9 Reasons to Implement an Affiliate Program for Your SaaS Product

Ensuring sustainable growth is the hardest part of managing a SaaS business. You can achieve that by running affiliate programs for your Saas product.

Everyone is aware of the highly competitive landscape of the SaaS business. Every day, many SaaS products are entering the market. At this time of intense competition, businesses always look for innovative strategies to improve product visibility and drive revenue growth. One strategy that recently gained much popularity is affiliate marketing.

Continue reading to know the top reasons to opt for affiliate marketing for your SaaS product or business. 

The Competitive World of SaaS

SaaS, or software-as-a-service, is one of the major components of cloud computing. It is basically a software distribution model where applications are hosted in cloud servers, and users can access that software according to their needs using the internet.

Users do not need to install the software on their local computers and do not need to worry about its maintenance either.

With the advancement of technology, businesses are increasingly getting dependent on cloud-based solutions. Hence, the demand for SaaS products is rising, and both established and new players are entering various industries and niches of this marketplace, making it more crowded than ever. 

Over the last seven years, the SaaS industry size has increased by around 500%. In 2023, the global SaaS market size will be $197 billion. It is expected to reach $232 billion by 2024. To accelerate the growth in this competitive market, SaaS businesses need to implement novel and effective methods such as affiliate marketing.

SaaS companies can utilize the vast network of influencers and industry experts who work as affiliates to promote their SaaS products to a wider audience. By leveraging the power of affiliates, one can easily promote their products, highlight the benefits, and generate more revenue at a sustainable rate.

Affiliate Marketing for Affordable Promotion of SaaS

The affiliate program is also known as the partnership program. It is a compensation agreement between a business/merchant and a marketing partner.

This is a performance-based system that involves payment of a commission to a marketer when they can successfully get the company a new customer utilizing their promotional efforts. When done correctly, this program offers a win-win situation for affiliates and businesses.

The process of affiliate marketing is as follows:

1️⃣ A business starts an affiliate program.

2️⃣ Interested people get enrolled in the program.

3️⃣ The business provides unique tracking links or affiliate codes for each affiliate.

4️⃣ Affiliates start to promote through various channels.

5️⃣ The audience clicks on the unique code to visit the merchant’s website.

6️⃣ The visitor performs a desired action or buys something.

7️⃣ The conversion is tracked through cookies or other identifiers.

8️⃣ The commission for the affiliate is calculated and paid monthly or quarterly.

The affiliate marketing program is a cost-effective and efficient way of marketing for businesses of all sizes. This pay-for-performance model helps businesses to control their marketing expenses. Especially during an economic slowdown or recession, companies optimize their marketing budgets. 

Businesses can set commission rates according to their marketing budget and financial capabilities. This alternative to traditional advertising methods also helps companies to target specific audiences and niches without incurring significant upfront costs.

Reasons to Choose Affiliate Marketing for SaaS

Many businesses assume that affiliate marketing is not for SaaS products. Nowadays, you will see many tech bloggers and content creators have emerged as influencers who can make a significant impact on your SaaS product sales. 

Therefore, more and more SaaS companies are starting affiliate programs and collaborating with influencers for promotion. If you are still in doubt, here is why SaaS companies should implement affiliate programs.

Grow Sales and Revenue

The biggest reason to opt for affiliate marketing is to get more sales. When it comes to influencing more people to make successful purchases of your SaaS products or services, affiliate marketing is a highly effective strategy. 

It helps you tap into the niche markets and reach the people specifically interested in your products. When many affiliates promote your products through their channels, those become more visible in social media and search engines as well.

If you consider product revenue and profit margin, you will find affiliate marketing to be highly beneficial. Imagine you want to display an ad on social media or traditional media about your product. In that case, you have to pay those media for displaying that ad itself, whether it gets you any customers or not.

The scenario is completely different in the case of affiliate marketing. You only pay a commission to the affiliate marketer when someone purchases your product through their link. As you spend less money on customer acquisition, your profit margin increases to a great extent.

Global Reach and Exposure

Having an affiliate program for your SaaS products means making the global audience become familiar with your brand. Influencers and bloggers from all over the world can enroll in this program and promote your products. Every influencer has a separate fanbase, and the promotional content they create for your products can reach thousands of interested audiences.

If you are trying to become a global brand, you need to create localized promotional content for different regions. This task can be easily done by collaborating with affiliate marketers. They can create content in the local languages that will easily spread among the local audience of a country.

Moreover, most affiliates have a huge network with their colleagues. They can even utilize their networks to ensure the global reach of your company. In addition, these marketers play a significant role in increasing your brand awareness. 

A user might not need to buy your product now, but when they have the necessity to use a SaaS product in the future, brand familiarity will let them choose your product over your unknown competitors.

Better SEO and Online Presence

One undervalued reason for collaborating with affiliates is to get better online visibility and SEO benefits for your website. If you sell a SaaS product, you must be prominently visible on different online channels. You can leverage the resources and expertise of affiliate marketers to enhance your online presence. 

As they use established platforms, like websites, blogs, and social platforms, to promote your products, your brand gets more visibility. Moreover, these blogs and videos generate valuable backlinks to your main website, helping it rank higher in search results and become a company with an online reputation. 

Additionally, affiliate marketers use different online marketing techniques to drive more traffic to your website or landing pages. As you do not have to pay them anything unless there is a successful purchase, the traffic you get through them is absolutely free. Increased traffic is also beneficial for boosting your SEO efforts and enables you to achieve a better ranking.

Performance-Based Marketing

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Affiliate marketing is a popular channel for performance marketing. In performance marketing, the objective is to achieve predetermined objectives or get measurable results. Affiliate program also involves a performance-based payment structure where you do not pay the influencers for efforts but for quantifiable results. 

The performance of an affiliate marketer can be easily tracked as you offer unique links to them that the audience uses to visit your website and buy your SaaS products. It saves you from promoting on billboards or traditional media where it is difficult to measure ad performance.

What’s more, SaaS companies can evaluate the performance of the campaigns and optimize them accordingly with the help of analytics data. If any promotional campaign is not working, they can ask the affiliate marketers to change the strategy so both parties can benefit.

Finally, this performance-based marketing strategy can keep your marketing expense in check. You only pay the affiliate when they can get a customer who bought or subscribed to your product. It reduces your CAC and, eventually, has a positive impact on your revenue.

The affiliate program is a great way to build a good relationship with influencers and industry experts. The experts can engage with your community and answer customer queries about your products. Furthermore, they can offer valuable insights into your products based on their experience that you can use to improve your products.

An affiliate program should not be only about influencers. You can even make your current customers a part of this program. If you start a program under which a customer will get a commission or discount for getting a new customer, many people will want to be a part of it. In fact, they are the best persons for promoting your product or service in exchange for a reward.

Including them in your affiliate program will strengthen customer loyalty and trust and work as social proof for the audience. This will also improve your reputation among your potential customers as a company with a strong bond with its customers and encourage them to choose your products.

Scalable Growth Strategy

An affiliate program is a scalable marketing strategy that can be scaled up or down according to the company’s growth and budget. This means businesses can expand their affiliate efforts when their budget and resources grow. 

They can recruit more affiliates to expand their network and enter new markets without any significant additional costs. In fact, this reason makes affiliate marketing adaptable to business growth.

On the other hand, if the business cannot generate desired revenue, it can reduce the affiliate commission or even stop the affiliate program altogether.

Word-of-Mouth Marketing

Affiliates program can even function as a word-of-mouth marketing strategy. When the audience finds that a trusted affiliate is promoting your product, they become interested in giving it a try. 

For this reason, you would want to develop a network of industry-expert affiliates who understand your software and can share their expert opinion on it.

No Risks Involved

Do you know that there is no downside to an affiliate program? If you have a well-structured program in place, you do not have any chance of losing money.

The payments you make to the affiliates are from the actual revenue you earn. So, you do not have to pay anything until you generate some revenue from the program.  

Increased Credibility

If you are a SaaS startup, establishing your credibility in the market could be challenging. When you choose to work in collaboration with prominent content creators or famous websites from relevant industries, you can quickly become credible and make more people confidently choose your products. 

Now that you know the justification behind running an affiliate marketing program for your SaaS products, find below some online platforms that can streamline the whole process:

#1. PartnerStack

PartnerStack gives you the tools and knowledge to create a successful and always-growing partner ecosystem. At low cost and effort, you can find new customers for your SaaS products, grow your market share, 

#2. Impact

Impact is the next-generation partnership management platform for your growing SaaS business. On its easy-to-use and features-packed platform, you can manage various types of partners who help you sell SaaS subscriptions or add-ons. The online tool is good for influencers, affiliates, ambassadors, etc. 

#3. Rewardful

Rewardful lets you create an affiliate program management account on its platform. Then, the team themselves manage referrals, commission amounts, discounts, and other crucial partnership management tasks. You can choose from Paddle or Stripe for smooth affiliate payments. 

Final Words

It is not possible to concentrate solely on enhancing your SaaS product, guaranteeing its security, and offering support while simultaneously handling the marketing yourself. While you do need to promote the SaaS tools yourself, you should heavily rely on affiliate programs.

It lets you partner up with social media influencers, ambassadors, online blogs, YouTube channels, Discord groups, and so on to promote your product. It is an effective and inexpensive way of selling and reaching out to the mass. 

Also, many businesses prefer to get SaaS product recommendations from known contacts. Set up your affiliate marketing program for SaaS tools now and enjoy the benefit of widespread marketing.

Next up, check out how to kickstart an affiliate marketing site and make money.