This post is specially crafted for you if:
- You sell a product
- You sell a service
- You manage the marketing efforts for a brand
If you have ever thought to increase your product/service sales, what factors did you work upon the most?
You may be working on:
Well, you should keep them all aside and focus on affiliate marketing.
You may have tried everything else, but if you are not offering pretty commissions to those who promote your product or services, then you are making a big mistake.
Starting an affiliate program for your product or service will help you boost your sales. Rewarding people who love your services will encourage them to refer and share your brand with their friends and followers.
Below is a list where I’m sharing not-so-well-known options. Apart from the following platforms which you may have heard of quite a lot before:
- Impact
- PartnerStack
- Refersion
- Rewardful
- CJ
Let’s dive right in.
1. ShareASale
ShareASale is what you should be using if you don’t want to manage your affiliate dashboard, tracking, and all that. They have been one of the best affiliate platform and marketplace for 19 years now. That’s a pretty long time.
Setting up the affiliate program is thoroughly smooth.
You can set commissions structure, make data feeds, including custom banners, handle affiliate promoter requests, and do so much more. It comes with many powerful and interesting features.
The links ShareASale uses are tracked by its own “ShareASale analytics” software. You’ll be given long, unbranded, and custom links that will redirect to your website and product pages. ShareASale uses these links to assign cookies and commissions to each and every affiliate.
They have a neat old-school admin dashboard, both for affiliate promoters and admins.
ShareASale works in real-time; sales are registered to an affiliate as soon as it happens. You and the affiliate both will be able to see the sale and commission earned instantly.
What’s best about ShareASale is their support team.
They won’t give you simple answers. They’ll solve your problems. In fact, they will help you build your affiliate program from scratch and increase your profits, all by real humans known as the guidance team.
You have to pay a one-time fee only to access the ShareASale marketplace. That’s it.
They don’t charge huge fees or transaction charges, and you don’t need to pay your affiliates manually as their funds’ system is a solution to that.
The funds are needed to be filled by the admin (probably you), and payments would be sent on an automated cycle. You can also choose if you want to manually or automatically approve new affiliates.
See how ShareASale can be useful for you.
2. Ambassador
Ambassador is a user-friendly affiliate software.
It has a clean user interface, a no-nonsense dashboard, and a very dependable tracking system. You’ll find brands such as Instapage, HubSpot, and ConvertKit using their affiliate software.
3. SamCart
Not only SamCart is a powerful tool to sell your digital products, But It also comes with a whole new affiliate center that helps you to run your product’s affiliate programs quite smoothly.
SamCart is a much automated tool, so when you first list your product, an affiliate signup page is automatically created. Users can use this page to sign up as an affiliate for your product, but they would still need to get approved by the admin.
You can either enable or disable the auto-approval settings for new affiliates.
You can create new affiliate links, email swipe files, destination URLs, and media files such as banners right from your admin dashboard.
The affiliates will get the links you create and banners you publish from their own dashboards. SamCart has a neat feature called “private links.” Private links can be created by you if you want to assign an exclusive affiliate or group of partners apart separately from your standard affiliate agreements.
The sales are tracked using cookies. You can set the expiry date of affiliate cookies manually, as well.
Cookies work sitewide regardless of what page an affiliate sends the traffic to. So, an affiliate would be receiving appropriate commissions on successful sales no matter what link they choose.
The default commission that will be given to affiliates is 50% of every product’s sale amount under your SamCart account.
You can change the commission percentage or make it a flat rate. A flat rate means the commissions will be fixed regardless of the product’s price or sale amount.
4. LeadDyno
If you are relatively new to affiliate marketing, LeadDyno is software that’ll help you set up your first affiliate program fast.
LeadDyno is used by brands like Snappa and comes with powerful features, including funnels and automation.
An affiliate signup page is automatically created for your product as soon as you start using LeadDyno. The signup page is hosted on a subdomain branded with your original domain. You can also host this page on your website.
New affiliates will receive an automated welcome email and a thank you note with necessary information about the product and affiliate program.
The clicks are tracked in real-time, and sales are registered through browser cookies. There’s an option to add banners and other marketing materials such as promotional copy, which your affiliates can use to promote your product.
In fact, you should always supply affiliate banners and other promotional content to your affiliates. This helps to increase their promotion output.
LeadDyno also has a mobile app for both Andriod and iOS, so if you like to do things on the go, this would be handy for you. You’ll have to pay $49/month for the lowest plan.
5. PayKickStart
If you have been familiar with selling digital products, you might be familiar with PayKickStart.
Last but not least, PayKickStart is not only a superb checkout tool, but its affiliate software also lets you run your product’s affiliate program like a breeze.
It is one of the few tools that let you pay via PayPal MassPay directly. Along with that, you can also send payments via wire transfers. Setting up your affiliate program in PayKickStart is a 3 step process:
- Signup for Paykickstart
- Listing your product in your account
- Setting up your affiliate dashboard
There’s one unique feature I’m yet to fully understand is their marketing promotion panel. Normally you would see banners and stuff like that in this section. However, PayKickStart is different.
In its promotion panel, the affiliates are given a choice to create a sales funnel. In this sales funnel, they can add a specific URL, and from then on, any person who makes a sale would be given a special bonus. What bonus will be delivered has to be set by the affiliate too.
If you know how the sales funnel works, you know how powerful this can be for both you and the affiliate. Other features include recurring payments, automated bonus delivery, real-time contests, and lead tracking.
Matthew from matthewwoodward.co.uk informed me about this tool and how he used it to sell his online courses. I’m planning to use it myself.
Use this exclusive link to get a free trial of PayKickStart.
That’s it.
I hope you’ve found the affiliate marketing tool you needed.
Let me know which tool you chose and why. You would also want to read about:
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Nice post, Each an Every Affiliate Network you mention has their Terms & Conditions. It is very good information to work on to increase the revenue of yours. Thanks for this information again.
Thanks Aayush…very helpful as we look for a platform for our new SaaS to compete with Zoom and other video call platforms. I’m doing a free trial now with leaddyno, I have dabbled with Samcart but I am liking what I see with PayKickStart…thoughts? Simple and easy is a top priority and we want to reward with direct referrals and also offer tier 1 and tier 2 commissions as well… are there any we should cross off the list that do not offer additional tiers?
Hi Jeff,
Congrats, that’s a smart move.
If you’re looking for simple and easy affiliate software for SaaS, my recommendation would be PartnerStack. I know the team behind PartnerStack pretty well. They are fully-focused on SaaS companies. So you’ll get more competent partners using their platform. The tier system is what companies like TeamWork are currently trying with PartnerStack and it works very well.