Recruiting affiliate partners?
We're trying to find affiliate partners to help us grow Kapwing, our free online video editor. Besides our customers, I'm not sure where to start on sourcing new affiliates. We set up our campaign on Rewardful, and we're planning to share 50% revenue commission because we want to involve and reward the affiliates we work with.
When I cold email potential leads (bloggers, YouTubers, etc), they rarely open the email since it sees spammy. Do I just need to write a better cold email? Or is there another way to go about reaching influencers, bloggers, etc?
Since our product is a creative tool, the people who use it are exactly the people who would promote it (content creators, YouTubers, meme makers, IG influencers, etc)
That's a difficult one.
It seems like you're kind of mixing affiliates and influencers/partners into the same basket, which you might not want to do.
I guess the first thing to say is that there is such a high noise level in the markets/emails you're sending, that you really can only expect a really low response rate. A really low open rate is easier to improve because you can just change your subject line to something less spammy (and send drip campaigns with different subject lines).
Secondly, have you talked to your potential affiliate partners and worked out exactly how much they stand to gain from promoting Kapwing with your current business model?
Is it more or less than they normally make off this kind of thing? Remember that for every shoutout/promotion they give your product, it (in)directly affects revenue opportunities from other promotion they could be doing.
Have you tried reaching out to your current customers to become affiliate partners? (or maybe even a referral program?)
And do you already have successful affiliate partners up and running? If so, what do these successful partners have in common? Is there an easy way to find more of these kind of partners based on their shared commonality?
Remember, for real affiliates you need to go upstream of your target customers. Who do they trust as an authority in their respective fields?
Have you considered posting on some Facebook groups of entrepreneurs / startups that you're launching an affiliate program?
I have a line soliciting affiliates on the footer of my site. It's still a lot of noise, but my best affiliates emailed me spontaneously (blog/reviews seem to work pretty well)