With SaaS, there’s no need to run and install applications on your computer or data centers. This means you can eliminate the expense of hardware acquisition, maintenance, and even provisioning. There’s also no need for licensing, support and installation anymore. Aside from that, your SAAS company can benefit from Affiliate programs to make your job easier and to be more successful.
What Is SAAS?
Software as a Service or SaaS is where a 3rd party provider host the application and make them available online for customers. Software as a Service is one of the 3 main categories of Infrastructure as a service, cloud computing, and platform as a service. Instead of having to buy and install or get another hardware to support it, you could subscribe to a SaaS offering instead. You basically pay for the service on a monthly basis and you get a model which is pay as you go. This helps you practice a more predictable budgeting too. You can also stop your subscription anytime you would want to, and that would stop your recurring costs too. SaaS cloud services have high scalability which gives you more access. SaaS also come with automatic updates as long as you are subscribed. This means you won’t have to hire an IT anymore. Since it’s a service delivered over the internet, you can access them anywhere as you have an internet enabled phone, laptop, device. As a business man, it’s given that one SaaS wouldn’t have everything to maximize the potential of your business, that’s why it’s a good thing that SaaS are integratable to different software and applications. One good software that comes with different features to benefit your business is OSI Affiliate Software. It has different business features such as sales management, emails, customer relationship management, Billing, tracking, affiliate marketing, and others more.
Why Would SAAS Companies Benefit From Affiliate Programs?
The nice thing about affiliate programs is that even if you give your affiliate a hundred percent commission, at the end of the day, your customer is paying you, which means they remain to be your customer, eventually you would be building a relationship with them, so, you can cross sell, and make more money from them in the long run. Regardless of what you pay your affiliate, the fact that they will remain to be your customer is a very good thing. Affiliate programs are mainly used by customers to spread the word through word of mouth because they are usually people who have actually tried your product and is aiming to find a way to get more products from you with a discount or as a freebie, that alone means your product is something they are happy with.
Now you might be wondering, if you are already selling your products, then why waste the tie to setup an affiliate program? There’s only two main reasons, and that is distribution and scale. There are a lot of successful companies who have affiliates who were far more better at driving traffic and sales to the website than the main marketing team of the company. Some even come up with sales copy and ads that actually are better and more targeted than how the vendor did them before. This happens because affiliates are more motivated because of the large payouts.
The loner your customer lifetime is, the more likely it is for you to grow your lifetime value through expanding the revenue. The more you an afford to pay up upfront and on a recurring basis the more motivated your affiliates would become. This attitude tends to lead to success. Now, a lot of people are wondering if affiliate programs tend to lower the CAC? Well the truth is that isn’t necessary. The main goal of an affiliate program is for distribution and scale, this means distribution to newer audiences or market segments that you aren’t reaching.
Scale because you are given the chance to reach those audience and market consistently and at a faster phase. These goals don’t exactly have anything to do with lowering your CAC, instead it’s more about accelerating your growth. Let’s say you have a CAC of a hundred dollars right now, but is it efficient? It might have taken 10 thousand on your Adwords ad before a hundred actually clicked through your landing page a dollar per click so you could finally get a customer.
Now, you have the choice to pay an affiliate a hundred dollars in exchange of a customer. Even if you only have 25% conversion rate, whenever they send it to 4 people, you at least get a customer. Compared to our example with Adwords, affiliate program is more efficient. To make sure you won’t be giving and spending too much, you have to have a safeguard in place. This means you need payout policies, rules, timeframes, that would cover refunds, chargebacks, just in case they are trying to play your system.
Companies that have grown to be successful with the help of affiliate programs work hard so they could help their affiliates make more sales. They make sure their funnel actually converts, they checkout tactics and become creative in giving ideas and they make sure to communicate with their affiliates back and forth. Always remember that you need to pay your affiliates EVERY time, on time without fail.
How Affiliate program works?
Whenever a person becomes an affiliate they receive a special link to make sure sales from them are tracked.
When SaaS providers receive the visitors through that affiliate link, that means the visitor comes from that affiliate.
When that visitor with the link purchases, the affiliate gets a percentage as a commission. Commissions could be a one time thing or on renewal based on the policy.
There are 2 types of affiliate programs:
A public network offers a broad distribution, it handles the affiliate recruitment and makes the partner payment. This usually delivers a higher volume.
A private network which allows the company to manage the affiliates directly and concentrate more on the publishers in driving the highest ROI.
As you can see, there are a lot of things an affiliate program could do to help a SaaS business reach success.
OSI Affiliate Software
OSI Affiliate Software is designed for companies of different sizes and to help beginners up to expert marketers. With OSI Affiliate Program you can manage, setup your affiliate program so you can boost your customer base. OSI Affiliate program is designed to help companies realize how much potential their existing customers have. This software gives you everything you would need to manage your affiliate program and run it smoothly. It’s also simple to use, in order to invite a customer to join your affiliate program, all they have to do is put in their email address and they would be receiving an email with their special link. Sharing is also made simple with a social share widget that makes sharing to social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn simple. OSI Affiliate Software makes sure to track every successful sale from an affiliate partner and show both of you the progress you have been making in your dashboard real time. There are also different ways you can reward them so you can make sure you are rewarding them with something that they would appreciate and that would motivate them. There are coupons, contests for incentives, discounts,and others.
Conclusion
SaaS companies could definitely benefit from having an affiliate program because there’s near to nothing to lose and it comes with features that would make managing your business easier and even give you options to automate some tasks.
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