I want
to share with you four
strategies to build the most powerful
SaaS affiliate program ever.
You know, I learned this
not only generating
tens of millions of dollars
in my own businesses
through affiliates and partners,
but teaching this to 500 of my SaaS
clients
to do it in their business themselves.
For many of them, it's become a third
of all the demand generation
in their business
so that they could grow
without spending money.
Like literally the most beautiful thing
about an affiliate program is
you can have somebody else
wake up every day,
build the most creative
marketing campaigns, and have people
that you couldn't afford to hire,
executing these marketing strategies
to bring you new customers
and you only pay them once you get paid.
It is the most beautiful
marketing strategy out there,
but I want to teach you
the four specific aspects of it
that's going to make this next level
for you in your software business.
Let's get into it.
Number
one is payout strategy.
When people are evaluating
different affiliate programs,
they might be looking at you
and your competitor
and trying to ask themselves like,
who should I promote?
One of the coolest things
that I learned working
with a guy named Clay Collins,
he built this payout strategy
that was super aggressive, 30% lifetime
value forever
for people that brought him customers.
And now when you think about it,
I want you to consider a few things.
Number one is the percent you pay out,
the average in the industry
for SaaS is about 25%.
The other aspect is how long the pixel
when you tag somebody
or your affiliate tags
somebody as potentially being a customer,
there's the length
that the pixel will stay active for.
Most people,
the average is 90 days,
but you can go 120
if you want to be super generous
or you can go as little as 30 days
if you want to bring that down
because you might be
doing your own marketing.
But for me,
the way to think about
it is to understand
what can you afford, right?
What's the lifetime value of a customer?
Most SaaS businesses will pay out
a third of the lifetime
value of a customer to acquire them
because they're going to make up
all their money on the back end.
So be sure to think like Clay.
Pay your affiliates
an attractive scenario
so that they want to promote
you and stick with you
and keep promoting more and more people
to your business.
Number two is a bulletproof offer.
So a lot of folks,
they have an affiliate program
and it's only inside the product.
There's no affiliate page.
There's no information about it.
But here's what I know, is
that if you want to attract
great affiliates,
you gotta treat it like a sales page.
You got to make sure that the headline,
the copy, the case studies, the proof,
the screenshots of how you've helped
other affiliates make money is all there.
You know, one of my buddies, Brennan,
he reached out to me once.
He's like, “Hey, man,
I'd love for you to be an affiliate
for our new product.”
And I was like, “That's cool.
Tell me how it works”.
And he sent me a Google doc.
And what I loved about this
Google doc is not only did it have
incredible copy, right?
Not only did it have great examples,
case studies,
but he literally gave me
the math to work out
exactly how much money
I would make basing on earnings
per click.
He broke down
all the different affiliates
and programs and averaged it out
and said
If you can send an email to your list
and you have this size of a list, here's
the kind of potential revenue
you can make based on the historical data
that we have.
Giving me that information
it made it so easy for me to say yes
because it wasn't like this,
I hope that I make money
if I promote this.
He was taking all the risk off the table,
putting it front and center,
and showing me
what the results were for
past affiliate partners
and allowed me to just feel confident
that he had a bulletproof offer
for me to want to endorse.
Number three is resource to win.
Most affiliate programs
do not support their affiliates
when they sign up.
Do you have a onboarding
training sequence
to bring your affiliates
to get them successful,
just like you do for your software?
Do you consider the things
an affiliate would need to be successful?
Landing page copy,
ad copy, social media posts,
literally training on
how to grow their own business.
Because if they can grow their business,
then they're going to help you
grow your business.
One of the things that I discovered
a long time ago
when I built my Flowtown
affiliate program, Flowtown
was a social marketing platform, is
I needed to treat these partners
like they were team members.
So that meant monthly calls.
It meant identifying things
that certain affiliates were doing that
I wanted to share with the rest of them.
It meant training my affiliates
to be better business people
so that they could grow their business.
Doing that
process will blow away
your affiliate results.
Number four is operationalize
the channel.
One time
I was talking to a coaching client
and we were just
digging into their business
to try to understand
where the growth died off
because they used to actually
be a lot higher in revenue
and then it dropped.
So when they started working with me,
I just said, Hey, show me your analytics.
And I saw this peak in their business
and then it dropped, their MRR dropped
and I was like, Interesting.
What did you do to cause that peak?
And he shared with me
that they were running a
bunch of partner webinars,
and I said,
Why did you stop?
And he goes, We just started
working on Facebook ads and we forgot.
And I stopped doing webinars.
And this is the philosophy
that I always called growth stacking
is that when you have a channel
that's producing results for you,
you want to operationalize
it, and stack it,
and then put the new one on top.
But if you move to the next silver
bullet syndrome,
you just stop
something else to do the new thing,
you don't stack it,
you don't operationalize it,
and it just falls apart.
It literally is like a castle
made of sand.
So what I want to encourage you,
if you have an affiliate program
and it's starting to go,
and it's
a meaningful, ideally 25% of your demand.
You want to staff it with a person
that wakes up every day
to push it forward
to recruit more affiliates,
to ensure they've got the right resources
to focus on the incentives
to make it better. Right.
You want somebody who wakes up every day
to push it forward,
recruit more affiliates,
give them the resources they need
so that you can growth
stack your business.
So if you want to build a world
class affiliate program
for your business,
you want to make sure you build
a great payout structure.
You want to focus on the offer,
give the resources
your partners need to win,
and most importantly,
build an operationalized process
so that it doesn't fall apart
once you start doing something else
in your marketing.
If you want to learn more from me,
I have a strategic partner
playbook training.
I'm going to give you the training
where I walk through
how to create your own partner network,
to recruit them, to onboard them,
to pay them out, etc.
Click the link below
to get your access to that.
And as per usual,
I want to challenge you
to live a bigger life
and a bigger business.
And I'll see you next Monday.