It's when people say: “Just copy what worked for X.”

I see it all the time like: look at how they do their pricing page, they grew through SEO, we should do SEO, they removed the credit card from their trial and conversions went up etc

Sound cool, but IMO you’re seeing the result, not everything that led to it. You don’t have their customers, product or even let's start with positioning. And you definitely don’t know all the things they tried that didn’t work.

Don't get me wrong, I’m all for getting inspo from other companies and I do it too but I’d rather ask “why did this work for them?” than “how do we do the same thing?”

That usually leads to a much better experiment.

What do y'all think?

A common problem in affiliate programs is that people sign up, but then nothing happens. No sales, no activity, and motivation drops fast. The main reasons are pretty simple: onboarding is too generic, affiliates don’t get enough support, and there is no plan for those critical first two weeks.

Here’s a simple activation timeline that I have seen working well:

• Day 1: Send a personalized welcome email with login details, a program overview, and some ready-to-use promotional materials. Include a link to book a short welcome call.
• Day 2: Share a “Getting Started” guide that shows how to create their first affiliate link and use the portal.
• Day 3: Send a case study or success story from another affiliate, along with specific strategies they can try right away.
• Day 7: Check in to see if they have any questions and offer support.
• Day 14: Share early performance insights (even if small) and introduce them to your affiliate community or exclusive resources.

A few other things that make a big difference:

Onboard your affiliates with all the essential information

When you onboard your affiliates, provide them with an all-inclusive guide about your program. Include details about your company, the products or services they’ll be promoting, the commission structure, and your expectations from them.

Schedule a welcome call or webinar

A welcome email is great, but a call is better. This personal interaction allows you to outline your expectations, clarify any doubts, and start building a relationship. A first call, whether it's one-to-one or in groups, helps in establishing a personal connection with your affiliates. You can use this as an opportunity to understand their needs and discuss effective strategies. You might even walk away with some fresh ideas or new insights. During the call, walk them through the affiliate dashboard, show some best examples and let them know how to reach out to you. A little goes a long way.

Provide your affiliates with promotional materials

Your affiliates likely aren't (all) great designers, and you want to stay on brand wherever your products go. Make it easy for your affiliates to start promoting your products/services in a way that truly represents your style. Provide them with a variety of promotional materials like banners, product images, and pre-written emails.

A best practice that I've been following is to build a central library with all important links, templates, testimonials, and promo materials in one place so affiliates always know where to go.

Regularly update them with helpful information

Keep your affiliates in the loop with regular updates about anything related to your affiliate program. To make this a habit, you can send out a monthly newsletter. This could contain information about new product updates, seasonal promotions, and ideas for campaigns, updates to your affiliate program, and success stories from top-performing affiliates. It doesn't always have to be long either: just make sure you share what really matters.

Nothing motivates like appreciation!

Regularly acknowledge the work your affiliates do, celebrate their achievements, and provide incentives for them to continue working hard.  You could run a quarterly "Affiliate of the Quarter" program where you spotlight an affiliate who has performed exceptionally well. Share their story in your newsletter, offer a bonus commission for the next quarter, and send them a certificate or a trophy. 

You could also create an affiliate's "Hall of Fame" in an online community, or highlight them on your social media.  Or you can revisit your commission structure and offer high performers a slightly higher commission rate once they achieve a certain number of sales.

The big idea is simple: affiliate activation is not about the number of signups, it’s about creating momentum early. Affiliates who make their first sale quickly almost always stay engaged long term.

If anyone’s working on an affiliate program and wants to see the templates for emails I used, happy to share.

Sometimes the simplest tactics surprise you the most, especially in the SaaS world.
What actually worked for your SaaS? Was there a marketing trick you didn’t expect to work, but it did?
Looking for inspiration!

It's when people say: “Just copy what worked for X.”

I see it all the time like: look at how they do their pricing page, they grew through SEO, we should do SEO, they removed the credit card from their trial and conversions went up etc

Sound cool, but IMO you’re seeing the result, not everything that led to it. You don’t have their customers, product or even let's start with positioning. And you definitely don’t know all the things they tried that didn’t work.

Don't get me wrong, I’m all for getting inspo from other companies and I do it too but I’d rather ask “why did this work for them?” than “how do we do the same thing?”

That usually leads to a much better experiment.

What do y'all think?

I've been thinking about this recently, and I can't help feeling that affiliate marketing and influencer marketing are a lot closer than people make them out to be.

When you look at what the best affiliates are actually doing, it doesn't look very different from what brands pay influencers to do. They're writing comparison articles, making YouTube videos, sharing tutorials, recommending products in newsletters, and answering questions on Reddit from people looking for the right tool.

That's the same kind of content you'd expect from a B2B influencer campaign.

The biggest difference isn't the content but how they're paid.

Influencers usually get paid upfront because they have an audience a brand wants to reach. Affiliates get paid when they bring in customers. Different payment models, but they're often doing the same job.

It makes me wonder if some companies are looking in the wrong place. They spend time trying to find influencers, while the people already creating great content about their product are sitting in their affiliate program.

Am I the only one seeing this, or do you think affiliate marketing and influencer marketing are becoming more similar?

For transparency I work at Rewardful (affiliate management software), so I pulled anonymized product data from 2,847 active SaaS affiliate programs to see what actually separates the ones that scale from the ones that quietly die.

The numbers were rougher than I expected. 56% of programs run with fewer than 50 affiliates. Only 1 in 10 ever break 1,000. Just 7.6% of affiliates ever send a single referral, and only 1.28% ever generate a sale. Long term, only 15.6% of programs are still active at all.

The data tracks the full lifecycle: signup, setup, first referral, first sale, first payout, so I can see exactly where programs stall and why.

To get past just the numbers, I also talked to our Partnerships Lead and Head of Marketing, plus founders running programs at very different stages, to understand what the survivors are doing differently.

So ask me anything: commission structures, recruiting, why your program has affiliates but no sales, fraud, whatever you've got.

I've been thinking about this recently, and I can't help feeling that affiliate marketing and influencer marketing are a lot closer than people make them out to be.

When you look at what the best affiliates are actually doing, it doesn't look very different from what brands pay influencers to do. They're writing comparison articles, making YouTube videos, sharing tutorials, recommending products in newsletters, and answering questions on Reddit from people looking for the right tool.

That's the same kind of content you'd expect from a B2B influencer campaign.

The biggest difference isn't the content but how they're paid.

Influencers usually get paid upfront because they have an audience a brand wants to reach. Affiliates get paid when they bring in customers. Different payment models, but they're often doing the same job.

It makes me wonder if some companies are looking in the wrong place. They spend time trying to find influencers, while the people already creating great content about their product are sitting in their affiliate program.

Am I the only one seeing this, or do you think affiliate marketing and influencer marketing are becoming more similar?

I've looked at a lot of affiliate programs over the years, and one thing I've noticed is that they almost never fail overnight. They just slowly dying and most of the time isn't just one big mistake but a few small things that build over time.

Here are the four I run into the most.

1. Assuming it'll run itself

This is probably the most common one.

A lot of teams launch an affiliate program, onboard a few partners, and assume the rest will take care of itself.

But affiliates have plenty of products they could be promoting. If they don't hear from you for months, it's easy for your program to fall off their radar.

Even a quick email with product updates, a new landing page, or fresh creative can make a bigger difference than you'd expect.

2. Your affiliates don't know how to explain your product

I always ask myself one question: If I picked three affiliates at random, would they all describe my product the same way?

If the answer is no, that's usually where I'd start.

The easier it is for someone to explain why your product is worth recommending, the more likely they are to actually recommend it.

3. Focusing on signups instead of activity

I get it that seeing new affiliates join feels great but I'd rather have 25 affiliates sending referrals every month than 250 who signed up once and disappeared.

The numbers I pay attention to are things like:

• How long it takes someone to send their first referral.
• Whether affiliates keep referring customers over time.
• Whether they're actually creating content.

Those tell me a lot more about a program's health.

4. Not checking your own tracking

This one sounds obvious, but I still see it all the time.

Every few months, I click my own affiliate link, test it in another browser, and go through the whole flow. It takes a few minutes, and it's a lot better than having an affiliate tell you something's been broken for weeks.

Everyone talks about running experiments, but almost no one talks about how to choose the right ones. And as someone who works in a B2B SaaS company, I know that some ideas are cheap, but execution costs $$$.

So instead of chasing ideas, I filter them by going through 3 questions:

1) Is this coming from a real customer need?

Not a guess or a trend, but something I’ve heard on calls or in support tickets.

2) Can we ship it in under a week?

If it takes longer, it’s probably overthought.

3) Does it compound?

Will it keep driving results without constant effort?

If it’s YES x3 → we test it

If it's NO → it's a distraction

I personally find killing the ideas that I'm emotionally attached to, one of the hardest part in growth marketing that isn't talked about a lot (while everyone thinks the issue is the lac of coming up with new ideas)

Anyway, tell me your frameworks!

Acquisition or retention is always the dilemma but personally I've fixed plenty growth problems by fixing retention and not by adding a new channel.

I know for some it might sound us unpopular opinion but I realy believe that retention is where the actual growth work happens. Acquisition just gets the credit.

Let me give you the specific pattern I've been seeing:

A team hits a growth wall. Leadership says, "We need more top of funnel." The marketing gets pushed to find new channels, run more campaigns, chase more volume.

Meanwhile, the real problem is sitting in onboarding, or in the first 30 days of the product experience, where half the people who signed up quietly disappear, and nobody in the growth meeting is even looking at that number.

Fix the leak, and the exact same acquisition spend suddenly performs better. Not because the channels got smarter but simply because fewer people are falling out the bottom.

And this is why growth hacking got a bad reputation. Too many teams treated it as a top-of-funnel discipline when the highest-leverage growth work is almost always retention work wearing a top-of-funnel costume.

Acquisition gets you in the door while retention is what makes the door worth walking through.

If your growth stalled this year, I'd bet money the fix isn't a new channel. It's the first week of the product experience.

Not interested in the polished case study version but the real stories. Always keen to learn from others and grow from mistakes.

Acquisition or retention is always the dilemma but personally I've fixed plenty growth problems by fixing retention and not by adding a new channel.

I know for some it might sound us unpopular opinion but I realy believe that retention is where the actual growth work happens. Acquisition just gets the credit.

Let me give you the specific pattern I've been seeing:

A team hits a growth wall. Leadership says, "We need more top of funnel." The marketing gets pushed to find new channels, run more campaigns, chase more volume.

Meanwhile, the real problem is sitting in onboarding, or in the first 30 days of the product experience, where half the people who signed up quietly disappear, and nobody in the growth meeting is even looking at that number.

Fix the leak, and the exact same acquisition spend suddenly performs better. Not because the channels got smarter but simply because fewer people are falling out the bottom.

And this is why growth hacking got a bad reputation. Too many teams treated it as a top-of-funnel discipline when the highest-leverage growth work is almost always retention work wearing a top-of-funnel costume.

Acquisition gets you in the door while retention is what makes the door worth walking through.

If your growth stalled this year, I'd bet money the fix isn't a new channel. It's the first week of the product experience.

A few months ago, I would've said the best affiliates are the ones sending you the most customers.

I don't think that's the full picture anymore.

With ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity becoming places where people discover software, I've started thinking about affiliate programs a little differently.

Some affiliates aren't just driving clicks anymore. They're creating the content AI actually reads and recommends.

If I were rebuilding a SaaS affiliate program today, these are the three changes I'd make.

1. Stop looking only at revenue. Look at what your affiliates are publishing.

Open your dashboard, find your top 10 affiliates, and actually read their content.

If it's mostly coupon pages and "50% OFF" deals, that's fine, they're doing exactly what they're supposed to do.

But they're probably not helping your visibility in AI search.

Now imagine your top affiliates are writing comparisons, publishing YouTube reviews, running newsletters, or sharing real experiences with your product. That's a completely different asset. They're generating conversions today while also creating content that keeps getting surfaced when people ask AI tools for recommendations.

That's the kind of affiliate I'd be doubling down on.

2. Stop giving affiliates a media kit. Give them an opinion.

Most affiliate resource libraries are... pretty boring.

A logo. Some screenshots. Brand colors. A few marketing bullets.

That's enough to recreate your homepage, which is exactly what most affiliates end up doing.

Instead, give them the stuff they can't find on your website.

Tell them what customers ask on sales calls. Show them the comparisons prospects keep making. Share the Reddit thread that resonated most. Explain where your product loses to competitors, and why customers still choose you anyway.

That's the stuff that leads to interesting content instead of another copy-and-paste review.

3. Start thinking about compounding, not just conversions.

A coupon page might drive sales this month.

A really good comparison article might influence buying decisions for the next two years.

If AI assistants keep referencing that article whenever someone asks, "What's the best X?" the value keeps compounding long after it was published.

That's why I think creator-style affiliates are becoming much more valuable than we give them credit for.

Not because they're replacing coupon affiliates.

Because they're doing a completely different job.

Anyone else agreeing or do you think AI search is still too early to change how we recruit and reward affiliates?

Acquisition or retention is always the dilemma but personally I've fixed plenty growth problems by fixing retention and not by adding a new channel.

I know for some it might sound us unpopular opinion but I realy believe that retention is where the actual growth work happens. Acquisition just gets the credit.

Let me give you the specific pattern I've been seeing:

A team hits a growth wall. Leadership says, "We need more top of funnel." The marketing gets pushed to find new channels, run more campaigns, chase more volume.

Meanwhile, the real problem is sitting in onboarding, or in the first 30 days of the product experience, where half the people who signed up quietly disappear, and nobody in the growth meeting is even looking at that number.

Fix the leak, and the exact same acquisition spend suddenly performs better. Not because the channels got smarter but simply because fewer people are falling out the bottom.

And this is why growth hacking got a bad reputation. Too many teams treated it as a top-of-funnel discipline when the highest-leverage growth work is almost always retention work wearing a top-of-funnel costume.

Acquisition gets you in the door while retention is what makes the door worth walking through.

If your growth stalled this year, I'd bet money the fix isn't a new channel. It's the first week of the product experience.

Everyone's talking about AI SEO.

But I think there's another piece most SaaS companies are overlooking.

Your affiliate program is already teaching AI what to say about your product.

Every review, comparison, YouTube video, LinkedIn post, and tutorial your affiliates publish becomes part of the information LLMs use to understand your product and decide when to recommend it.

The problem is that most affiliate programs are optimized for conversion, not for the kind of content AI actually trusts.

So they end up producing generic listicles, copied product descriptions, and AI-written reviews that add almost no original insight.

In my experience, that content rarely becomes the source AI models rely on. What stands out instead is content written by people who've actually used the product reviews with specific examples, honest trade-offs, and real opinions.

That made me rethink affiliate programs entirely.

Maybe we shouldn't be asking, "How many affiliates can we recruit?"

Maybe we should be asking, "Who can create the kind of content that's still valuable when a human or an AI reads it?

When people talk about affiliate program performance, the conversation usually starts with how many affiliates signed up, how many clicks did they generate or how many referrals came in this month.

Don't get me wrong those metrics are useful but they don't always tell you whether your affiliate program is actually healthy.

A program can be adding affiliates every week while very few of them ever become active partners.

A few metrics I've found much more interesting:

1. Time To First Referral

How long does it take a new affiliate to generate their first referral?

If it's taking months, there may be friction in onboarding, unclear incentives, or a lack of promotion opportunities.

2. Repeat Referral Rate

One referral is nice.

Affiliates who consistently send referrals are usually a stronger signal that your program is delivering value for both sides.

3. Affiliate-Created Content

Are affiliates actively creating content, tutorials, reviews, videos, or social posts?

That's often where long-term program growth comes from.

4. Affiliate Lifespan

How long do affiliates stay active after joining?

A program that retains productive affiliates for years is very different from one that's constantly replacing churned partners.

The reason I like these metrics is that they measure engagement, not just activity. It's easy to see signups going up and assume everything is working. It's harder but much more valuableto understand whether affiliates are actually becoming long-term partners.

What metric has been the most useful early warning sign that something in your program needs attention?

Acquisition or retention is always the dilemma but personally I've fixed plenty growth problems by fixing retention and not by adding a new channel.

I know for some it might sound us unpopular opinion but I realy believe that retention is where the actual growth work happens. Acquisition just gets the credit.

Let me give you the specific pattern I've been seeing:

A team hits a growth wall. Leadership says, "We need more top of funnel." The marketing gets pushed to find new channels, run more campaigns, chase more volume.

Meanwhile, the real problem is sitting in onboarding, or in the first 30 days of the product experience, where half the people who signed up quietly disappear, and nobody in the growth meeting is even looking at that number.

Fix the leak, and the exact same acquisition spend suddenly performs better. Not because the channels got smarter but simply because fewer people are falling out the bottom.

And this is why growth hacking got a bad reputation. Too many teams treated it as a top-of-funnel discipline when the highest-leverage growth work is almost always retention work wearing a top-of-funnel costume.

Acquisition gets you in the door while retention is what makes the door worth walking through.

If your growth stalled this year, I'd bet money the fix isn't a new channel. It's the first week of the product experience.

I don't know if it's just me but I keep hearing is that once your tracking is set up and affiliates are approved, the program basically runs itself.

Not gonna lie I used to think there was some truth to this but when I look at the programs that consistently perform well, that's actually faaar from being the truth.

The companies getting the most from their affiliate channel are the ones who stay in regular contact with partners aka actively managing the program and not treating it as a set it and foret it channel. Like they're sharing messaging ideas, giving affiliates a heads-up about launches, sending performance insights, answering questions quickly, and generally making it easy for people to promote them.

The companies that don't do this often end up with a growing list of approved affiliates who never really become active.

One thing that surprised me is how much impact even just a small amount of outreach can have. I've seen a simple weekly check-in with affiliates create more traction than increasing commissions for examples.

That's not to say payouts aren't important. Nobody promotes products for free.

But if an affiliate is already comparing dozens of products they could recommend, staying top of mind often matters just as much as offering a few extra percentage points.

I've been thinking about this recently, and I can't help feeling that affiliate marketing and influencer marketing are a lot closer than people make them out to be.

When you look at what the best affiliates are actually doing, it doesn't look very different from what brands pay influencers to do. They're writing comparison articles, making YouTube videos, sharing tutorials, recommending products in newsletters, and answering questions on Reddit from people looking for the right tool.

That's the same kind of content you'd expect from a B2B influencer campaign.

The biggest difference isn't the content but how they're paid.

Influencers usually get paid upfront because they have an audience a brand wants to reach. Affiliates get paid when they bring in customers. Different payment models, but they're often doing the same job.

It makes me wonder if some companies are looking in the wrong place. They spend time trying to find influencers, while the people already creating great content about their product are sitting in their affiliate program.

Am I the only one seeing this, or do you think affiliate marketing and influencer marketing are becoming more similar?