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How to Setup an Affiliate Program in Infusionsoft
Level: Beginners
Setting up an Affiliate Program is pretty easy with Infusionsoft. There’s only one requirement which is that Infusionsoft must be your shopping cart — otherwise, you’d be registering a whole bunch of affiliates but not paying them. So in order for this to work, you will need to be using Infusionsoft to process your sales. That means if you run your sales manually (e.g. you collect membership fees in cash at your gym or use a POS system that’s not integrated with Infusionsoft) or generally outside of the Infusionsoft system (using something like Stripe, DAP, e-junkie, Clickbank etc. without proper integrations), then it’s not going to work.
Note that commissions are based only on the purchase price which excludes taxes and shipping costs.
In order to set up your affiliate program, go to CRM and then click on “Referral Partners”
Next, click on “Commission Programs“:
Then “Add a Commission Program” on the top right:
Now we name the specific program:
For “Priority“, number 1 overrides number 2, and number 2 overrides number 13. So the lower number gets the priority.
After you hit “Save” you’re going to see a new section appear below:
The “Default Commission” is where you set your standard rule. So let’s say that you want to pay a 20% flat rate on all of your products as commission. Then you click on Edit:
And then set your commission to 20% on the Level 1 Sale Percentage:
Level 1 means the affiliate (let’s say Affiliate A) that made the sale. Level 2 means the affiliate that brought Affiliate A.
You’ll also notice an option for “Payout Type”. Credit on Customer Payment means that the affiliate gets paid out after full payment has been made by the customer. “Up-Front Credit in Full” means the affiliate gets credited even when the customer hasn’t made the full payment yet.
You can create “overrides” for products/subscriptions where you want to set a different commission rate.
Set Up Your Affiliate Sign Up Form
Now we need to give your affiliates somewhere to sign up. We can do this from the campaign builder.
First, go into one of your campaigns, and drag the “Sign up for newsletter” from the “Goals” section on the right:
I’ve renamed this to “Affiliate Sign Up Form“.
Now double click on this and go to “Field Snippets”
Now drag and drop the “Referral” icon:
You will now be presented with this:
Parent refers to the affiliate that brought in the person that’s filling out the affiliate form. So that’d be “Affiliate A” from our previous example.
Programs determines which affiliate program the affiliate is signed up to. You can use the form to move an affiliate off one program and to another one (both “Add to” and “Remove from” will need to have a selection) or remove them from the affiliate program altogether (only “Remove from” will need a selection).
Referral Partner Notifications determines whether the affiliate gets sent an email when someone signs up.
Credit Window determines how long the tracking cookie remains active for. Leave it blank for unlimited so that the affiliate gets credit no matter how long it takes the customer to sign up.
After you hit “Save”, create a “Thank You” Page, Publish your changes and then you’re all set here! See, that wasn’t bad, right?
Now sign up as an Affiliate yourself using the form that you’ve created and keep a note of your username and password as we’ll use this in the next step.
Setting Up the Partner Center
You’ll need to know your application name here. It will usually be in the format of xx123. You will see it when you login to Infusionsoft. When you have that, replace xx123 with your application name below and enter your URL:
https://xx123.infusionsoft.com/app/authentication/login
(You can also find the URL by going to CRM -> Settings -> Referral Partner Center)
When you go to the URL, it should look like this:
Use the username and login that you noted above. You should see a screen like this next after you login:
This is what your affiliates will see. When they click on “Link Generator” it’s going to be empty. This is the link that they’re going to use to refer leads to you. In order to set this up, go back into your Infusionsoft application and go to:
CRM -> Referral Partners -> Referral Tracking Links
Then click on “Add Referral Tracking Link”
Now we enter details about the Link where affiliates will send traffic:
Everything on the form above is pretty straight forward. The only thing that’s not is the Referral Partner field. This allows you to specify a promotion specifically for one affiliate — e.g. if you’re doing a JV webinar and you want to give discounts for your affiliate’s customers and then give credit to that affiliate, you would specify the affiliate in this field. Note that other affiliate will NOT be able to use this since it has been assigned to one partner.
After you hit save, go back to the Referral Partner Center and you’ll see that there’s now a link in the Link Generator:
This link is what your affiliate will use to refer leads to you.
Now you can also create additional resources such as email templates, resource links (i.e. point them to websites with details about how they can better promote your products), and banners to help your affiliate help you even more.
To do this, go to Referral Partners -> Promotional Resources
And then on the top right, you can choose to add email templates, link resources for your affiliates, and banners.
Your affiliate will be able to track their link stats, orders generated and so on:
I encourage you to explore the partner section in the Infusionsoft application. If you go to CRM -> Settings
You can customize your Partner Center even more (e.g. the welcome message on the home screen).
Your affiliate will be able to use the one log in and track multiple websites and multiple campaigns.
All they have to do is “Create Ad” in the Link Generator:
And then fill out the details:
And then your affiliate will be able to create a custom tracking link for a specific product (“Main Product” in this example):
Your affiliate can then track clicks and sales according to the specific links they’ve created.
Issuing Payments to Affiliates
Get more information on issuing individual payments here and batch payments here.
This article is just absolutely fabulous. I needed to setup an affiliate program and fast, and this assisted greatly in doing so.
The part about having to sign up separately in the Partner Center as an an affiliate to see the Referral links was missing in almost every other online source including the Infusionsoft website.
Kudos!!! Keep it up.
best regards
Marlon
Great article. One quick question. We usually pay affiliates for sales up to 60 days prioor to the payout date to deal with customer returns. How would one do this in Infusionsoft? Generating a report for the period up to 60 days prior not only only includes sales for that period, but also only payouts for that period. In other words, even though I paid an affiliate 30 days ago, it will tell me I still owe them that money because it doesn’t include payouts.
Any ideas?
Thanks.
Al
I was also getting stuck in the signing up separately in the Partner Center to see the referall links after reading several others guides. That is why I landed on ruizhidong. Thanks for your help.
How does this link impact SEO? In other words, if you want this link to be both a backlink and an affiliate link should you customize it to fit the website’s url?
Rui,
I really appreciate you for taking the time to create and share this how to article. I am following along and setting up my affiliate program now using this article.
I look forward to reading more of your blog posts that have to do with Infusionsoft and checking out some of your articles on Medium too.
Thank you again. 🙂