Step-by-Step Guide to Effective Affiliate Program Onboarding
Imagine this…
You’ve been using a product or service for a while and you’re really happy with the results. You want to share it with your friends, peers, and community so you look to see if they have an affiliate program you can sign up to. (Might as well earn some sweet mullah if you can, right?
You can’t see anything about a referral program in the emails you received after you signed up, and you can’t see a link on their website. You dig around and, after a quick Google search, finally find a way to join their affiliate program.
You register your details and you’re approved to be an affiliate - huzzah! 🎉
You get an email confirmation from the brand with a link to login to their affiliate tracking platform.
And then… crickets 🦗
You manage to find your way around their affiliate software to get your links but you, quite literally, never hear from them after that. You share your affiliate link one time and then it slips your mind and gathers dust in the depths of your inbox.
This is what we want to help you, as an affiliate program creator, avoid.
Because a lacking onboarding system can lead to less referrals, less affiliate sales, and affiliates forgetting they’re in your program altogether.
This post will help you ensure that new affiliates who join your program are:
Enthusiastically welcomed into your affiliate program, referral program, or ambassador program* (so they feel valued from the get-go!)
Provided with everything they need to promote your offer (so they can get sharing right away)
Comfortable with navigating your affiliate tracking software (so they can find their affiliate links!)
Knowledgeable about exactly where to go for support (and get their Q’s answered quickly)
In order to get your affiliate onboarding set up, we need to work from the bottom up: starting with everything we need to create and ending with your onboarding systems live! Keep reading to learn more!
*For simplicity's sake, we’ll use the term ‘affiliate program’ throughout this post but this applies to any kind of program where you are asking people to share your products or services with other people in return for an incentive (cash or otherwise).
Create an affiliate welcome packet or hub
One of the best ways to welcome affiliates into your program is with an affiliate welcome packet or affiliate hub. This way you can provide them with everything they need to get started in one central place.
Hub or no hub?
An affiliate hub is a webpage where affiliates go to get information about your affiliate program. It can be an area where affiliates need to login (for example, a ‘course’ in Kajabi or Teachable) or it could be a webpage that links out to other pages (for example, a Notion page). Affiliate hubs are typically updated with new assets & materials for every promotion or launch that you have.
An affiliate welcome packet is more of a document they can refer back to at any time. A welcome packet will link out to other places (i.e. a folder where you keep your promotional graphics) but it won’t necessarily be updated to reflect every single upcoming promotion or launch.
If you’re just getting started with your affiliate program, we recommend creating a simple welcome packet to get started and building it up from there! If you have a LOT of affiliates, and a lot of promotions planned for the year, an affiliate hub might be the way to go to keep everything in one place.
For the sake of this blog post, we’ll move forward as if you’re creating an affiliate welcome packet! ☺️
Provide an overview of your affiliate program
Your affiliate welcome packet will be a place your affiliates come back to regularly so you want to make sure all the important info is right there, front & center. If your affiliate welcome packet contains anything, it should be the following:
Affiliate links. First, and foremost, where do your affiliates find their links? Make this really simple and add visuals (GIFs, video tutorials, step-by-step images) to make them even easier to find.
Commission. What affiliate commission/incentives do you offer to your affiliates? Do you offer any bonuses if they reach a certain number of sales? Even better if you can have a table with different products, commission rates, and how much they’d earn per product sold.
Cookies. What is your affiliate cookie length? And are sales attributed on a first or last click basis?
Payouts. Where do you handle payouts? If it’s via PayPal, do you need to remind your affiliates to share their PayPal email address somewhere? What date do payouts typically occur?
Coupons. Do you offer coupons to your affiliates to share with their audiences? If so, how do they find their coupon?
Affiliate agreement. If you have an affiliate agreement (which you should!), you should relink it in your welcome packet for reference.
Pull together your affiliate promotional materials & affiliate swipe copy
→ Not sure what affiliate swipe copy is? Read our guide here.
Providing your affiliates with promotional materials could be THE difference between them promoting and not. Hopefully, you have some promo assets in place. If not, you know where to find us. 😉
You should make sure everything you’ve got for affiliates to share is super easy to find. Don’t let it get forgotten in a Dropbox folder inside another Dropbox folder that isn’t linked anywhere in your welcome packet.
Make sure your affiliates can easily find any:
Promotional graphics
Email swipe copy
Social media swipe copy
DM swipe copy
Promotional ideas
Content ideas
that you’ve created for your affiliate program by linking to them directly in your welcome packet!
Tip: if you have a LOT of promotional assets, we recommend grouping them together in the most relevant way to your offers. For example, you could group everything by launch (if you ask your affiliates to promote one launch at a time) or you could group by product category (if you have an online store with lots of products to share).
The most important thing is to make finding the assets as simple as possible, and not to overwhelm your affiliates. 💛
Share easy-to-follow tutorials on your affiliate tracking software
Unless you have a very specific & targeted group of affiliates you are inviting into your program, it’s likely that you will have people from all walks of life sign up to your affiliate program. And people with varying levels of experience in affiliate marketing.
Having an affiliate program of your own, you know how tricky affiliate tracking software can be. Now imagine being someone who has never logged into an affiliate program before. 🤯
Make your affiliate program welcoming to everyone who joins, no matter their past experience, by sharing tutorials on how to use your affiliate tracking platform.
We’d recommend sharing things like:
Where to find their affiliate links
How to create affiliate links for a specific page of your site (if that’s possible with your software!)
Where to change their Payout information (i.e. their PayPal email address)
How to monitor their clicks & conversions
Reminding them where to reach out if they get stuck or have extra questions
These could be delivered in videos, images, GIFs, step-by-step text instructions, etc.
Write up common affiliate FAQs for smooth onboarding
Save back-and-forth emails by writing your affiliates’ FAQs in your welcome packet - or storing them in a separate doc/web page. Some typical affiliate FAQs are:
Where do I find my affiliate links?
How much commission do I receive?
When will I be paid?
Is there a payout threshold?
How long does my affiliate link cookie browsers for?
Where can I find promotional materials?
Who can I reach out to for support?
Of course, keep an eye on your affiliate inbox (or wherever else you communicate with affiliates) for the same questions coming up, again & again! Every time you get a new question, add it to the FAQ doc to save time!
Create an automated affiliate onboarding sequence
Now that you have your welcome packet (or hub!), we want to make sure every new affiliate that joins receives it automatically when they sign up to your program. We also want your affiliates to receive a warm welcome from you and make sure they start sharing their links!
We recommend creating an affiliate onboarding sequence that follows the following structure. (Or a similar structure! This is just our way, not THE way.)
Welcome email. This email should be received immediately after sign-up/approval and should be focused on confirming they signed up, welcoming them, and giving them what they need to get started. Give your new affiliate a warm welcome! They just decided to share your offer with other people and that’s not to be taken lightly. After welcoming them, make sure they get:
Their affiliate link. If you can use custom fields/custom formatting/personlisations to include their affiliate link directly in the email, that’s the way to go so they have it right then and there to share! Otherwise, linking out to their affiliate dashboard is perfect.
Their welcome packet/affiliate hub. Make sure they know where to find everything they need to get started with promoting.
A reminder of their commission %/amount. We recommend adding this in as these welcome emails often become future reference points for affiliates searching their inboxes - so it’s handy to have that info in the email!
Instructions for anything you need from them. For example, if they need to go into their affiliate dashboard and upload a W9 form or add their PayPal email address. Let them know if they need to take action on anything!
Sharing your link. This email could be received 3 to 7 days after an affiliate signs up to your program. It should be focused on giving the affiliate ideas on ways they can share their affiliate link. Even better if you can share the idea and link to the exact place where they can find a promotional graphic or swipe copy to help them share. You should also For example, affiliates can share in places like:
In social media posts
In their Instagram link-in-bio
On their blog sidebar
On their website footer
On their resources page
In SEO blog posts
In YouTube videos
In 1:1 conversations
In DMs to friends, colleagues, or connections
Promotional/positioning ideas. At around a week or two after your last email, you can help affiliates who haven’t started promoting yet by sharing some different messaging they can use to get started. This could include blog post ideas, YouTube video ideas, caption ideas—even better if you link to your swipe copy directly in your email.
Checking in. You could send this two weeks to one month after your last email. Just check in with your affiliate, see if they need any support or have any questions, and keep your brand and offers at the top of their mind. This email can sometimes come in at the perfect time and encourage an affiliate to share! If you offer them, you could share a link to your scheduling tool to encourage your affiliates to book a time to chat with you or someone on your team.
We also recommend having a check-in email at least once a quarter to keep top of mind for your affiliates and prompt them to reach out if they are having any struggles sharing their links.
No matter the contents, EVERY email should have the affiliate’s link (or a place to login to get their affiliate link), the link to your welcome packet/affiliate hub, and a link to login to your affiliate tracking platform.
Final tips for automating your affiliate onboarding process
A streamlined & automated affiliate program > an all-hands-on-deck affiliate program 😍
Here are some automations you can create to make your affiliate onboarding experience as smooth as possible:
When an affiliate signs up, they get your affiliate onboarding sequence
Set up an automation so when an affiliate signs up in your affiliate tracking software, they automatically receive your affiliate onboarding sequence.
There are pros & cons to adding affiliates into your email service provider. We recommend having a tag, list, or group for your affiliates so they don’t receive your regular marketing emails unless they explicitly opt-in to them.
When an affiliate signs up, add their affiliate ID to your email service provider
Adding an affiliate’s ID or referral code into your ESP allows you to get personalised and share affiliate links directly in your affiliate onboarding sequence.
It’s the difference between saying:
Click here to login to your affiliate dashboard to find your affiliate link.
And saying:
Here’s your affiliate link so you can get sharing right away:
It saves them having to spend time navigating your affiliate tracking platform and gets them sharing—which is the main thing we want affiliates to do, right? 🙌
When an affiliate makes their first sale, they get a celebratory email
Set up an automation so when an affiliate gets their first sale, you send them an email celebrating them. This helps affiliates feel appreciated and encourages them to keep sharing!
Personalise your affiliate welcome sequence based on affiliate performance
You can have automations & personalisations set up so you can separate affiliates who have made sales or clicks vs. those who haven’t yet in your onboarding sequence.
For example, a personalisation could be:
We noticed you haven’t made any sales yet. What can we do to help?
Or: Congratulations on making your first sale! Let’s keep the ball rolling. Is there anything we can do to help you get your second sale?
When an affiliate signs up, add them into your affiliate management spreadsheet for tracking
If you have a separate Google sheet, AirTable, Notion page, or the like to track your affiliates, make sure they get added to this automatically upon sign up/approval.
Need help creating your affiliate onboarding?
At ReferralPie, we’re here to help make running your affiliate program as easy as pie! 🥧
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