How can Affiliate Marketing help your SaaS Business?

Have you ever wondered if affiliate marketing could help your SaaS business? Maybe the term affiliate marketing has you confused. If these are the questions you seek answers to, you have come to the right place.

What is Affiliate Marketing? 

Affiliate marketing is a method to compensate third-party publishers for marketing a specific company's product. They are paid to generate traffic or leads to the company's products and services, and being incentivized is why these affiliates promote the company.

How can Affiliate Marketing help your SaaS Business? 

Affiliate marketing can specifically help SaaS businesses. Have you ever wondered how they can help your SaaS business?:

Expand Viral Marketing

SaaS companies rely a great deal on viral marketing. The recommendations of affiliates to your products begin a conversation with their network. Word of mouth marketing generates positive feedback, and awareness of your brand is brought to your targeted audience. Then sales of your product are made.

Ideal affiliates are current customers using your products. Using these current customers to market your product is a good practice. They are already experts in how your software works. Being experts, they know how to sell the product to those in their private network.

There are many great things about your customers using an affiliate commission. The obvious is they have an extra incentive to remain a customer as they spread the word about your software. An influential affiliate who knows your product can provide an authentic voice. Users prefer a personal recommendation from someone they trust than some random individual trying to sell software.

Lower CAC and Improve ROI 

Managing an affiliate program is very cost-effective contrasted to other marketing channels. Payment for marketing only occurs with actual sales occurring, and no significant investments are needed upfront. Any marketing prepared without sales still gives you an added voice on the internet. 

Often ad campaigns are a waste of money and don't bring customers. Improving your ROI means you are decreasing your customer acquisition cost, and the primary purpose of your affiliate program shouldn't be lowering CAC. 

Accelerated growth of your SaaS business is your ultimate goal. Access to new populations of customers is what affiliates provide to your business, and these customers are people you might not get on your own.

However, the improved ROI and lower CAC are of particular interest to SaaS businesses. The initial growth stages of SaaS B2B businesses are best benefited from attracting new investors. Affiliate sales can substantially boost their annual growth rate and profit margin when measured against the rule of 40. Improved annual growth rates are a perfect way to attract new investors.

Build credibility and brand loyalty

SaaS affiliate programs give third-party publishers reoccurring commissions, thanks to a subscription-based pricing model. The reoccurring commissions attract the most influential affiliates and build your credibility. 

Recurring commissions will motivate affiliates to concentrate their marketing efforts on your affiliate program. Rewarding your satisfied customers for sharing their experiences builds credibility. These loyal customers have a vested interest in remaining loyal to your brand. Brand loyalty helps bring in qualified contacts and faithful customers because they are motivated by long-term passive income. 

Targeted Audiences through Affiliate-Generated Content.

Partnering with affiliates specializing in a similar niche as your business will generate unique targeted audiences. Affiliates with high internet traffic have developed an audience that trusts them. These influencers can leverage their audience to produce sales. The content has authority, and people come to their websites looking for expert knowledge and insights about specific topics. 

Why Would Affiliates use SaaS affiliate programs?

SaaS affiliate programs offer attractive niches with a steady stream of passive income from the affiliate's perspective. Recurring commissions allow affiliates to obtain more long-term revenues.

Other features about SaaS products can make them lucrative for affiliates. SaaS products are surprisingly easy to sell for the right affiliate when marketing is done correctly. Many SaaS companies offer free trials for potential customers, making the affiliate's job much more manageable. All you need to do is convince prospects to register for a free trial. The remainder depends upon how well the product itself sells the affiliate and the seller's onboarding process.

Another appealing feature about SaaS is that its implementation and use are almost as simple as it gets. SaaS users are free from installing software onto their computers. The instant gratification from easy access to the cloud-based software application is very appealing. This sort of instant gratification allows affiliates a simple method to promote your products.

Affiliates are better off entering a growing market without many competitors. When evaluating affiliate programs, affiliates also need to consider the product's lifetime and market demand. Subscription pricing models are known to have a higher lifetime value for an affiliate than offering only flat commissions. 

Given that the SaaS market is expected to grow to $220 billion at an annual growth rate of 13.1% through 2022, it's safe to assume that SaaS products will remain in high demand. 

How is Reditus Unique to Affiliate Marketing? 

Many programs focus purely on setting up a program one by one; we are offering a marketplace. This will have huge benefits as you can get partner requests from 'unknown' partners. Partner on the other side can manage everything in one dashboard, making it easier to track how things are going. Feel free to sign up to check out the tool (we don't ask for cc details)

Reditus provides a niche market to connect you to the affiliate influencers you need. These influencers know their audience and how best to get your SaaS products into their hands. Using Reditus will help lower CAC. The affiliate program will also help expand viral marketing, improve ROI, brand awareness, and brand loyalty. 

Meet the author

Joran Hofman

Back in 2020 I was an affiliate for 80+ SaaS tools and I was generating an average of 30k in organic visits each month with my site. Due to the issues I experienced with the current affiliate management software tools, it never resulted in the passive income I was hoping for. Many clunky affiliate management tools lost me probably more than $20,000+ in affiliate revenue. So I decided to build my own software with a high focus on the affiliates, as in the end, they generate more money for SaaS companies.