🤔Does affiliate marketing still work for SaaS?
Hello indie hackers,
I am close to finishing my product (affistash.com) and I was thinking about a few marketing funnels that I can use in order to boost my number of users.
I noticed that Affiliate Marketing, although it's a really common marketing tactic, and it can work for lots of startups, I haven't seen it so much in SaaS.
I was wondering if any of you guys use it for your products? Also, do you think it would be a good move for my SaaS tool? (my target audience, is oddly enough beginners/intermediate affiliate marketers xD )
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I think it depends on your cost structure and how your affiliate program works.
If it's a one time cost structure, then you can just organize it like you would any other affiliate for a physical one time product.
If it's a subscription, then things get more dicey. If you pay them a recurring dividend based on the sale they make, then you essentially permanently get less profit from each affiliate sale much like an investor taking a share of the profits (unless the customer cancels, which in this case, it might be possible that they make nothing if the customer cancels during the free trial if you have one). This might actually make affiliates focus more on getting quality customers rather than ones who churn.
The benefit to this is that it makes it more attractive to affiliate marketers since they'll be able to make permanent passive income off a single sale. The draw back was mentioned above.
You could also use a hybrid model, where the affiliate marketer would simple get each month's subscription payment for x amount of months, with the payment terminating after the last month.
The benefit is once again the level of attraction from affiliates, albeit less this time since there's less passive income. The drawbacks are similar to the first but less pronounced.
A very simple one for subscriptions could be literally just paying them for each subscription. At this point, I would say it's less affiliate marketing and moreso just paying people to endorse your product. The benefits and drawbacks are the opposite of the ones mentioned above of course.
Thanks for the nice tips Richard! Im just curious, what are you building at the moment? Also, are tou planning to have an Affiliate Program for your project?
Hey, I'm currently building an API for various AI. To begin, we're getting Stable Diffusion (art AI) and Bloom (text generator) on the cloud and allowing people to make API calls to them and charging a small fee each time.
You can follow my journey here if you're interested: https://www.indiehackers.com/product/evoke
I'm not planning to have an affiliate program yet (margins are razor thin haha), but it might change in the future (though it'd probably be a long ways off).
I see. Such a cool product! I hope it works out as you want and I am looking forward to see it release : )
Thank you! Good luck on your product as well. Saw your profile, I did entrepreneurial things at 16 as well, but nothing as sophisticated as you.
Just looked at your site more closely and noticed a spelling error: "experts" is spelled "expers" at one point on the home page, you can find it with ctrl+f.
And I don't think it should be capitalized in that instance.
Thanks for the kind words! Regarding the spelling error, I'll make sure to fix it asap, thanks for letting me know. Me and my co-founder are kind of experimenting with the content on the website, since the product is not released yet, and we are still in our early access phase, but we validated the product and even got 2 pre-sales, so it will be ready in the next 2-3 weeks for sure, so i'm really excited for it :D
I actually found more writing mistakes.
There's one in this paragraph:
"You will have a full hand-writter marketign plan for every affiliate program present on the platform and, in-house, scripts for cold outreaching that are ready to copy/paste directly into your audience inbox!"
Also, the punctuation should be "in-house script for cold outreach".
"Meet our pricing plan that suit you" should be "suits you".
There are some more here:
"In Depht Makreting Tips for every Product"
"Chat with to Affiliate Makreting Experts"
I actually found more that would be too long to list here.
I think you should take all the text on your website and run it through grammarly. This amount of spelling mistakes would really make you look unprofessional. You can also look into AI for helping with your copywriting.
Best of luck
Good suggestion! I'll have to add Grammarly to my set of tools from now!
Big thanks for your good question. I also have the similar question recently and the interaction b/w you and others really inspires me a lot💪. May you good luck and success!
Thanks! I really appreciate it, and I am happy that it helped you :D
If I can give 30% away to an affiliate instead of spending that on paid ads, then it makes sense. The main concern is screening the candidates.
You don't want people promoting your brand in certain ways that will damage the brand.
Like cold email spamming, listing them on coupon sites. I would want to know how they are getting their leads.
You made a great point Dave.
It's always tricky to find quality affiliate marketers, this is why we also make our platform Affistash a 2 way platform, where companies can also get listed and only be recommended to quality marketers that operate in your niche, which I assume is SaaS. You might want to become an early adopter, so you can take a look here: affistash.com/companies : )
I am so exited to see this product shipped!
Although I implemented an Affiliate program in my micro-Saas, I always have the feeling that if I ever figure out how to sell my product to Affiliates, then why don't I rather sell directly to potential customers?
Yes, there's the argument of affiliates with large audiences. I've personally found it tricky to find one that's focused on my niche (and willing to bet on my startup this early). I probably just don't know where to look but that's a conversation for another day :|
Seems like you have a pretty interesting situation! What product are you building?
Also, I think actually our platform will be a pretty nice service for you in the end. We have an option for businesses and our startup is pretty SaaS driven, so probably a large part of our audience will be marketers with interest in saas and tech.
You might want to become an early adopter, so you can check out(affistash.com/companies)
That's interesting, but weirdly, almost all your links are broken.
Interesting, I'll make sure to check it out. Thanks for reporting! We are still in pre-release, so errors here and there can be present without notice
Sure, no problem. Hit me up when you're done I'm sure it's nothing huge
You'll have CAC anyway, either for promoting your product yourself (social media activities, content creation, ads) or you share your revenue with someone else for promoting your product. I don't see why that shouldn't work for SaaS.
What you need, though, is a great product that people with a relevant following want to promote. Because they don't wanna put their reputation at risk.
Makes sense, I was thinking about pushing the product through Influencer marketing as the main tactic, also I think I will try to make the most of TikTok marketing as well. It seems like the products that are similar with the one that I am building are really good for viral content.
Thanks so much for the advice!
I'm assuming you mean having a sales-focused cofounder/employee etc. But "share your revenue with someone else for promoting your product" seems like a service that should be productized. Do you know of anything like this??
No, I wasn't thinking of a co-founder.
With sharing your revenue with someone else for promoting your product, I meant affiliate marketing: Your affiliate partners promote your product, and for every successful referral, you pay them a part of your revenue.
No need to invent a new tool. https://firstpromoter.com does that. Or https://www.rewardful.com/. And quite some others too ...
Thanks for the links. At a first glance, they seem to be affiliate networks. I'm coming around to that concept. I'll have to sit and research it a bit better before I can really express what I mean... but it's highly likely you're right.
They are not exactly affiliate networks but tools you can use to set up your own affiliate and recommendation program. You still have to find the people promoting your offer.
But they're not affiliate networks like https://www.awin.com/ or https://www.cj.com/. The networks connect publishers and sellers. The tools I mentioned don't.
Yes it does
I'm into this course, why don't you check this out
https://aff.stakecut.com/297798/877298
what sites or places do you recommend going to try and link up with affiliates? how do you go about getting this in place?
Hi Josh, I think our platform would be a good place to start if you have a saas tool. You can apply to br featured on our platform here if tou want to become an early bird (affistash.com/companies)