7 Tips To Recruit Affiliates to Your SaaS Affiliate Program

Recruiting affiliates can be a great way to extend your company's sales force. By onboarding the right partners through your SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) affiliate program, you can grow your affiliate network, target niche audiences, improve sales conversions, and expand your customer base.

Although your SaaS affiliate program can help you sign up affiliates to represent your business, strengthening your affiliate marketing efforts through recurring revenue can help you achieve better results. For example, recurring revenue allows you to offer a generous commission to potential affiliates and onboard successful partners to promote your brand among their audiences, generate sales, and grow your business.  

However, recruiting affiliates to your SaaS affiliate program can be challenging, as it requires a considerable amount of time, energy, creativity, and perseverance. To simplify this process, here are seven practical tips for recruiting affiliates to a SaaS affiliate program.

How To Recruit SaaS Affiliates

The affiliate recruitment process includes finding the right affiliates, contacting them, pitching your products/services, and ultimately onboarding them. ‌Here's how you can recruit affiliates to your SaaS affiliate program.

1. Conduct Research on Potential Affiliates‌

A business, individual, blogger, influencer, or existing customer can all be potential affiliates. So before you create a strategy, set up campaigns, and define your pitch or value proposition, it is essential to research your potential affiliates and how they endorse products. 

For example, before contacting bloggers or reviewers, research their websites to understand how they promote different products and services to their audiences. Going through their website will also help you find their contact information. 

The research you conduct will help you understand your future affiliate's audience and the needs of their target audiences. This information can also help you establish an appropriate commission for specific affiliates and develop a customized pitch to approach them. 

Available traffic analytics tools will allow you to measure your future affiliates' websites' traffic, audience size, and engagement metrics. This can help you make an informed decision before you approach potential affiliates.  

You can also conduct competitor research, identify your competitors' affiliates, and analyze how they promote their products or services. Using metrics such as authority score, backlinks, and referring domains, online analytics tools can help you identify the websites that send the most traffic to your competitor's site. You can then target affiliates who have similar relevant experience to achieve your business goals.  

2. Find Affiliates From Your Existing Customer and Mailing Lists

An excellent route for recruiting affiliates is tapping into your existing mailing list subscribers, users, or customers. Those who have subscribed to or used your products/services are probably already familiar with what you have to offer. ‌

You can pitch the benefits of your affiliate program to existing buyers using follow-up emails or by advertising it on your website. Several automated email tools offer affiliate "drip" email campaigns to ease the follow-up process. Apart from following up, these tools can help you test different, personalized messages to get your satisfied customers interested in your affiliate program. You can also send your customers an email after purchase and invite them to join your affiliate program.

Advertising on the checkout page can also attract customers to join your affiliate program. You can use an ad to highlight the incentives of your affiliate program and direct them to your affiliate program landing page.

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3. Run Pay-per-Click (PPC) Advertising Campaigns 

Running PPC advertisements in search engines and advertising platforms is a surefire method for driving potential affiliates to your website. Although paid ad campaigns can be time-consuming and cost money, they enable you to easily target specific niches of audiences and recruit many potential affiliates.

Here are some pointers for running successful PPC ads: 

• Use platforms like Google, Facebook, or LinkedIn to recruit affiliates. 
• Identify high-ranking target keywords in your niche. 
• Include a headline and description with your affiliate keywords in your PPC ad.
• Introduce your business in brief.
• Highlight your offerings and commissions. 
• Include a call to action to direct affiliates to your website or landing page.

To yield better results, run several ads with different wording and demographic preferences simultaneously on various platforms. This will help you reach diverse affiliates, along with customers who can be potential affiliates.

4. Focus on Your Pitch

‌A high-quality pitch can convince an affiliate to represent you and endorse your products or services. Based on your research data, you can approach affiliates with a customized pitch to address their specific needs. Keeping your SaaS affiliate program at the forefront, you can personalize your message by highlighting how your products or services can benefit the affiliate and their audiences.

Using tenets of the AIDA model, you can improve your email pitch by doing the following:

• Add attractive visual elements like an image or video to grab the potential affiliate's attention. 
• Include a catchy and interesting headline, phrase, or single sentence to pique their interest in joining your affiliate program.
• Highlight the advantages of joining your affiliate program or the perks of entering into a long-term partnership with you. You can underscore exclusive opportunities, bonuses, incentives, discounts, and other prospects. This will help you shift their mindset from the present to the future and instill a desire to join you as a partner. 
• Add a call to action directing them to your website or landing page to sign up or contact you.

‌Using a simple but creative pitch can help you get reactive affiliate sign-ups to grow your affiliate program. 

5. Create a Simple but Great Affiliate Sign-Up Page

Building a straightforward and easy-to-understand affiliate sign-up page is crucial. Complicating your landing page can result in needless confusion, deterring potential affiliates from signing up for your program. 

‌Affiliates are looking for clear information about your program terms and a simple commission table on the sign-up page. Your sign-up page must include a catchy tagline, creative visuals, and a succinct business description, along with your products or services that receive the most subscriptions. Also, include a direct contact for affiliates to reach out to you. 

6. Offer Affiliates Incentives to Sign Up

Offer incentives for signing up to get potential affiliates interested in your business. A few ideas include: 

• Offer a gift card or cash bonus to affiliates after their first referral and sale or once they have set up affiliate links.
• Give out customized coupons, which affiliates can offer to their audiences as incentives to subscribe to your brand

‌Also, inform your affiliates about new updates or features of your product/service to get them interested in promoting it.

7. Offer Generous Commissions To Gain More Interest From Affiliates

Offering generous incentives can help affiliates earn more money, which will motivate them to better endorse your brand to their audiences. Higher incentives can set your business apart and allow you to recruit successful affiliates. With recurring commissions, satisfied affiliates will remain loyal to your brand over the long term and help you reach a wider audience. 

Generally, SaaS affiliate programs offer between 15% and 25% of the sales price to affiliates. So fix a good percentage of your revenue as commission to develop goodwill among your affiliates and keep a steady flow of referrals coming your way. 

Final Thoughts

With your SaaS affiliate program in place, these tips can help you recruit the right affiliates. Once you onboard affiliates, you can leverage their power to improve your brand awareness, target new audiences, expand your customer base and increase your subscriptions. Through the increased recurring revenue you gain, you can foster long-term relationships with your affiliates and grow your business. 

Build Your Affiliate Program With LeadDyno

‌Are you looking to set up a SaaS affiliate program for your e-commerce, startup, or SaaS business? LeadDyno can help you build and expand your affiliate program. LeadDyno's affiliate tracking software can help you efficiently manage your affiliates and create a robust and trusted network to promote your business. Contact us to begin your SaaS affiliate program today.