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Affiliate Marketing for SaaS Product (7)

05-20-2019 06:38 PM #1 gupanant (Member)
Affiliate Marketing for SaaS Product

Hi,
I am little confused on where to start from. I run couple of online business and one of them is : toodledo.com. It's an online to-do list application based on a famous time-management strategy called Getting Things Done by David Allen. Toodledo has been there from last 10years and we bought the company last year thinking it will be easy to scale. We are kinda stuck in its growth so looking for a Growth or Affiliates people who can help us in growing Toodledo.

We are very flexible with the payouts//commissions or in creating different landing pages or trying out different things. Currently we hired someone in-house and he asked us to create these landing pages : toodledo.com/business, toodledo.com/lawyers and toodledo.com/financial-managers. Even getting a lead from facebook ads is getting very expensive. We also have in-house sales person to follow-up on these leads.

If you know anyone who can help us out in laying out our marketing or affiliate strategy, let me know.

You can also reach out to me on skype : google.plus

Thanks

05-20-2019 09:11 PM #2 matuloo (Legendary Moderator)

Hello gupanant!

I was just looking at the PM you sent me and then I noticed this thread, so let's keep the discussion in here

So first of all, how about you tell us what you have tried so far, so we don't recommend you steps that you've already taken.

Do you have any users of the product now, if so how many? For a product like this, using the current user base might help a lot, if you can make them recommend it to other possible customers... colleagues, friendly companies, partners, professionals in the same business area... A simple referral system that would give them a free month (30 days, 90 days ...) for every new users they refer, for example.

Did you list your tool in some related resources that focus on productivity related issues? Discount codes on sites listing these ...

You mentioned FB, have you tried anything else? I see ads for similar (I think) tools on youtube all the time, for example.

There is a low you can try, but provide some more details please.

05-20-2019 09:33 PM #3 gupanant (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by matuloo View Post
Hello gupanant!

I was just looking at the PM you sent me and then I noticed this thread, so let's keep the discussion in here

So first of all, how about you tell us what you have tried so far, so we don't recommend you steps that you've already taken.

Do you have any users of the product now, if so how many? For a product like this, using the current user base might help a lot, if you can make them recommend it to other possible customers... colleagues, friendly companies, partners, professionals in the same business area... A simple referral system that would give them a free month (30 days, 90 days ...) for every new users they refer, for example.

Did you list your tool in some related resources that focus on productivity related issues? Discount codes on sites listing these ...

You mentioned FB, have you tried anything else? I see ads for similar (I think) tools on youtube all the time, for example.

There is a low you can try, but provide some more details please.
We do have referral or ambassador program which gives them free memberships. Total users who used our product or rather you can say our email list is above 1.2M. Daily active users and paying subscribers are over 50k and 8k respectively.

Yes we have discount codes and tried that earlier on AppSumo and one more site, I don't remember the name. Wanted to dig into affiliate marketing for this because of one podcast from TheSaaSClub in which one of the company bootstrapped to 50,000 paying subscribers from affiliates. They started by paying affiliates like 50-60% of the commissions for every new subscriber, but good thing for their company was that they were able to retain 40% of those users on their product.

Their affiliate campaigns were more inclined towards selling multi-year subscription at less price. In this way affiliates were able to earn good commissions as well as for product owner there was a good retention rate of these subscribers.

05-22-2019 02:04 PM #4 matuloo (Legendary Moderator)

Ok, so this is a bit different case than I thought. You have a running product with a solid base of users/customers and basically want to get more of them

We do have referral or ambassador program which gives them free memberships.
Does it bring you new members? Do your users actively use this to refer people to you? In case the results are poor, it might be time to rethink the strategy and come up with new compensation structure.

Wanted to dig into affiliate marketing for this because of one podcast from TheSaaSClub in which one of the company bootstrapped to 50,000 paying subscribers from affiliates.
Did they mention any details about how they approached this? There are basically two ways of working with affiliates.

You an either handle the affiliate part in-house, or you can just manage the product and work with affiliate networks, who take care of the affiliates. I think you might want to explore the later option and list your product with some large and established affiliate network. For example https://www.cj.com/ could be a good one for you. They already have a large pool of affiliates that they are working with, so if you can offer fair conditions and interesting payouts, it might raise some interest.

It would be a good idea to find out what the company from the podcast did and whether they used some affiliate network to get the affiliates.

Another option for you would be to look for people who manage blogs or other resources that relate to your product. I'm sure there are countless lists of tools that enhance productivity, those people should be willing to list your product, especially if you can give them a discount coupon. There should also be people who run newsletters about topics that relate to your product, these could become your affiliates too.

It's hard for me to give you some specific advice as your product is rather unique and won't appeal to very broad audience. But with some research, you should be able to find online resources that would be a good match for you. Try to contact people who run those places, these would be the ideal affiliates for you.

05-23-2019 09:48 PM #5 gupanant (Member)

Does it bring you new members? Do your users actively use this to refer people to you? In case the results are poor, it might be time to rethink the strategy and come up with new compensation structure.
Yes it does but we are working on improving on this area. We have big competitors with much higher funding. They are outranking us in all the ads we run.

You an either handle the affiliate part in-house, or you can just manage the product and work with affiliate networks, who take care of the affiliates. I think you might want to explore the later option and list your product with some large and established affiliate network. For example https://www.cj.com/ could be a good one for you. They already have a large pool of affiliates that they are working with, so if you can offer fair conditions and interesting payouts, it might raise some interest.

It would be a good idea to find out what the company from the podcast did and whether they used some affiliate network to get the affiliates.

Another option for you would be to look for people who manage blogs or other resources that relate to your product. I'm sure there are countless lists of tools that enhance productivity, those people should be willing to list your product, especially if you can give them a discount coupon. There should also be people who run newsletters about topics that relate to your product, these could become your affiliates too.

It's hard for me to give you some specific advice as your product is rather unique and won't appeal to very broad audience. But with some research, you should be able to find online resources that would be a good match for you. Try to contact people who run those places, these would be the ideal affiliates for you.
We are working on creating a partner's program and want to find affiliates and affiliate network who can promote our offers. As I said earlier, we are very flexible in terms of commissions and creating landers. Just don't have any clue in where to start. I registered on CJ and waiting for the approval. If you know more people, let me know! I can eat up their head lol.

05-24-2019 03:15 AM #6 jack_l (Veteran Member)

Sounds like the kind of thing you might see on Max Bounty. That might be another network for you to take a look at.

Good luck

05-24-2019 05:20 PM #7 anstrex (Senior Member)

I am an owner of a Saas platform (somewhat of a niche product) and we handsomely pay our affiliates on a recurring basis. Our top affiliates make 4 figure commission every month and we have no problem recruiting new affiliates. Believe it or not, the word does spread around and you don't have to make too much effort in recruiting people.

However, your biggest issue is the Freemium pricing model. By your own account, only ~15% of your customer base migrates to a paid plan and the conversion from free to premium product may be weeks or months. This is not enticing for any affiliate. Unless you are ready to pay for every lead that your potential affiliates bring it to you, you will have to do the work of finding new clients yourself.

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