Affiliate marketing accounts for a significant portion of SaaS company revenues. One of my software client has partners generating over 63% of his entire annual revenue.
When done well, having strategic partnerships can be one of the fastest ways to scale your software business and for many businesses, partnerships is their key sales channel.
You can generally tell which software companies are heavily investing in their partnership program by looking at their resource section, training material, bonuses, and having a helpful and dedicated partnership manager available.
Examples include Klaviyo and ClickFunnels.
These things are important to an affiliate because they show that you care, that you’re making an effort (which will ultimately have an impact on things like conversions so they’re not sending clicks that could be better sent elsewhere) and that you’ll actually pay out their commissions.
The ones that invest no effort generally just set up the program and then leave everything as is. This will generally attract less quality partners.
SaaS Affiliate Tracking Programs
While simply implementing an affiliate or referral program is not going to generate significant revenues (like all sales channel), it’s the first step in getting started.
The main SaaS affiliate tracking options are:
- Tapfiliate
- FirstPromoter
- PartnerStack
- Refersion
- LinkMink
Having worked with all of them, I prefer Tapfiliate for affiliate/referral tracking for software businesses. Most of them offer Stripe tracking for your affiliates.
You can also use a marketplace where affiliates can find you including:
- CommissionJunction
- Impact
- ShareASale
- Partnerstack