Affiliate Programs for SaaS: Build a Referral Engine That Grows With Your Product

Like Rob said, my name is Laura Sprinkle. Yes, that is my real last name. Uh, and I am here to talk about growing your audience and boosting conversions with a guaranteed ROI, aka affiliates made ridiculously easy. All right, according to Harvard Business Review, people are four times more likely to buy when they come through a referral. And we see this every single day. I am part of Tiny Seed. Shout out. Woohoo. And every single time one of us wonders what vendor to use for something, what tool, we are all up in that Slack channel asking our community. And I know that y'all have done the same thing in your lives with your friends. And I want you to be the one that everyone in your industry refers to. The way I think about affiliates is growth in general. And as Rob said, I have worked for a lot of years as an affiliate manager and I have seen hundreds of campaigns. I've worked with thousands of affiliates and generated over $50 million in affiliate revenue. And so when I think about growing your audience, you can grow it organically, which takes time, but is low cost. You can pay for attention using paid ads, which obviously takes money up front, or you can borrow other people's audiences and the trust that they have built with them. One of the things that I see as a mistake when people start thinking about affiliates and even in some conversations that I've had here at Micro Comp is people thinking about them. Oh, I think maybe I've been talking about the wrong slides. Sorry if they have not made sense. If you don't have an affiliate program yet, you are definitely leaving money on the table. And I know that none of us want to leave money on the table, right? Let's make some money. Uh, one of the mistakes that I see made is people thinking about affiliates as a sales channel. Affiliates are not a sales team. What they can actually do is deliver three times the value. So, they create brand awareness. It's people talking about you in rooms that you are not in over and over again, more leverage for you. It's bringing you qualified leads, so more people that you could potentially sell to. And then of course, we also want referred sales, so more income for us and then commission for them. So, if you don't know what an affiliate program is, basically the guaranteed ROI part is someone refers a customer to you and because they referred them, you send the referral person, the affiliate, a commission, a percentage or a flat amount of that sale. and what I've created over those hundreds of campaigns I call the profitable partnerships flywheel which is what I want to share with you and then dig in to one of those strategies today. So the profitable partnerships flywheel has four phases. Phase one, attract the right fit partners. Phase two, activate them by making it ridiculously easy to share. Whoops. Phase three, amplify their results with transparent data and timely why nows. And then phase four, appreciate them. Pay out commissions, thank them, and celebrate so they come back for more. There are two different types of affiliates that I see that work really well. The first are Keystone partners and the second are pollinator partners. If you can't tell, I really love a nature metaphor. My company is called Reutable after all. So, keystone partners are like keystone species in an ecosystem. So, they're larger. They have complimentary audiences. Think integrations or just like bigger players in your industry. Pollinators are often your customers and collectively they create a buzz even if they only refer a couple of sales at a time just like it's a bigger pool of people. So I want to dig in today to one of those strategies which is keystone partners which is strategically tapping into someone else's trusted audience with value. So this is exactly what Nathan Barry did at ConvertKit. Now kit they ran partner webinars for aligned audiences to grow from 1 million in ARR to 10 million in ARR and now that they're at 40 million ARR they are coming back to this strategy because it is so effective and then we've done the same thing at

Rudible with integration partners and also strategic like course creators because we serve the creator space uh to not just say hey here's an affiliate link but actually provide content and training to their audiences so that we can get more leads and sales in the door. So, here's the playbook specific to Keystone partners. Uh step again, attract, activate, amplify, appreciate. So, you're going to find a right fit partner to find a quick win topic and make it easy for them to send invites. help them follow up with leads through transparent data and pay out commissions. So digging in further again, Keystone partners serve your audience in a complimentary way. So they might have a community of your right fit customers. They might train on the topic or maybe it's another tool that a lot of your customers are using, right? It go like they can be uh going hand in hand. So, my friend Lindsay from Hello Audio, who is over a millionaire right now, she shared that 19% of her revenue comes from affiliates and they helped them scale to that number. So, she's partnered is she has a private podcast uh platform and she's partnered with um podcast uh sorry, business coaches who teach podcasts as a launch strategy. So they're a perfect match because they can, you know, create a training specific to, okay, how do you launch using a private podcast, deliver that training, and on the end it's like hello, use hello audio. Step two is really to define that quick win training. It's kind of like the lead magnet uh that was shared yesterday. So I want you to think about something specific and actionable that you can teach their audience for free. So you can think okay what's the first step people need before they buy your product or what sets them up for success right when they come onto your product right the first step in onboarding how can you train them again for free super quick 30 minutes and then also do a demo at the end of that training while you're in front of all these ideal buyers something that most people miss is the making it ridiculously easy to promote So, you are going to set up the landing and registration page. You're going to create three to five promotional emails that they can invite their audience with. Remember, even though I'm like, "Oh my gosh, you got to make all these emails. We talked about emails yesterday. You got to create the page. " And that sounds like work. Obviously, we all work on our businesses. Uh, but it is a flywheel. It gets easier and easier over time. So you can take that same landing page, you can take those same emails and customize them for future audiences. So Ali, who was here or who was here somewhere, shout out to Ali, he also shared that Sanja, which is a testimonials tool, gets 20% of their revenue from affiliates. And what he does is he takes example screenshots of all the successful promos that his affiliates do and he puts them in a resource bank for future affiliates to use. Uh, so you're going to anchor the o the offer at the end of that demo with a clear bonus deadline or special incentive. You're going to make sure to share those leads list so whoever signs up for that free training, you and they can follow up with those people. Oh, Olly is here right there. Hello. Uh, and you can stagger those follow-ups. And then you're going to make those payouts. Thank your partner privately, publicly if they're willing. Uh, debrief what worked and then book that next campaign. oftentimes I find that annually is best. Uh, and I wanted to put everything together for you in a playbook. There is no opt-in required. Um, so you can just scan that QR code and grab that playbook. And there's examples of like what to actually put in all of those emails that you're going to be creating for your partners. I'll give you a second there. And I'm not going to have time to go through pollinator partners right now, but I also wanted to create a quick playbook for that. So if you are interested in that side of the equation, you can grab uh that playbook as well. Also, no opt-in. So that is a different QR code. All right. So basically my main takeaway for you or the main reason why I got into this is because I love paying small business owners to grow my business rather than paying faceless corporations. So let's pay our friends. Let's scale and grow together. Thank you so much.