Converting leads for your Affiliate Marketing program
Hi guys, I'm currently interested in designing an affiliate marketing program and am trying to figure out the best ways to find people/companies interested in partnering with me and having them join my program. In this case, affiliate marketing means that I am offering influencers shared revenue for bringing me customers. Currently, I give the customer a 15% discount and give the influencer 15% of the revenue.
My SaaS platform offers SQL and python interview questions and solutions to help people prep for technical interviews. So I've been reaching out to data science bootcamp instructors via email. But I'm having a tough time generating enough interest for them to join the program. Email has a low conversion which is expected but I would have thought I would get more responses considering it's no risk to them and they'd get 15% of the revenue (currently a 2% response rate).
I'm in my very early dates with affiliate marketing and have never done this before.
My questions to you are:
- What's a good way to identify and message people that might be interested in participating in your affiliate marketing program?
- What are good strategies to convert?
- What are your experiences with conversion rates?
- Do you have advice on other ways to design the program (i.e., rather than shared revenue, I am able to compensate with something else?)
- Any other feedback, advice, etc?
Thank you guys in advance!
15% is too low. Try increasing the percentage. I'd say at least 30%.
This number does not have to set in stone -- you can revisit and modify it again in the future when your product has taken off and gained a name in the marketplace.
Consider upping the affiliate cut and see if that increases your response rate. 15% feels a bit low to me. For reference, I do a 50% cut for affiliates of divjoy.com and it still takes some work to get a new affiliate on-board. I'd suggest at least 30%.
Other than that, I'd recommend only reaching out to people that have a decent size audience already, whether via a website, twitter, size of their classes, etc and spend significant time tailoring your message to them. Give them an estimate of how much you think they can make, how they might go about letting their students know, etc.
Small affiliates tend to be a waste of time because 1) they can do the math and probably won't respond because they know it's not worth their time and 2) even if they do try it out they'll probably stop after making very little their first month.
Thanks so much for your advice, especially about targeting large affiliates and tailoring the content heavily and providing them with a lot of information upfront. Makes sense because they're probably wondering if this opportunity is even worth the time.
I checked out your platform divjoy. Love the concept of the platform - good luck to you. Can I ask what your primary growth channels are? Is it affiliate marketing and other channels like content marketing?
Affiliates are about 8% of sales, so not a big channel, although I hope to keep growing it. The rest of sales are pretty spread out all over the place, with the two main sources being usehooks.com and bulma.io/expo. Don’t have much of a strategy yet because I’ve been a focused on adding features people are asking for. Would like to start working on SEO and ranking for long-tail terms like “react firebase templates” and various other combinations of the options you see on Divjoy.
Thanks, Gabe. I really like your usehooks website. It's sort of like content marketing ... Good luck with Divjoy.
Thanks you! Best of luck with your SaaS platform.