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.

Affiliate Marketing Program Checklist

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)

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