased commission for the sales-driven period between Christmas and New Year’s, you can also be creative and work together on a special project like a license or subscription giveaway for their blog readers or Social Media followers. 

Planning Tip: Pay your affiliate a bonus based on their performance. With bonus tiers, you can increase payout for subsequent actions based on the monthly revenue. 

Looking for more help leveraging your affiliate network? Check out our white paper on how to drive affiliate activity. You’ll learn how to create an affiliate recruitment checklist, a communication timeline, and an engagement strategy. You’ll also read a case study detailing how one software company used FastSpring to grow its affiliate program. Download it here.

The post How to Prepare Your Affiliate Program for the Holidays appeared first on FastSpring.

If you are not familiar with what each of the above terms means and how they differ, you came to the right place!

Order Refunds

Order refunds occur when a customer requests a refund for an order, or they dispute a charge with their bank, and the funds are returned to the customer. It is important to note that when an order refund occurs, it does not mean that the affiliate commission associated with that order is automatically stopped. 

Tip: If your affiliate program or a specific affiliate is generating a returned order rate higher than your non-affiliate sale average, investigate how they promote your product(s). There may be an opportunity to improve the continuity between their message and your product. In some cases, this may also indicate fraudulent activity from that affiliate.

Action Locking

An action locking period is the time between when an action occurs and when it is approved or marked as owed to an affiliate. For clients who use the FastSpring affiliate solution Impact, the action locking and payout periods are standardized to synchronize all client affiliate accounts’ funding. All actions happening in a given month are locked one month after the end of the month in which they occur. This means that for every action occuring in January, you have until the end of February to process any necessary action reversals. Once the action locking period ends, affiliate commissions are not able to be reversed.

Note: Though actions lock during the month after they occur, payments are not issued until the following month on the 15^th. For example, January actions lock in February, then are paid on the 15^th of March.

Action Reversals

Action Reversals prevent an affiliate commission from being paid and reverse a tracked action or sale for different reasons. This is because an order was returned, and no revenue was collected for a sale; therefore no commission should be paid. However, sometimes actions need to be reversed because incorrect information is passed through the action tracker. Suppose your store only has a few orders per month. In that case, it may be sufficient to simply set a calendar notification to run a report that includes returned orders in your store and then check those against actions within the affiliate platform to see if they need to be reversed. If your store processes hundreds or even thousands of orders and you have over a dozen or more returns, you will likely want to automate this process.

For more information on action reversal processes, please check out the following support article: https://help.impactradius.com/hc/en-us/articles/202925139

Tip: It is also a good idea to periodically look at the pending actions screen in the affiliate platform to make sure information such as product SKUs, order amounts, order ids, etc. are being received properly by the platform. If you notice something that does not seem right, reach out to support immediately to investigate the issue.

Whichever reversal option best suits your situation, it is crucial to be consistent with the process to help your program run smoothly and minimize unnecessary expenses. Opening conversations with affiliates about promotional methods they use that may be resulting in higher percentages of returned orders fosters a good relationship with your affiliates and will result in a more reliable web presence as a bonus.

The post Lessons in Affiliate Marketing: Order Refunds, Action Locking, and Affiliate Action Reversals appeared first on FastSpring.

When there is a good fit, and affiliate marketing is used effectively, it can provide a healthy boost to sales and marketing activities, but how can you tell if it is right for you? With each company having its own unique priorities and needs, it can be confusing as to where to even start, but hopefully, the criteria below will help you understand if taking the plunge into affiliate marketing is right for you and your team.

Stay on Target

Many affiliates have direct relationships with their audience through social media, their websites, blogs, videos, or even in-person interactions so it is important to understand your sales/marketing journey and determine if affiliate marketing is adaptable to that process.

For example, if your products are primarily sold by resellers or through channels other than your website, affiliate-based marketing will be difficult to implement and have a low percentage of success. The main reason for this mismatch is trackability, but it also extends into how resellers might interact with their audience and fulfill orders.

Alternatively, if the majority of your sales pass through your website and your products are competitive in a market like creative software, security, utilities, or other products that are purchased by individuals who intend to use the products themselves, affiliate marketing could be a good fit.

Filling in the Gaps

Though there are many different types of affiliates that can offer various types of promotional methods to build awareness for your products such as SEO, Coupon/Deals, content, media, and influencers, affiliate programs tend to work best when they are considered as a complement to an existing in-house marketing strategy.

Take for instance a situation where you may have in-house email campaigns that drive sales, but you may be having trouble finding qualified leads to put into the email funnel. In this case, an SEO affiliate, or content type affiliates that specialize in your software vertical can send leads to your site to sign up to your newsletter or download a trial of your software where you can then follow up with them through your email marketing.

Similarly, content and influencer affiliates can help build awareness for your brand in competitive markets by sharing product information, special offers, or even doing product reviews/comparisons of your products alongside the competition.

Building a Healthy Affiliate Program

A productive affiliate program takes time to build. Recruitment of new affiliates and keeping current affiliates up to date with product news, promotions, and content to share with their audience takes time and effort, so it is important to take this into account when getting started.

Ideally, a new program will have an experienced person or team to take on those responsibilities, or at least someone that will support the program by recruiting new affiliates, relaying company information like product releases and special offers to affiliates as well as provide support to them if they need assistance with links, ads or have questions about their accounts with regards to commissions or other administrative tasks.

Want to learn more about building a healthy affiliate program? Learn more about FastSpring’s Affiliate program, here.

The post Is Affiliate Marketing Right for your Company? appeared first on FastSpring.

The techniques and actions described below can help you minimize the risk in your program, and help build a healthy program that is fair and clear for your affiliates.

Control Recruitment

The most effective way to manage risk inside of an affiliate program is to stop it before it starts. By researching, pursuing, and approving only quality partners that align with your company goals and will adhere to your guidelines, a program is less likely to experience abuse and should be positioned well to avoid fraud within the program. It is also understandable if a proactive only recruitment plan may not be realistic.

If you do publish your affiliate program application online on your site or open your program up to a marketplace or network, it is important to not enable any automatic approval rules, and instead opt to review each application by visiting the affiliate’s website, checking to see how they are promoting other brands and even message them if you have any questions before you approve them if you are not familiar with them.

Monitor Activity

Once affiliates join your program, it is important to learn what suspicious activity looks like and keep an eye out for metrics that are questionable. Some examples of metrics that may indicate suspicious activity are:

Conversion rates that are significantly higher than your program average or the baseline for that specific affiliate that does not coincide with a special offer or promotion may indicate fraud.
The percentage of returned sales from a partner is higher than your regular rate of returns.
Order totals that are very high or higher than your average order value
Multiple orders from the same customer name or IP Address

This type of information can be seen through various reports within your dashboard. You can either check your dashboard on a regular basis or schedule important reports to be delivered to your email address as a reminder. There are also notifications that you can enable when different activities occur to notify you of potentially fraudulent activity in the custom notifications section of the dashboard.

Enforcement of Rules

Strange things happen, but if they happen often enough that a pattern develops don’t be afraid to remove offending affiliates from your program. If you do suspect fraud from an affiliate, you should reach out to them to try and find out what the situation is and work with them to help rectify the issues. However, if you have confirmed fraud, the best thing you can do is report it to your affiliate platform or partners so they can remove the offending affiliate from other campaigns in their network. Many affiliate solutions will have formal processes for managing the removal of affiliates in the even they are committing fraud.

Process Returns

The cost of fraud is two-fold, there is obviously the return of a sale and the associated fees in your online store, but there is also the commission owed to an affiliate. It is important to remember that these two costs are separate, and once you process the returned orders in your store, you must also reverse the related actions within the affiliate platform. Affiliate solutions offer different ways to reverse sales to prevent commissions.

The most common is by enabling options for actions to “lock” before they are finalized and payments are owed to affiliates. In general, the locking period is usually around 1 month after an action occurs. Inside of Impact you can reverse actions one at a time from the pending actions screen or select multiple sales if you are suspicious of a media partner, as well as submit a formatted list of actions to be reversed via FTP.

No matter which option you choose, it is important to understand the timing of action locking to make sure you process any returns or mark suspicious actions before they are locked. If you are diligent you can reduce or eliminate the effect fraudulent orders have on your affiliate expenses.

Communicate with Your Affiliates

Communication with your affiliates is important for many reasons, but as it relates to fraud or risk in your program, it is especially important. Establishing clear guidelines and communicating them with your affiliates as to which promotional methods are allowed, and creating a no-tolerance policy for fraud in your program will go a long way to strengthen your program by setting a fair playing field for all affiliates.

Want to learn more about growing your business with the support of a full-service ecommerce partner and an affiliate program? Learn more about FastSpring’s Affiliate program, here.

The post 5 Steps to Minimize Risk in Your Affiliate Program appeared first on FastSpring.

Catch up on the previous three articles, here:

1. So You Created an Affiliate Program—Now What?
2. 3 Simple Tips for Recruiting Successful Affiliate Partners
3. How to Effectively Communicate with Your Affiliate Partners

In this piece, I am discussing tips for keeping your affiliate partners involved in your program. A successful affiliate program largely depends on keeping your affiliate partners interested and active. This is often easier said than done. One of the most common struggles in the affiliate space is activating affiliates immediately following recruitment and keeping them engaged over time.

The best place to start is by understanding and defining what having active affiliates means to you. And then following up with the appropriate planning and consistent communication.

Keep reading to learn how to get the most out of your affiliate program by keeping your partners engaged.

Define and Categorize Your Affiliates By Activity Level

One metric for affiliate activity is by measuring an action—like sales, leads, etc.—no surprise there. However, clicks can also indicate affiliate activity and effort so they should be considered as well to better understand how you can grow your program.

From there, you will need to define a time frame such as the past month, three months or six months and identify which of your affiliates have very few, little or no action and/or have not driven any clicks. You should then separate that list into different groups based on their activity. For example, a list for those affiliates with zero actions and zero clicks, another list for affiliates with zero actions and some clicks, and finally a list for affiliates with a few actions and a few clicks.

Having your affiliates organized into groups based on their activity level will help you create segmented messaging. In the next section, I will demonstrate how you can create messaging for specific groups.

How to Engage with Inactive Affiliates

It is highly recommended that you prioritize the affiliate groups you engage with. For example, you can start by focusing your efforts on the group of affiliates that have a few actions with a few clicks, then move on to engage with the affiliates with zero actions with some clicks, and finally, you can work with the group with zero actions and zero clicks.

The first two groups are likely to be the most responsive since the clicks indicate that they are interested in promoting your campaign but may need some guidance or assistance. You may also have some affiliates that were very productive in the past, but have since been less active, identifying those affiliates and reaching out to them personally could rebuild that relationship.

With all of this in mind, the message you send them should be encouraging and motivational, expressing your appreciation for having them as a part of your program, while making suggestions on how others in your program are finding success, or asking if they require any additional resources that might enable them to better reach their audience. For example:

Hi,

Thank you so much for being a part of our affiliate program. We have noticed that you have generated some traffic to our site, which we really appreciate, but your audience has not yet made a purchase. We’ve found that using direct links to our product pages instead of the generic link to our company page when sharing information about our products increases the conversion rate of visitors significantly.

Some affiliates are also finding quite a bit of success with sharing product reviews with their audience or linking our products in the “Software I Use” section of their websites. If you haven’t tried either of those options, it could help drive some additional sales from your site.

Please let us know if you require any additional resources or there is anything we can do to make promoting our products easier for you.

Incentivize Activity with Bonus Offers

Sometimes the effort of an affiliate within a given program is determined solely by their return on the time they invest. In this case, offering an activation campaign to affiliates is the perfect way to jumpstart some activity within your affiliate pool. You can offer a higher commission percentage for subsequent months if a milestone is reached, or even offer a bonus once an affiliate makes their first sale of a month.

Plan to send out a message in advance explaining the activation campaign offer including the timing, rewards, and terms so affiliates that wish to participate can plan ahead. An activation campaign can also be used to incentivize content creation if you offer to reward affiliates for NEW content they create such as a video review, blog post, etc. Try to match the activity you are promoting with the goals of your overall marketing program to maximize impact.

For example, if you have an upcoming product release planned you might want to have as many product reviews at launch as possible, or if you have a seasonal sale, running an activation campaign at the same time serves double duty as an option for affiliates to earn more money, while offering their audience the best price on your product.

At the end of the day, it comes down to consistent and concise communication with your affiliate partners. Building and maintaining an affiliate program takes time and effort. You have to find the right mix that works for your unique product and affiliate program.

Visit the FastSpring website to learn more about FastSpring’s Affiliate network.

The post How to Keep Your Affiliate Partners Engaged appeared first on FastSpring.

Integration of the affiliate channel into your other online marketing activities dashboard will help shape not only affiliate marketing activities but may help you rethink other online marketing activities and roll them into a performance-based model as well. Here is a quick guide to the metrics you should monitor and track to determine your affiliate marketing program’s success.

1. Impressions

The number of impressions indicates your product’s level of exposure among affiliates’ promotional channels. A very high volume of impressions that relate to a small number of clicks or sales can be an indicator of inaccurate affiliate tracking, low affinity between the affiliates’ audience and your products or an inconsistency between the ad promoted and the landing page the ad directs traffic to.

*Please note that not all programs or ad types support impression reporting, and it may not be a useful measurement for your program unless you plan to reward some affiliates based on impressions.

2. Clicks

The number of clicks is a measurement of the interactions between the impressions given by your ads and how the audience interacts with the displayed banner or link. Clicks reflect a baseline for interest in the content where the related ads are placed. Essentially a click can equate to the audience “taking the next step” towards the final goal of a sale or action.

3. Actions

The number of actions is representative of the total number of conversions within an affiliate program. Sales are the most common conversion metric, but other activities such as lead generation or trial downloads may also be part of a program and are considered actions. When affiliates do not drive actions, it is important to understand why. A lack of actions for an entire program may indicate integration or tracking issues, while individual affiliates that do not drive actions may be an opportunity to improve your program’s performance by addressing their needs.

4. Conversion Rate

A conversion rate in affiliate marketing is usually calculated by dividing the number of actions by the number of clicks, resulting in a percentage. As one of the more highly used performance indicators in e-commerce, the conversion rate applied to affiliate traffic will indicate the effectiveness of affiliates, specific ads, ad types or campaigns. Conversion rates above 10% are usually considered very high and could mean that the affiliate’s traffic has a strong affinity with your market, but in some cases, it could indicate that an affiliate is employing suspicious promotional methods.

5. Cost

Cost in the very basic sense within affiliate marketing is the commissions paid to your affiliates based on the actions they create. This metric may be broken down into different silos depending on the platform you use, so it is important to understand what the costs represent related to the specific report you are viewing. Oftentimes calculated bonuses, platform fees, ad serving fees and other costs associated with affiliate marketing are not included in basic sales reports so be sure to check and understand the total costs of your program so you can fully recognize how each expense fits into the total costs for a program. If platform fees or ad serving fees are too high, it may impact the commission amounts you are able to offer or the types of ads you feature in your program.

6. Revenue

Revenue for affiliate marketing is just like revenue from any other marketing channel and is defined by the sales tracked through that system. Taking the revenue metric one step further, incremental revenue is additional revenue attributed to a specific channel. Though incremental revenue may be difficult to pinpoint and sort out with one hundred percent certainty, especially in fully-fledged marketing campaigns that include multiple touchpoints from various channels. Determining the incremental value of your activities to at least some degree plays a crucial role in prioritizing tasks related to your marketing mix and determining which type of marketing performs best for each task.

7. Active Affiliates

In most cases, an active affiliate has generated a click, an action, or both. Some programs use one variation of the above criteria to create outreach programs to bring their affiliates into an active state. Especially in cases where an affiliate was previously active but has recently been inactive, proactive outreach for determining why this occurred, and how the affiliate might be encouraged to move back into an active state will help keep your program in a healthy state. You might even get some valuable feedback from affiliates about competitive commission rates or missing resources.

8. Affiliate Mix

Traditionally, affiliates are grouped based on how and where they interact with their audience to drive traffic and sales to your site. Typical designations are content creators, influencers, media sites, deals & coupons, paid search, email marketing, bloggers or even affiliate networks working as sub-affiliates. By keeping your affiliates in groups it will enable you to message them more effectively by sending actionable messages that are specific to their needs, as well as let you see areas you might want to increase or decrease the number of affiliates to recruit for a given category to optimize your affiliate mix.

9. Returned Orders

Returned orders are simply the number of returned sales within your program. The rate for returned orders from affiliate traffic should not be that different from your overall return rate. If you notice an affiliate with a higher than average return rate from their sales, you should investigate how they are promoting your products and driving traffic to your site. You may find that they are exaggerating features of your products so your customers referred by them are disappointed, or you may even find that they are using illegitimate practices to generate sales and they should be removed from your program.

Are you a FastSpring user who hasn’t yet leveraged an affiliate network to sell your product? Learn more about FastSpring’s Affiliate Program here.

Not yet using FastSpring to sell your product? Sign up to check out our platform, or for more a more personalized tour of how FastSpring works, request a demo.

The post 9 Affiliate Performance Metrics and What They Tell You About Your Program appeared first on FastSpring.

Catch up on the previous two articles, here:

• So You Created an Affiliate Program—Now What?
• 3 Simple Tips for Recruiting Successful Affiliate Partners

In this piece, I am covering four tips to help you effectively communicate with your affiliate partners to drive more revenue for your business. The four topics I am sharing are:

1. Understanding Your Audience
2. Timing is (Almost) Everything
3. Focusing on the Structure
4. Making Your Message Actionable

Let’s dive in!

1. Understanding Your Audience

Understanding your audience is crucial to the success of your affiliate messaging strategy. If you can, segment your affiliate audience into identifiable groups and send targeted messaging to each group that focuses on their specific needs and methods of promotion. If you only have a small group of affiliates that is diverse in their promotional methods, try to keep the message clear and concise.

Try to think of your message to affiliates as “Marketing to Marketers” to help you find a voice and cadence that works best. Don’t be afraid to adjust your style and format based on feedback from your affiliates.

2. Timing is (Almost) Everything

In today’s competitive affiliate market, it is not uncommon for affiliates to work on multiple programs at the same time. Some affiliates limit their affiliate marketing to part-time. Given this, it is highly likely that they have other priorities vying for their time.

Ideally, you should provide at least one to two weeks of notice before a significant affiliate activity like a seasonal promotion or product release. The idea is to give an affiliate enough time to schedule posts, create an email, or whatever other promotional tasks they have at their disposal. However, more time may be necessary for personal product reviews, blog posts, or other content that will take additional time to prepare.

3. Focusing on the Structure

The structure of your messages helps make your communication not only efficient but also increases their effectiveness. Since many affiliates work with multiple programs, you can save them time with well-structured and clear messaging. A great skeleton for an affiliate message often looks something like this:

1. Greeting
2. A summary of the offer in paragraph form
3. Bullet points of key information and highlights like start/end time, discount amount, etc.
4. Personalized affiliate link to promote the offer
5. Link to additional resources
6. Incentives for them to promote the given offer, such as increased commission, new product, limited time offer, etc.
7. Examples of how they can promote the offer

When your messaging is consistent and systematic, it makes it easier for your affiliates to read and understand. It also can drastically reduce the time it takes you to create effective messages.
It’s a win-win!

4. Making Your Message Actionable

It is important to be clear as to what you want your affiliates to do with the information you share with them. You can inspire your affiliates to try something new or remind them of a lesser-used promotional method when you provide specific promotion examples. Some examples include instructing affiliates to:

1. Update their Instagram URL to an affiliate link—make sure you provide links!
2. Add links in descriptions of their videos.
3. Add a “things I use” section to their website.

Make sure to provide a good incentive for the action you are asking your affiliates to take. You can give a bonus for their first action or temporarily increase commissions for creating or updating a product review. These small actions are a great way to fill the gaps in your marketing mix to have a consistent and long-term presence online.

These tips should come in handy at any stage of your affiliate program. Visit the FastSpring website to learn more about FastSpring’s Affiliate network.

The post How to Effectively Communicate with Your Affiliate Partners appeared first on FastSpring.

Finding the right mix of partners to help drive demand and revenue for your business is no easy task. And it is rarely a “set it and forget it” situation. If you’re looking to assemble your first team of affiliate partners or are looking to add new ones to your existing mix, take a look at these three helpful tips.

1. Set a Budget

Finding the right affiliates for your program takes some planning. Before you can even begin recruiting, you need to consider your costs and determine your ideal budget for your affiliate program.

The key here is to set a budget and rates for affiliate commissions. Many larger affiliates have a set commission rate that they expect to get, and won’t even consider programs that can’t match that figure. Take your time to understand typical commission rates, and pay structures for similar-sized companies in your industry. You need to find the right subset of affiliates that work within your budget.

Pro Tip: Creating multiple insertion orders/contracts with different commission rates for different types of affiliates provides you with some negotiating power and can make it easy to set up new affiliates.

2. Identify Your Ideal Affiliate Partners

In order to build your dream team of affiliate partners, you need to have a good understanding of what your ideal candidate looks like. Start out simple by listing the qualities or characteristics you are interested in like:

• Supported promotional methods
• Geographic location
• Language(s)
• Social engagement
• Alexa ranking
• Post frequency

It’s important to remember that bigger isn’t always better. Often, smaller affiliates have the potential to be more responsive and willing to work with your program—this is especially important to keep in mind if you are not a well-established brand.

When you are working through this phase, it is helpful to set goals for your outreach. Decide on the number of partners you want—making sure that it fits within your budget and makes sense for your program. The volume of qualified potential affiliates you will receive can vary depending on your product, how large your program already is and what types of affiliates you want to attract. So try to make sure to set a goal that is realistic as well as achievable.

Pro Tip: If you decide to opt into an affiliate program marketplace like the one that FastSpring offers in partnership with Impact, make sure you are applying the same set of criteria to the affiliates that reach out to you, as you would if you were finding them and reaching out. Do not be afraid to say no if the timing is not right for an affiliate, or if you are not currently looking for a specific promotional method they specialize in either.

3. Reach Out, Follow Up, and Repeat

Now that you established your budget, identified your ideal affiliate partners and set goals for outreach—the next step is to start contacting potential partners. Concentrate your time around affiliates you feel can really make an impact, and be flexible if they come back with a different offer than what you initially suggest, you can counter with different terms like higher commission rates, or longer referral periods if need be, but be aware of how that might impact your profitability so you don’t overextend.

Start out simple with an email message to your ideal candidate. Make sure to include all necessary information about your program—your company and product information, commission rates, and goals. If you don’t get a quick reply, try following up in a couple of days with a variation of the first email where you dive a bit deeper into why you would like to work with them.

Pro Tip: If you do not receive a response a few days after the second email, try asking them if there is a better contact for you to reach out to or look yourself to find a better contact at a given company and start a new message with them.

Recruiting affiliates is a process. Taking your time and finding the right partners for your program will set you up for long-term success. Visit the FastSpring website to learn more about FastSpring’s Affiliate network.

The post 3 Simple Tips for Recruiting Successful Affiliate Partners appeared first on FastSpring.

Either way, managing a revenue-driving affiliate program is not a set-it-and-forget-it endeavor. The tips below will help you make the most of your new affiliate program.

1. Include Helpful Information in Affiliate Welcome Communication

This may seem like a no brainer, but you would be surprised how many people go through the setup wizard and never revisit the actual setup of their program. There’s a lot of optimizations that you can do to make the onboarding experience as painless as possible for your affiliates and reduce the time to affiliates’ first action.

Configuring your system messages like the welcome email to include specific information like links to resources and your product information, you will empower your affiliates to learn more about your products and encourage them to take the first steps towards being productive. Think of this as your first opportunity to create an actionable message for your affiliates.

2. Provide Current Brand Messaging and Visuals

You also want to make sure you have the right content available in your program to make promoting your program as seamless as possible for your affiliates. Remember, the work of your affiliate partners is a reflection of your brand, so make sure you’re giving the most up-to-date assets. A great start is making separate text links for each page you would like your affiliates to send traffic to such as individual product pages, specific campaign landing pages, or even your blog. Make sure to provide graphics to your affiliates so they can easily create display banner ads on their sites.

Common sizes for affiliate banners are: 300×250, 250×250, 160×600, 300×600 and 125×125.

Hopefully, you already have some basic branding and product information ready but if you don’t, start with the most essential items like product descriptions, logos, and branding guidelines. Then, make these resources readily available to your affiliates so they can quickly learn the most important things about your company and products, and feel prepared to share it with their audience. If you plan to have affiliates create reviews of your product to share with their audiences, it might also be a good idea to create a short reviewer’s guide where you can summarize key product information and competitive comparisons like feature lists, pricing, etc.

A reviewer’s guide helps to focus on affiliate messages on what you think best represents your brand, but encourage affiliates to build on the guide and share their own experience with your products as well!

3. Open a Channel for Direct Conversation with Your Affiliate Partners

Affiliate marketing is a two-way street and having a conversation with your affiliates about what they want and need will enable you to focus your efforts on building a revenue-driving program. If you have personal relationships with your affiliates, you can jump on a short call to see how they are doing in your program. If that’s not a feasible option, you can create a survey for your affiliates to ask a few questions about what is working for them, what they would like to see, and how you could improve it. This survey can help you take action based on the responses.

On the topic of conversations, a good guideline is to think of the messages you send to your affiliates as marketing to and for marketers. Take into consideration what you would ask any other marketer for and think about what they would need to achieve a given task, then provide as much of the information and resources they would need upfront so they can take action quickly without too much back and forth.

4. Develop a Communication Strategy

We will get more in-depth with specific messaging strategies another time, but having a strategy for communicating with your affiliates is crucial to the ongoing success of your program. A monthly newsletter where you share any upcoming news with your affiliates, product promotion information or program updates is a great place to start, but depending on how your affiliates work, you may be able to benefit from other information strategies such as product and ad feeds that can be used to automatically distribute information they can then share with their audiences.

A simple schedule and structure for your messages will also make affiliates more likely to open your messages and take action. For example, a short intro paragraph with the latest news, bullet points of any offers and suggestions for how to promote a given offer to their audience is a great way to keep a message focused and actionable. Affiliates can then anticipate an upcoming message and make time in their schedule to support it if it will work for their audience.

These tips should come in handy at any stage of your affiliate program. Visit the FastSpring website to learn more about FastSpring’s Affiliate network.

The post So You Created an Affiliate Program—Now What? appeared first on FastSpring.

In our latest webinar, FastSpring Affiliate Marketing Manager Mark Jacobs, guided attendees through the exciting world of affiliate marketing. When done right, affiliate programs can provide a valuable stream of revenue for businesses that they otherwise wouldn’t have access to.

Webinar attendees learned:

• The basics of an affiliate program
• How to set up an affiliate program with FastSpring
• How to identify and recruit the best affiliates
• Best practices for running a revenue-driving affiliate program

In case you missed it, check out the webinar recording below:

And here’s a copy of the slides:

Bonus: Check out the video Mark mentioned during the webinar that shows the FastSpring affiliate program in action!

We’re looking forward to seeing you at the next webinar in September!

The post [Webinar Recap] How to Drive More Software Sales with an Affiliate Program appeared first on FastSpring.