Kartra Training 14: Setting Up An Affiliate Program

Kartra’s Affiliate Program allows you to incentivize other marketing professionals to help you build your business in deep and sophisticated ways where other platforms simply can’t measure up.

In this training, we will cover:

• A quick overview of the Affiliate Program capabilities.
• Configuring an Affiliate Program in Kartra.
• Creating an Affiliate Sign-Up page.
• Approving Affiliates.
• Communicating with your Affiliates in Kartra.
• Paying Your Affiliates in Kartra.

A Quick Overview of the Affiliate Program Capabilities

First, using the affiliate settings, you can set commission percentages to apply to a specific product, or to apply across the range of your products to make your affiliate program easy to explain, and simple to manage.

You create your Affiliate Program right in the setup for your product. Right away, you can choose to reward affiliates with a fixed dollar amount or a percentage of the sale. This can even vary based on the price level the customer purchases.

Also included here are other features to really flex the versatility of your Affiliate Program. You can, for example, reward affiliates with straight commissions for creating new email subscribers through their affiliate link. You can create landing pages built just for your affiliates to use, or even for specific affiliates to use in their own promotions.

With Kartra’s Affiliate Program, you have total control of whom you welcome into your program, and how you compensate them. You also choose how to keep your affiliates in the loop when you offer special promotions, affiliate contests and other incentives to keep them enthusiastic about building your business with rewards to them.

Kartra’s Affiliate Program is yet another great example of the easy to customize features within the platform. By having all your marketing systems tied together, you have the flexibility to reach new heights with your campaigns!

Configuring an Affiliate Program in Kartra

There are two places you’ll need to configure your settings for your affiliate program to ensure your products are being promoted exactly as you would like them to be: in the global Affiliate Settings, and in the settings for each product.

Global Affiliate Settings

You’ll find your Affiliate Program settings for your business in My Products. Click on AFFILIATES at the top of the page, then Settings under that. These are the global settings that apply for all affiliates of any of your products.

Affiliate Approval

You can choose Manual or Auto approval. Manual is the default, and it is our recommendation – unless you really don’t care who markets your products.

PayPal Instant Payments

PayPal instant payments allows the system to immediately and automatically pay the affiliate his commission when an order is placed using PayPal. That means that you don’t have to manually send payments to your affiliates. Conversely, in case of a refund, the system will automatically retrieve the funds from the affiliate’s PayPal account.

You can choose Manual activation for this feature, meaning that you will choose which affiliates will get PayPal Instant Payments, or you can choose Automatic P.I.P. Activation, which will enable it for every affiliate you receive.

We strongly recommend you only activate PayPal Instant Payments for affiliates you know and trust. Otherwise, you could potentially expose yourself to affiliate fraud. So, our recommendation (and the default) here is Manual.

Product-Specific Vs Account-Wide

With Account-Wide commissions, your affiliates will receive credit for any product the visitor buys; whereas product-specific commissions, like it sounds, will only give your affiliate a commission for the specific product the affiliate link refers to and is purchased by a customer.

Minimum Amount of Sales

This allows you to specify a minimum number of units sold that your affiliates must reach before they receive any commission pay. This is a great way to incentivize your affiliates to promote harder for you.

Require the W9 or W8BEN Tax Form

If you are in the U.S., the IRS may require you to issue a 1099 tax form to each of your U.S.-based affiliates and independent contractors. Because you might need them to sign and return a W9 or W8BEN form for you, you can prevent affiliates from being paid until you have such a record on file.

We highly recommend you activate this feature as a protective measure to ensure compliance with tax regulations.

Mandatory Terms & Conditions

Want to require your affiliates to accept terms and conditions before being approved? Activate this feature and paste in your terms and conditions document.

Again, we highly recommend having this activated as well as having your well-written terms and conditions document reviewed by a trusted attorney to minimize your potential liability.

Affiliate Sign-Up Questionnaire

In case you want to know more about your affiliates, you can have them fill out an obligatory questionnaire before they can submit their approval request to promote your product. This might help you determine which affiliates to approve and which ones to block.

It can also help you get better insight into the sorts of people who are interested in promoting your product.

Product Affiliate Settings

Go to My Products and, next to the product you want to set up for affiliates to promote, click Edit. Now click “Save and Next” for each step of the setup until you get to the sixth step, “Affiliates.”

Affiliate Program on Checkout

This is where you’ll activate an Affiliate Program for sales of this product, and where you’ll set the commissions – either as percentages or as fixed amounts – for affiliates and JV brokers, for each price point of your product.

You can also add multiple commission tiers for affiliates who are performing especially well (you will manually add individual affiliates to these additional tiers).

Affiliate Program on Opt-in

This allows you to pay affiliates a commission when they acquire a lead opt-in for you. These are fixed amounts only (since no purchase is involved).

Your Affiliates List

This section allows you to select which contact lists you want your affiliates and JV brokers added to when they sign up. You can also create new lists right from here.

Tag Your Affiliates

Add any tags you like to your affiliates upon signup. You can also create new tags right from here.

Payment Milestones

This section allows you to delay commissions until a certain timeframe has passed after the transaction, or to “drip” out your commission payments (pay on a schedule).

Landing Pages for Your Affiliate Traffic

This is where you’ll enter the URL for the landing pages that your affiliates will be sending traffic to when they are promoting.

You may configure multiple landing pages for each product for your affiliates to promote. As a result, your affiliates will receive different affiliate links, each of them redirecting their traffic to the corresponding destination page.

Affiliate Sign-up Page Look and Feel

This is where you’ll configure the page people will see when they go to sign up to become your affiliate.

You can simply use Kartra’s beautiful default affiliate signup page, or you can overlay Kartra’s pop-up form onto your own affiliate sign-up page.

When you are finished with this page, when you hit “Save and next” at the bottom of the screen, you’ll be given a tracking code to place on your landing page. Once it’s there, you can start signing up affiliates and sending them their links.

Creating an Affiliate Signup Page

You don’t need to have a domain of your own to create a great custom affiliate signup page. Instead, you can use Kartra’s Page Builder to create your perfect signup page.

We recommend you use a Squeeze Page template for this; after all, convincing an affiliate to sign up is much like convincing a lead to sign up for your mailing list.

Once you’ve finished building your page, grab the URL for it. You can do this from the My Pages dashboard by clicking the three dots under the page you built, and clicking “Get code or link.”

Then, go back to My Products, and hit “Edit” next to a product that you want affiliates to promote.

Click “Save and next” until you reach the “Affiliates” step of the settings, and scroll down to the bottom. The very last option is called “Affiliate sign up page look & feel”.

You’ll want to make sure to select “Overlay pop-up window on your site.” Now you’ll have a field where you can place your affiliate sign-up page URL.

Go ahead and put in the URL you just grabbed from the page you just built and viola! You just built your own custom affiliate sign-up page to use with your Kartra products, and you didn’t even need to buy a domain. That’s the power of Kartra!

Approving Affiliates

When someone signs up to be your affiliate for one of your Kartra products, approving them is very easy.

• A little red number will appear next to My Products.
• Click on My Products and you’ll see that the little red number also appears next to AFFILIATES. Click on that to see your list of affiliates.
• You will have a new request pending; over on the far right, there’s a column called ACTIONS.
• Click the icon in the ACTIONS column to approve or deny your affiliate.
• That’s it! Your new affiliate can start promoting your product and earning commissions.

Communicating with your Affiliates in Kartra

You’ve set up an Affiliate Program for every product you have in Kartra. You’ve gotten some of your fellow online marketers to promote your products as your affiliate. Now, you want to communicate with them; maybe you have a new product coming out soon that you want to tell them about, or maybe you just want to say “thanks!” How do you do it?

Sending Emails to Your Affiliates

Once someone has signed up as one of your affiliates, there are two ways to send them a message, and many ways of customizing how, when and what gets sent.

From the Products Pages:

• Go to My Products.
• Click AFFILIATES at the top of the page.
• Select the affiliates from your list that you want to contact.
• At the top of the page, click the drop-down that says Action…
• At the bottom of the list in the drop-down, select Contact this segment.
• Follow the prompts to create and customize your Broadcast to your affiliates, just like with any other Broadcast!

From My Campaigns:

• Go to My Campaigns.
• Select CAMPAIGNS and then Broadcasts at the top of the page.
• Click the big green +BROADCAST button.
• Enter a name and a category for your broadcast to your affiliates.
• Choose whether to send your message by email or SMS (text message), and fill in or change any sender details needed.
• Here is the important part: on the Recipients page when setting up your Broadcast, you will select “Has signed up as an affiliate for product…”.
• On the next drop-down menu, you can select the product funnel for the affiliates you want to contact, or “Any Product” if you want to send a message to all your affiliates regardless of the product they promote for you.
• You can also target the Broadcast further by adding another rule at the top if you would like; for example, you can send a message only to those affiliates who have a specific tag.
• Finish setting up the Broadcast as usual, and then send it! Or, you can schedule it to be sent at a future time or when a specific event occurs.

Paying Your Affiliates in Kartra

In Kartra, you have plenty of options for when and how to pay your affiliates.

• Payment gateways – you can use any of the payment gateways that integrate with Kartra:
  • PayPal
  • Stripe
  • Authorize.net
  • Braintree
• Manual payments – from your Affiliates list (in My Products, then AFFILIATES), use the ACTIONS column to make a payment to any affiliate.
• PayPal Instant Payment – you can choose to have affiliates automatically paid via P.I.P. instead of manually making payments to them.
• Payment Milestones – in your Product settings, under step 6 “Affiliates,” you can set up timed payments using the Payment Milestones feature.
• Minimum amount of sales – you can activate this feature in the global Affiliates Settings ( in My Products, then AFFILIATES, then Settings) to withhold payment to affiliates until they have provided a certain number of sales.

See Training 13 here.