Affiliate programs aren’t very well known for being collaborative. In-fact, it’s usually the complete opposite. Affiliates are usually competing with each-other, even if it’s indirect. After-all, traditional affiliate programs only allow one winner.
I believe this stifles opportunities for people to work together, and ultimately has a negative impact on your program. Let’s dive into how you can fix this with Siren.
Collaboration Across Different Programs
Because Siren allows you to create multiple programs, you can have multiple roles collaborate together to accomplish a goal.
A classic example could be an affiliate program, plus a sales program, where the affiliate is focused on driving traffic to your website, and the salesperson focuses on actually closing the sale. They’re two entirely separate roles, and work in different ways. One is focused on bringing in a healthy pipeline of opportunities, and the other is focused on converting those opportunities into sales. Both are important, and they certainly have some overlap, but there’s a clear separation of the two roles.
With Siren, you can create a sales program plus an affiliate program at the same time, and pay out commissions for both of them when someone makes a purchase. As long as you can quantify the performance, you can create a program for it.
You could extend this relationship even further with a third program for a blog content bonus. Again, the affiliate is focused on driving traffic, but this time they’re linking to a blog post that was published on your site by a writer in the bonus program. The affiliate gets great content to share, and has a chance to use their affiliate link in the process. The content writer gets credit for traffic that goes to their blog post. Slap a chat box in the corner of your screen, and let the salesperson convert the leads as they come in.
Affiliate Programs That Pay Multiple Affiliates
Something that’s always bugged me about traditional affiliate programs is there is only one winner, even in cases where more than one affiliate may have referred someone. This is especially annoying for products that are more than a impulse purchase, and require research and opinions from multiple people. Why is it that only one of the many potential affiliates gets the credit, when it was the efforts from multiple people that actually made that possible?
The worst part about this is that it pits affiliates against each-other, instead of giving them a reason to work together. It forces them to put excessive pressure for you to convert, because the window of opportunity could shut at any time if your program pays the last person to drive the visit. Conversely, it can be really frustrating to drive traffic to a product only to find that a large percentage of those people are already associated with another affiliate, and your efforts and pitch is doing nothing but helping “the other person”.
Yuck. We can do better than that.
One of my favorite features that makes Siren unique is that it is possible to pay out in unique, creative ways that existing programs cannot. I call them incentive resolvers, and at-launch Siren will have several different options (and I’m already cookin’ up some other ones for future releases, too!):
- Oldest Engagement Wins – This works much like traditional programs, the first person who referred the visitor gets credit.
- Newest Engagement Wins – The opposite of oldest engagement wins. This gives credit to the last person who referred the visitor.
- Top Score Wins – Pays the affiliate who referred the visitor the most times.
- Shared Engagement Pool – Evenly divides the value of the commission across every affiliate who referred this visitor.
- Performance Weighted Pool – Divides the values of the commission across every affiliate who referred this visitor based on the number of times they referred them to the site.
In-particular, the last two options really shake things up. If you’re sharing the commission across everyone who participated, you open up opportunities for affiliates in the same program to work together.
I think that’s really cool.
Multiple Programs, With Multiple Shared Pools
If you want to have several different programs, and some of those programs split commissions amongst themselves, you can do that. With this approach, an entire collaborative platform can be built around your website, and each one is built around the different roles that people want to fill. These roles naturally work together, and incentivizes these people to collaborate together. People within their own programs have opportunities to work together, too.
I think my favorite thing about this is that it allows people to work together organically, as well. This doesn’t force people to have to network with the other people in the other programs, in fact they don’t even need to know each-other. If a blogger writes something on the site that fits well with what an affiliate would naturally want to share, they don’t need to know each-other to make that connection. As long as the affiliate is watching the blog for content that’s relevant to their audience.
Swim fast, dream big!
