Create a Program in Siren

Next up, let’s create a program in Siren. So, first things first, we’re going to hover over Siren and click programs. Then, we’re going to click add new. And from here, this is the program edit screen. So, all we have to do is fill out all the details here. And uh once we’re done, we can have our program created. So, let’s get into the individual pieces to explain how they all work. So, first off, the ones that are a little more obvious, of course, are name and description. So, name uh for this one, we’re just going to create a simple affiliate program. So, it’s affiliate program. I like to add a percentage here as well if it’s a percentage based program just to remind myself just how much this program is for. It’s definitely not required, but it is something that I like to do. Then you can add a description. Something like that should do. You’re going to set the status to active and pick whatever currency you’re paying in. And then you can set a group. Um, you might not see this if you don’t have any uh program groups, but if you do, you would be able to pick what program group you want here. Don’t worry about this if you don’t know what this is yet. I do talk about this in a later lesson and we’ll get into details there. For now, we’re going to leave it as no group. Next up is the expiration time in days. So basically what this means is um you can think of the expiration time as the number of the amount of time that um the collaborator has before um their actions expire. So, for example, if uh a customer is directed to a website by an affiliate and that customer buys something 10 days later and you had uh the expiration time set to 7 days, then that affiliate would not get credit because it was outside of that window. It was too long. It was 10 days instead of, you know, six. So, this allows you to set um how long uh how much time you have people have before, you know, they no longer are eligible to receive credit for uh the sale or whatever happens uh with the program. Not all programs apply with this, but most of them do. Uh what’s really great about this actually just a little sidebar is uh just a little tip. You can set a really tight expiration time and uh use that to create like a a a sales focus a conversion focused program where you pay a higher percentage and then you can also create a second program with a longer expiration time where you pay somebody a smaller amount for more like lead focused uh programs. So I get into that a lot more on my blog. You’re welcome to and encouraged to check those things out. So, for this one, we’re going to go ahead and set the expiration time to 7 days. Well, you know what? Actually, let’s make it 30. 30. That seems like a pretty good number for just a single affiliate program. As for the program structure, this determines what um how the program uh who actually gets the reward for the program. This actually determines what people need to do in order to be able to receive their reward for a program. So, um there’s a few different ones here. First off is newest newest engagement wins. So newest engagement wins basically means uh it will you will pay the collaborator who um was the last person to interact with um the customer the last person to do the thing. So in the case of a typical affiliate program this would be the last person uh who clicked on the affiliate link or the last affiliate that the link was clicked on. Right? So, if a customer visited a site from four different affiliates, of those affiliates, whoever’s link that customer would have clicked on last is going to be um who gets the credit. So, um obviously that applies in different contexts depending on things like for coupon codes, right? So, if you were using a coupon code, that would pretty much always be the last engagement because it’s the last thing that happens before the purchase is made. So, um oldest engagement wins is the opposite of that, right? is you’re awarding the first person. Every engagement wins. Uh this is used in scenarios where you want to pay everybody, right? So, uh maybe you want to pay everybody 100% of the commission amount for their contribution, right? So, if you had four affiliates or four people, four collaborators all do whatever you’re asking them to do, right? Um and you wanted to pay them a fixed amount of money, you could use every engagement wins. This is actually often used um in in uh Lifter LMS situations a lot where you’re doing royalty programs and stuff like that. You always want to reward um you know a product being sold for example. So sometimes this one’s being used but most of the time for affiliate programs not so much. The next one is uh a shared engagement pool. So this one what happens is if a whole bunch of affiliates or more than one affiliate um did uh created an engagement. So they you know they share their affiliate link or whatever. Uh this will evenly share the commission among everybody who did it. So if you had four affiliates who shared an affiliate link to a customer whenever that product was sold, it’s going to take the commission amount. So say they the commission was $100 and it was divide it would divide it evenly among all four of them. So each of them would get $25. The next one is performance weighted pool and this one’s a little more uh it’s very similar to the shared engagement pool but it’s a slightly more advanced version. So it uses uh points which you will see whenever you check tracking events. So different events you can assign a point value to and those point values uh allow you to weigh how much that specific affiliate or that specific collaborator contributed toward actually you know leading to um the conversion. Right? So, this could be uh maybe you have an affiliate link and you want to make it to where uh maybe you have people who are sending links all the time and all your customers have four or five different affiliates who are all collaborating and working together to talk to this customer. You can make it to where, you know, every time that customer clicks on a link that was sent by that customer or that affiliate, they would get uh you know, one point. And basically, it keeps track of those points. And then whenever it’s all said and done, uh what performance weighted pool will do is it’ll say, “Okay, here we have the total number of points among everybody, and I’m going to pay everybody a share of the commission based on who uh based on their point total. So, the people with the most points will get the most, and the people with the least amount of points will get the least.” And I actually have a commission calculator that can kind of show you what I’m talking about here. So, one second. Let me get that loaded up. So here looking at this uh program structure, let’s say we’re using a shared pool and we have four people, four people who are paying out, right? Four affiliates who shared a link that that person clicked on. Uh we’re paying uh 10% and let’s say the payout pool is $1,000, right? So uh in other words, the the product sold for $1,000 or whatever. We’re paying out 10% of that. So we’re paying out $100. Now in the case of a regular shared pool which was the shared engagement pool that will simply divide it evenly like I talked about earlier 25 each way. But let’s say we have a but in a performance weighted pool it might add a weight to paying more of a higher share to certain people and a smaller share to others based on their performance leading up to the sale. Right? So this customer in this case would be the person who was probably interacting with that customer the most, sharing most of the affiliate links, having most of the discussions, most of the follow-ups and things like that as recorded by the number of engagements that were tracked that led up to that sale, right? Whereas this person maybe they just happened to share one link early in the process or something like that. So that is kind of how that is uh that’s how the the performance weighted pool works compared to uh the regular uh shared engagement pool. Then finally there’s top score wins. And what this one does is it basically like I was talking about with the performance weighted pool earlier, it basically just looks at whoever got the most points wins all of the commission. So, okay. So, in the context of an affiliate program, right, since we’re using an affiliate program here, most of the time, what you’re going to want here is either going to be newest engagement wins or oldest engagement wins. And I typically recommend using newest engagement wins because um it tends to be the most it’s it tends to be the one that people are trying to use whenever they’re using an affiliate program. It ensures that your coupon codes award the right people. Um, and and it creates behaviors that you’re probably expecting. So, if you’re not sure which one of these to use and you’re trying to create an affiliate program, just use newest engagement wins for now. And that’s exactly what we’re going to do here. Okay. So, moving on, let’s talk about the engagement tracking events. So an engagement tracking event is basically um any of the things that you do that that your collaborators do that is being measured that happens that leads up to the sale. Right? So um a tracking event could be something like a person clicked on an affiliate link or a coupon code was used or a product associated with a collaborator was purchased, right? Different things like that. These things happen before the sale or leading up to the sale and we can measure those things and these are the things that uh collaborators can do to score points or um earn their commission. So um there are that coming with um coming with Siren. There’s a few basic ones and this site happens to also have Lifter LMS installed an LMS solution for WordPress. So there’s actually a couple that are specifically for LMS users as well that we can get into while we’re here. So the first one is site visited. So this one’s pretty straightforward. It triggers an engagement. It triggers an engagement whenever a collaborator is associated with a site visit. This is that affiliate link example I was talking about, right? So uh customer affiliate or a collaborator shares their affiliate link with somebody. That person clicks on that link. It goes to the site. Bam. as long as this box is checked, it will track that and associate it with this um with this program. The next one is blog post visited. So, this one’s kind of interesting. So, the use case for this is that if you have people on your site writing blog content and you wanted to, you know, give them credit uh whenever somebody reads that content in their journey to buying your product or doing whatever, you can use blog post visited. And basically what this will do is anytime somebody visits the site and reads a blog post that is written by that person by a collaborator that collaborator will get credit uh in the form of an engagement tracking event through the blog post visited. The next one here is a collaborator product sold. So this is just what I had mentioned earlier. So this is useful for royalty programs and things like that. So if you wanted to create a program where um people have products that they own that that are on your site if that product is sold um they will get credit for that using that engagement tracking event. So this is one of those circumstances where you would use every engagement wins. By the way, coupon code used is um is basically you can create coupons um in many e-commerce solutions and uh you can associate those coupons with a specific collaborator. So whenever that coupon code gets used, they get credit for it. The next two are um course and lesson completed. So these ones are pretty interesting because how they work is they will give a um a uh they will award an engagement tracking event. So these ones what they do is they make it so that you can um award engagement tracking events whenever a uh student using an LMS solution either completes a lesson or completes a course. What’s really cool about this is you can actually pay um award this. This allows you to create programs that award course creators that are on your site if you’ve got a multi-course platform or something like that uh for whenever they have successfully gotten a customer all the way through the course. So uh for example, maybe you have a program where you want to pay a um a course creator for their product. So you have a royalty program, right? every time their course is sold or whatever, uh, they they receive, you know, a a percentage, some percentage, some cut of sales. But then on top of that, maybe you have an extra incentive program on top of that that says, “And if you can get that customer within 30 days to complete your course as well, then I will give you another bonus because your course is clearly doing really well and you’re doing the things that’s needed to be done to make sure that these people are getting their value.” Right? A very big part of successful course management uh courses isn’t just in the purchase. That’s that’s the first sale that happens whenever you’re selling a course. The bigger arguably perhaps sometimes the harder thing to do is to get the person to actually do the thing because a lot of people who are running courses, this is a part of a funnel, right? This is a part of a bigger strategy. So, it makes a lot of sense to motivate and help incentivize creating courses and creating systems that ensure that those people who just bought these are getting their value out of that thing shortly. So that’s another example of an engagement tracking event in Siren. However, in our case, we are just going to use uh site visited and coupon code used because we’re simply creating a dead simple straightforward affiliate program. Now, you’ll notice this value here. This is the point value that’s associated with these different tracking events. So, if you have multiple tracking events checked, uh and you’re using something like shared engagement pool or something that actually leverages points, you can set a point value. So maybe you think that a site visited is worth one point. Maybe coupon code used is worth 10 and uh I don’t know maybe u blog post visited is worth 25, right? Something something like that. Just thinking out loud. Uh maybe you’re creating some kind of program affiliate program all around for people who are both on your site and also off your site sharing content and writing content on your site as well. And maybe you wanted to have a a performance weighted pool where um you know you’re going to generate the commission based on you know everybody’s contributions and you think the blog posts are worth the most. So every time somebody reads a blog post that they wrote you give them 25 points and then when it’s all said and done you know the majority of those the commission is going to end up going to the blog post visited person. So that’s one potential way uh you could see I could see point values I see point values being used whenever they are. Uh but in our case again we’re using a pretty simple straightforward one. So we’re just going to stick with newest engagement wins site visited and coupon code used. Okay. The next section is the incentive structure. And what this does is it talks about how you’re going to pay your collaborators for um what they’re the thing that they’re doing, right? How how is the reward calculated? So there’s a few different ones. There’s a few different options here. The first one of course is fixed per product. And basically what that does is it rewards a fixed amount of money based on uh the number of products that are sold. So in other words, let’s say you have um a cart a transaction that goes through and um and five and five of those product there’s five products in the cart and they get sold, right? Uh and you want to sell in and you want to give a commission of $10 for every one of those, right? This is useful in cases where let’s say for example you have um uh you want to create a temporary program right for maybe you’re selling pants or clothes on your website and um we’re coming into late midfall late fall and you still have shorts in stock and you want to get rid of those shorts quickly. You could put them on clearance but you could also put them on an incentive program. create an incentive program specifically targeting those shorts and say, “Hey affiliates, I’m going to give you a regular commission for everything that you sell right now. But in addition to that, specifically for these shorts, I’m going to pay you an extra $5 for every pair of shorts you sell.” You could use fixed per product to leverage that and give them an extra bonus on top of that. Um, another example is uh another one is fixed per transaction. This is um probably a little bit more common of use cases. you’re probably thinking of. So, basically, this pays a fixed fee every time a customer makes a purchase. So, um this is often used especially in really high ticket sales, high ticket products. So, maybe you want to give somebody a so maybe you wanted to give somebody like a $200 uh sign on fee for um for selling your your product or something like that. Uh I actually see this a lot in web develop in the web development world uh from uh hosting companies who who are hosting you know WordPress sites and stuff like that. What they’ll do is they’ll say hey I’m going to give you $200 if you for every customer that you bring to my platform and uh this is an interesting dynamic. This is especially interesting for them because they only charge you know $50 a month or something like that. So, basically what they’re doing is they’re saying, “I’m going to give you the first four months worth of my um my sales for every sale you generate for me. I’m going to eat that short-term cost but gain the long-term benefits of it.” So, this is an interesting one and it’s useful in cases where you, you know, maybe the um the total isn’t desirable, isn’t something that you really would like to use a percentage for, right? So either the price is really small on a recurring basis and they they want to make sure they get their money in the longer term or it’s the opposite and you want to use a fixed price on something where you don’t want to give, you know, a huge commission for a $80,000 project or something like that. Maybe you’re selling big big high ticket things, but you want to give somebody, you know, a kickback for um referring the business even though they didn’t do anything more than just send them your way. Maybe you want to just give them a a $200 thank you or something like that, right? This is a great use case for that. The next one is percentage of transaction. So, uh this one is the bread and butter. This is the one that almost every affiliate program uses and it is in fact going to be the one that we’re going to use here. So, percentage of transaction does exactly what the name suggests. It takes the total amount of money in the transaction and it takes a percentage of it and it gives it to the uh collaborators who uh have earned a reward for that specific customer’s sale for that specific conversion. So um in this case again we’re using a down and dirty dead simple affiliate program. So we’re just going to use a percentage and we’re going to set our percentages our percentage to 15. We’re going to credit conversions for sales and renewals and we’re also going to auto approve completed transactions. So, a lot’s going on there. Let me explain those three. Uh, we’re crediting conversions for sales. So, in other words, every time a sale happens on the site, this will uh we will credit for that. Uh, renewals. This works for memberships and things like that. So, um, if you wanted to create a recurring commission where a person uh maybe you want to make it to where you get 15% of the commission from our a membership, any membership you sell for the life of that membership, right? then in that case you would check the memberships box. I actually and I don’t like that personally. I don’t like that for most uh programs. So I actually prefer to uncheck that. I think there’s other ways that you can do this. Uh creating a separate program where it focuses specifically on retention and stuff like that. That’s where that makes a lot of sense. But since this is a cons uh a conversion focused program where it’s all about trying to get people to sell, not so much get them to remain on the platform, I’m not going to check renewals on this one. We can always create a second program, focus on that later. And then uh finally, I’m going to leave auto approve completed transactions checked. Basically, what that means is whenever the program whenever a uh purchase is done and the money goes through, it just automatically will approve um the the uh the obligation and the conversion in Siren on the back end. It just kind of saves you a little bit of extra work and and saves you a little bit of time moving forward. But, um, if you’re just getting started and you’re not really sure and you want to kind of monitor it a little bit closer, by all means, leave that unchecked. You can watch it. You can manually approve them later. And you can always turn it on later if you feel when you feel comfortable with it. Okay. So, next up, the last part that we’re going to talk about is include in commission calculations. So what this part does is it actually figures out what parts of the transaction needs to be used for this program needs to be calculated considered for the calculation for the program’s reward. So um there’s a few different options here. There’s discounts, fees, line items, shipping, and taxes. So um let’s start with line items, and then I’ll go back up to the top. So you pretty much always are going to want to have line items checked. uh because you’re probably there’s really I can’t think of any situation where you wouldn’t want to uh base your sale um on on the line items in some way, right? So fixed per transa or percentage of transaction and fixed per product definitely use this. Right? So um we’ll leave that checked. So now that what that means it’s going to calculate it’s going to use the line items in the sale at to um figure out some of the the commission. Right? So, if there’s three items in there and they’re worth $20 a piece, um it would calculate all of those for a total of $60, right? And that would be the amount of money that was sold in the transaction and then it would take 15% of that and it would generate, you know, from there. Um, we’re also going to check discounts. So, what discounts does is it actually accounts for the discount that’s being applied to the product. So, let’s say you sell something for $100 um or maybe $120, right? And you have a coupon and they have a coupon code and it takes $20 off of the total. That drops the total down to $100. And in this case, since the discounts is checked, they’re going to get 15% of $100. But if discounts was not checked, it would give them 15% of $120, which is obviously which is almost never what you want. But in some cases, there are programs where you would want that. So, we have it here, but in most affiliate programs, you’re going to want to have that checked. Uh, fees, I like to leave this one um checked as well, but it’s it’s a bit of a it’s a bit of a niche situation, specifically in things like WooCommerce and stuff like that. There’s signup free fees, subscription fees, uh, and things like that that can be applied in addition to a uh a um a product. So um one example that I can think of where I use fees a lot is um for a subscription with Woo Commerce, right? So I know customers who are agencies that will um create a um a fee for a monthly recurring subscription that they have. So maybe they have like a hosting plan or something like that. And the fee is actually the fee to build their website. So it’s like a $2,000 fee plus the subscription on top of that, right? So, um, fees are are things that can apply in some situations. So, you know, if you’re ever in Woo Commerce or anything like that and you see a fee that you can add to a product, that is going to be associated with this right here. Shipping and taxes, you’re almost never going to want to leave these checked. You probably don’t want to pay a commission. Uh, that includes the taxes that you’re paying, right? So, you would leave that unchecked. You probably also don’t want to pay a commission for shipping in most cases as well. So, you’re going to leave both of those unchecked. Um, but back to line items. What’s interesting about line items is when you check it, you can see it expands this into in all these categories, with all these SKs, with any of these types, and collaborator owned. So, what’s really interesting about this is this allows you to filter what products are eligible for this program, right? So we can say in any of these categories and then if you have product categories in Woo Commerce or um category course categories in Lifter LMS or anything like that you can add the slug of that category. So the all lowercase version of that category right here and the the this program would only apply to the products that are in that category. So, in my earlier example, I talked about the uh program where you could have uh you could be selling a a short-term program where you’re only specifically targeting short these shorts that you’re trying to sell. You could theoretically create a program called short where a category is called shorts maybe and uh you know maybe that one had the fixed per product and it was $10 per product for all sales, right? So, in that case, this would stack on top of your typical program. Maybe this is a second program you’re adding in addition to the first one. And uh in this case, having shorts here, it’s even if they bought stuff that wasn’t just shorts. So maybe they bought shorts, a tank top, a hoodie, um a beanie, all kinds of other things. It’s only going to count for this program the shorts. So it wouldn’t it wouldn’t count, you know, 10 items. It would only count the three items that were in this category. So let me go ahead and put all this stuff back real quick. with any of these SKs works in much the same way as categories. So you can se specify any SKS here. You can separate them by a comma and it will only apply to products that have those SKs types. This also works for products and subscriptions. So you can say this this program only applies to products or it only applies to subscriptions. And then last but not least is collaborator owned. So in other words, you can ensure that uh this is great for royalty programs. you can ensure that um a program that you create for royalties only applies only uses the collaborator owned products whenever it’s calculating its commission totals. So, but in the case of a basic affiliate program, we just need discounts, fees, and line items. And that’s it. And then from there, you just click create and you’re good to go. So, there we go. The program was created successfully. And we can see right there, affiliate program 15%. And it’s all set and ready to go.