EP 15: What the Growth!? How to Use an Affiliate Program to Increase Leads and Drive Revenue

In this episode of What the Growth!? Nick discusses how you can use an affiliate program to increase the number of leads and revenue that your company generates. This is a tactic the Visitor Queue has used from the very beginning and has led to us generating some of our largest customers. So, let’s get started.

Calculate How Much Your Affiliates Will Earn

You’re going to want to start by figuring out how much affiliates will earn by referring clients to you. This could range anywhere from 5-50%. This entirely depends on the price of your product. As an example, at Visitor Queue we use a 25% commission and we have found that this is enough to incentivize affiliates, with our customers paying us on average $100 per month. The next thing you need to do is consider if the commission will be perpetual or not. Again, this should depend on the price of your product.

For lower-priced products, affiliates would be expecting recurring commissions and for higher-priced products, they likely won’t be. At Visitor Queue we use the reoccurring model to keep affiliates happy and to continue referring clients to us. With these main considerations out of the way, you’ll want to select an affiliate software to use to make tracking and paying commissions to your affiliates easy.

Select Your Affiliate Software

An affiliate software will take care of all the signups, generation of referral links, affiliate management, commissions, and more. So, ensure you choose wisely there are a handful of great affiliate software out there so have your pick. At Visitor Queue we use and are happy with a software called Tapfiliate. Check out this list of a few of our favorite affiliate software if you need help choosing. Once your affiliate software is set up you’re almost ready to start promoting your program. First, you’ll need to come up with sales and marketing resources.

Marketing & Sales Resources

Your team will need to put together marketing and sales resources to help your affiliates. Create interesting banner ads, brochures, pricing sheets, videos, and more to assist them with selling your products. Once you have these key marketing and sales resources, you can begin promoting your affiliate program.

Affiliate Website Page

The first step in promoting your affiliate program is to create a page on your website that talks about your affiliate program in depth and invites prospective affiliates to sign up. Below is a great example of our affiliate page. It talks about all the benefits of becoming a Visitor Queue affiliate.

Include Information in Your Onboarding Sequence

You’ll also want to share your affiliate program with your current customers. I recommend creating an onboarding sequence that invites new customers to the program 60 or so days after they become a client. You never know who will share your product with their friends family or peers!

Bonus Tip: Ensure that you wait 30 days or so to pay your affiliates in case any of their commissions came from payments that ended up being refunded.

Bonus Tip #2: Secondly, ensure that you use terms and conditions to state that they can’t use search engine marketing to promote your affiliate program. This is because you don’t want to be competing against your affiliates on Adwords, Bing, or other search engine marketing platforms.

Final Words

That’s all for this growth tip ensure that you subscribe to be notified of next month’s growth tip. As always, if you have a tip that you want to learn more about, let us know!