Affiliate Marketing Program Design Tips
Design the best affiliate marketing program that is extremely partners-friendly, one that will help you run successful affiliate programs.
Because of my work in the CRM, Nocode, and automation space, I get approached for affiliate partnerships. Program managers always ask what would make it easier for me to promote them. So I thought I would make a partners-friendly affiliate marketing program checklist for Program Managers at SaaS/B2C companies.
I have published a directory of all such tools.
Wishlist of an affiliate & content marketer from an Affiliate Marketing Program
I am a systems builder. I work with multiple SaaS tools. To improve the capabilities of the tools my clients use, I have to look for other tools that will help my clients achieve their goals. So I am always in a position to transparently pitch tools that would help my clients.
This made me an accidental affiliate and content marketer.
To be successful in this role, I need the support and resources from the brands I am promoting and plugging.
So here’s my checklist that lists what would help me pitch partner products easily.
Affiliate Marketing Program Checklist
All things Brand/Product
- Brand Assets (brand guide, logos, illustrations)
- A one-line description of the product
- A 200-300 word description of the product
- An expert listings/directory for eligible partners
- A community for partners and experts to contribute
- RSS feed of your blog posts
All things Content Production
- Access to a full-feature sandbox account
- Branded screenshots
- Sample test datasets/databases
- SWAG/merchandise
- Shared product roadmap
- Insider news about new feature launches
All things Affiliate Partner
- Custom links to track signups
- Generate multiple links for attribution
- Incentive for users to sign up using MY link (lifetime x% discount, or an extended trial)
- Competitive % commission structure (Pipedrive)
- Ability to manually add referrals
- Easier payment options (direct bank transfers, not PayPal)
- Excellent tracking and reporting
- Single point of contact and prompt support when things go wrong
- Ability to recruit sub-affiliates (Dedupely, Bonsai)
5 Affiliate Software Solutions to help you run your Affiliate Marketing Programs
Here’s a detailed list of 14+ affiliate software solutions.
- Partnerstack helps you recruit, engage, and scale your entire ecosystem of partners — from affiliates to referral and reseller partners.
- Tolt offers a simple affiliate management platform with a variety of payment options.
- FirstPromoter allows recruiting sub-affiliates, offers discount codes, and offers partner friendly payment options.
- Reditus is an affiliate management software focused on SaaS businesses. Check it out and learn how to grow your MRR without any upfront costs.
- Partnero maximizes revenue with all-in-one solution for seamless partnership management.
Brands with the best affiliate marketing programs
I have listed some of the best exclusive deals, promo codes/discount codes, and extended trials by SaaS companies.
If you’d like to be a part of this page, please write to me at hello(at)amitsarda(dot)xyz with your best offer for my readers.
The following brands deserve a special mention:
- Coupler: offers my readers exclusive discount codes, recruit sub-affiliates, and generous lifetime commissions to affiliate partners
- Pipedrive: offers tiered % commissions based on revenue slabs to affiliate partners, and extended trials to my readers
- Dedupely: allows affiliate partners to recruit sub-affiliates
- Bonsai: allows affiliate partners to recruit sub-affiliates AND offers generous one-time commissions (minimum $50 for each paid customer)