Affiliate marketing is an extremely popular method used to promote products and drive sales. However, for your affiliate marketing campaign to be successful, you need to find the right affiliate recruitment tools for the job.
Affiliate recruitment tools are key to achieving the twin goals of:
- Effectively managing existing affiliate partners, and
- Strategically expanding your own personal affiliate network.
However, identifying the right tool for your needs is easier said than done. Which is why I have done most of the work for you, to help you pick the best affiliate recruitment tools for your marketing needs.
Key Takeaways
- Affiliate recruitment involves identifying, vetting, and onboarding new affiliates to promote your products or services.
- To recruit the best affiliates, you should consider the objective for your affiliate marketing program and narrow in on partners most likely to help you achieve those goals.
- For your affiliate marketing campaign to be successful, you need to find the right affiliate recruitment tools for the job.
- Affiliate recruitment tools are sophisticated affiliate management software that help you find the right affiliates for your business.
- Some of the best affiliate recruitment tools include Referral Rock, TUNE and Post Affiliate Pro.
What Is Affiliate Recruitment?
Affiliate recruitment involves identifying, vetting, and onboarding new affiliates to promote your products or services. The goal is to find potential affiliates whose audiences align with your target market and whose values complement your brand. Affiliate recruitment is the bedrock of a successful affiliate marketing program, where affiliates promote your products or services and earn commissions based on the sales or leads they generate.
Effective affiliate recruitment can boost your business’s reach, brand awareness, and sales by leveraging the influence of well-suited partners. By carefully selecting affiliates with a strong connection to their audience and a proven track record of success, you can build long-lasting, mutually beneficial partnerships that help you tap into new markets and drive targeted traffic to your website.
Affiliate Recruitment Tools
Affiliate recruitment tools are sophisticated affiliate management software that help you:
- Drive the discovery of new affiliates who resonate both with your brand as well as your target audience (publisher discovery).
- Set up custom affiliate application forms and enable outreach initiatives to potential partner affiliates.
- Sign up the right affiliates who are generally vested in your affiliate marketing program. In other words, affiliate software helps you manage the complete affiliate recruitment process.
- Establish and disburse commissions to enrolled partners.
- Set up management and engagement to build a long-standing and mutually beneficial business relationship.
However, for the best returns, results, and the most flexibility, we recommend you use a techstack that combines affiliate software and brand mention tools, along with link builder tools.
Brand mention tools and link builder tools help you find affiliates that synergize brand-wise and audience-wise.
7 Best Affiliate Recruitment Tools For You
#1. Referral Rock
Referral Rock helps you set up your program in days (not months), develop effective relationships with your affiliates, and customize rewards based on your unique needs.
With Referral Rock, you can fully maximize the potential available with affiliate and referral marketing. The software is flexible enough to run all types of advocacy programs, such as customer referral programs, ambassador programs, and channel partner programs, giving you a much bigger bang for your buck.
The software is fully customizable, has in-depth reporting and analytics, and comes with stellar customer service and a dedicated onboarding specialist.
Top features:
- Flexible rewards: Design and customize rewards based on affiliate preferences, trigger rewards through your CRM or ecommerce platform and automate fulfillment with a variety of different payout options. Set up tiered commissions, and commissions on both leads and sales, if you wish.
- Focus on relationship-building: Go beyond the transaction with our relationship-focused software, which helps you build strong connections with affiliates through a dedicated member portal.
- Track and manage leads and affiliates: Track and capture every purchase made from each affiliate link or referral link, and quickly compensate each affiliate. Monitor campaigns and all key performance indicators, right on the platform’s admin dashboard.
- Wealth of integrations: Referral Rock affiliate software seamlessly integrates with HubSpot, Salesforce, and plenty of other marketing and sales tools you’re already using. Referral Rock also offers a mobile app and API integration, and lets you automate workflows with Zapier.
- Exceptional support: Expert services to help onboard and tailor the program to your unique business needs.
Pricing:
- Professional: $175+/month (for businesses with sales reps and servicepeople)
- Engage: $200+/month (for businesses with self-checkouts)
- Enterprise plan also available
#2. Post Affiliate Pro
Post Affiliate Pro is a popular affiliate management software that helps you build your affiliate program from the ground up and track all your affiliates from one place. The platform’s tracking capabilities let you monitor referrals, conversion rates, partner performance, cookies, and payouts in detail.
Post Affiliate Pro also integrates with over 170 CMS (Content Management Systems) and payment gateways.
Top features:
- A large library of promotional material to choose from, including banner rotators, discount coupons, Smartlinks, site replication tools, PDF banners, image banners, and a lot more.
- In-depth reporting, metrics, and analytics tools such as top affiliates, top URLs, trends, and campaign reports.
- Varied commission structures: multilevel commissions, performance rewards, event defining for commission disbursement, recurring and split commissions.
Pricing: $129-$599/month
#3. LeadDyno
LeadDyno enables you to launch, manage, and grow ecommerce affiliate, ambassador, and influencer marketing programs in one place. Aside from the features, one of LeadDyno’s key selling points is the fast turnover times on customer support enquiries.
Top features:
- All-in-one affiliate management platform to hire, manage, track, and pay your affiliate partners.
- Extensive customization options, so you can set up the plans that work best for your business, including mass vs. individual payments.
- Automated lead management to convert leads to new customers.
Pricing: $49-$749/month
#4. TUNE
With the TUNE partner marketing platform, expect all the innovative and business-focused trappings that come with a technology-led platform. Think extensive, comprehensive, and well-thought-out enterprise-grade features for advertisers.
Particularly worth noting are its proactive fraud prevention capabilities, and solid system and security features.
Top features:
- Robust targeting, tracking, and performance management to get the best results from your campaigns.
- Fully integrated accounts payable workflows and international payment processing, so you can expand your affiliate base globally.
- Predictable SaaS-based pricing with no hidden costs or commissions to eat away into your revenue. TUNE promises clear contracts and consistent billing.
Pricing: $599-$1500+/month
#5. Refersion
Refersion is a user-friendly affiliate marketing solution for ecommerce brands. Use Refersion to discover and recruit affiliates, manage campaigns and affiliates, take charge of payments and commissions, and manage attribution and first-party tracking.
The platform is also privacy-secure, being compliant with both GDPR and CCPA.
Top 3 key features:
- Onboard unlimited affiliates, brand ambassadors, and affiliates manage performance using built-in campaign reporting and monitoring tools.
- Advanced customization for commissions, such as commissions by product vs SKU, automated conversion approvals, and multiple payment options such as PayPal, Trolley, store credit, gift cards, and more.
- Flexible integration options – 30+ turnkey integrations, 2000+ app integrations, commerce tool integration, and more.
Pricing: $99-$249+/month
#6. PartnerStack
PartnerStack operates as an entire ecosystem as opposed to a typical affiliate program management platform. The company caters to both vendors and partners/publishers, and already has over 500 B2B SaaS brands signed up for its services. The PartnerStack Marketplace features over 80,000 B2B partners and 300 SaaS partners. Keep in mind, though, that the marketplace operates like an affiliate network, so you’ll have to be willing to sacrifice some control over your affiliates.
Top features:
- Easily promote your program by creating a landing page, linking to your partner application form, and promoting on PartnerStack’s Marketplace.
- Branded email marketing, including automation of multi-step workflows and embedding referral links directly into emails.
- Optimize revenue through many different methods, such as performance management, tracking lifetime revenue, viewing and sorting partner-sourced leads and deals.
Pricing: Unknown
#7. Brand24
Brand24 is an AI-powered social listening tool that you can use to find mentions about your brand across social media, news updates, blogs, videos, forums, reviews, and more and proactively manage your reputation based on sentiment.
The software solution is available on mobile (both iOS and Android), and you can also integrate it with your Slack channel.
Top features:
- Identify sudden spikes in discussion/mention volumes so you can quickly intervene to protect or promote your brand reputation.
- Sentiment analysis features to identify positive, negative, or neutral attitudes, so you can correct problem areas which need to be addressed fast.
- Turn your data into automated PDF reports, .xls files, and infographics for easy sharing and brainstorming.
Pricing: $79-$499/month
Tips For Recruiting The Best Affiliates
Recruiting affiliates need not be painful. Consider the objective for your affiliate marketing program—whether you’re looking to increase web traffic, expand brand awareness, or drive sales—and narrow in on partners most likely to help you achieve those goals.
Here’s how:
Recruiting The Best Affiliates
Affiliate Marketing: Tips To Get It Right
We feel as though it is important to preface these tips by pointing out that not all of them will work for everybody. Which recruitment strategy and tips work best for you depends on your business, its available resources, and its objectives.
That being said, let’s get stuck into the tips so that you can find out which one to implement in order to run a successful affiliate program.
#1. Run an ad campaign
Running ad campaigns that advertise your affiliate program is an active and direct outreach technique for finding affiliates. Create a targeted email marketing campaign that targets people in your industry or people that have already been searching for affiliate programs to join.
Make sure to keep your ad copy clear and concise with targeted keywords. As for the visual aspects, make sure that your ad stands out against the website or social media platform it will be run on. However, don’t assault the senses. Taking a more natural approach to advertising often sees more results.
#2. Consider your customers
Your customers already know your product inside and out, and if they are loyal customers, then they already love your product (perhaps nearly as much as you). So then, who better to be your affiliates than your customers themselves?
The benefits of using customers as affiliates are that they can offer potential customers an inside look into your products, and they can provide them with more authentic content. You also already have their details in their database, so reaching out to them to see if they are interested shouldn’t be too much of an issue.
#3. Reach out to opinion leads and influencers
The best thing about recruiting influencers and opinion leaders to be your affiliates is that they already have a lot of sway and respect within their community. This means that their audience is more likely to trust what they say when they talk about your business. Using people of authority in your campaigns is a basic principle of persuasion used by affiliate marketers worldwide.
This strategy can be difficult depending on the level of influencer you’re reaching out to. The more followers they have, the more they are being bombarded with affiliate offers and other potential partner offers every day, and the harder they may be to reach. However, sometimes the best influencers to partner with aren’t the ones with the highest follower count.
#4. Have a dedicated affiliate landing page
Having an affiliate landing page is an easy way for people to have access to all the information they need about your affiliate program and to sign up to become one of your affiliates. Unlike the other tips we’ve outlined, this isn’t an outreach strategy but rather a strategy that supports your outreach. How?
You can share a link to your affiliate landing page via your email or social media marketing campaigns.
On your affiliate landing page, it is important to outline how your affiliate network and your affiliate program work, the affiliate commission they can expect to receive, and what you expect from your affiliates in return.
#5. Stick in your niche
First things first, what is a niche? In this sense, ‘niche’ refers to a specific market segment that suits your product or service.
You need to identify who you want your affiliates to be and what niche you want them to be operating within. It may be a good idea to draw up a persona of your ideal affiliate so that you can compare any potential to it and see if they would be a good match.
Once you’ve identified your perfect affiliate and the affiliate niche they are in, stick to it. It can be tempting to just allow anyone and everyone to be your affiliate, but this is not the best strategy when it comes to affiliate marketing.
If you have multiple niches, then market and outreach to these niches separately. This will help in keeping your message clear and reeling in the right affiliates to you.
#6. Start a referral program
Affiliate marketing and referral marketing can go hand-in-hand. Referral marketing refers to the process of using word-of-mouth from previous customers to grow your business.
You can start a referral program for your current affiliates in which you offer them compensation for every person they refer back to you that successfully makes it into your affiliate program.
Perhaps you offer them an additional bonus, or you raise their commission rate slightly for every referral. Either way, this is a great way to recruit affiliates. Your affiliates will know people that are in the same industry as them, the same relevant industry that you’re already targeting.
Just make sure that you vet any potential referred candidates and make sure that they fit your outlined criteria for an affiliate.
#7. Network within your industry
No matter the industry you’re in, there will be a wide range of events and conferences worth going to. Going to these kinds of events is beneficial for a number of reasons, but namely, you get the chance to network and make connections with like-minded individuals, and you can gather important information and insights.
Networking gives you, or your employees, the chance to interact directly with people in the industry and, if the time is right, to talk about your company and your products or services. Your affiliate manager can explain the exact value your products bring to consumers as well as the benefits that joining your affiliate program can bring to them.
#8. Talk about your affiliate program
This may seem obvious, but if you, your employees, and your company don’t talk about your affiliate program, then the word won’t get out. This is something you should be doing on a regular basis.
You can announce your affiliate program on your website, via your emails, through your email newsletter, and on your social media channels. Social media is a great channel to inform, engage and interact with potential affiliates directly, and it is an excellent source of affiliates. It also doesn’t hurt that it’s a relatively cheap channel to use too.
#9. Take a peek at your competition
This strategy works best if you’re a company with a smaller market share and have the ability to learn from your larger, more dominating company. Over and above affiliate marketing and recruiting affiliates purposes, it’s important to keep an eye on your competition. Taking a peek at your competition allows you to see what they are doing so that you can implement their successful strategies within your own business.
But how can you use this to your advantage when it comes to affiliate recruitment?
Pick a partner that you already know has an affiliate program, then look at their backlinks. If they have multiple backlinks from the same website, then chances are that website is one of their affiliate partners. Now that you know that website is open to having affiliate links in its content, you can reach out to them with your own affiliate program offering.
Just make sure that your offer is better, if not the same as your competitor.
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