In this article, we will discuss:
We've also included a short FAQ section at the bottom of this article.
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What is Affiliate recruitment?
A great way to accelerate the growth of both your business and your affiliate program is by enabling a feature called affiliate recruitment.
By enabling Affiliate recruitment, your new customers can become affiliate prospects. This means that they automatically receive a referral link that they can use to promote your business.
If they drive a conversion or a customer using their referral link, the affiliate prospect is immediately promoted to affiliate status, and invited to log into the platform.
By automatically harnessing your customers' existing interest, you can effortlessly accelerate the growth of your business. And who better to promote your product or brand that those who are personally acquainted with it?
Setting up is easy, and consists of two key steps which we'll discuss in detail below:
Enable a source of affiliate prospects
Create or set your SPF record and Sender's address
Set up your follow-up actions
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1. Indicate your affiliate prospect Sources
To start gathering affiliate prospects, you must enable a Source of affiliate prospects.
Automated sources
You can link Tapfiliate to any one of these sources. These integrations already support affiliate recruitment:
Stripe
WooCommerce
Memberful
Moonclerk
Shopify
All you have to do is enable that specific Source in the Sources tab, or in the integration's Settings section.
Manual sources
If you don't have an integration that automatically supports affiliate recruitment, there are two ways to create affiliate prospects:
All affiliate prospects will be automatically added to your List of Prospects.
2. Set up your SPF record and Sender's address
If you haven't already, you must set up an SPF record. Once this is set in your DNS, set your Sender's Address in your Branding page.
Please note that setting up an SPF record is a pre-requisite for enabling these notifications & using the affiliate recruitment feature.
3. Setting up your actions
Once you have affiliate prospects, you will set up email notifications to communicate with your prospect. You'll set up two notifications for two specific events:
Affiliate prospect created
Affiliate prospect promoted
We have three communication options available:
Enable and send pre-made trigger emails (these standardized messages cannot be edited).
Create your own trigger email notifications inside the Tapfiliate platform (use the corresponding events in the Triggers feature).
Connect your Tapfiliate account to Mailchimp and handle all of your communication through Mailchimp. For more information on our Mailchimp Integration, refer to this article.
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Your List of Prospects
When your affiliate prospects start to pour in, they're added to your List of prospects.
Here you can review each prospect's details, as well as batch manage them.
When checking the box next to the affiliate, two options will appear near the top:
Promote to affiliate
Set affiliate group
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Affiliates & affiliate prospects
Our Affiliate recruitment feature allows you to create affiliate prospects - these are customers who receive a referral link to promote your business with, but are not yet official participants of your affiliate program.
There's a difference between an affiliate prospect and a regular affiliate:
An affiliate prospect is a customer who has received a referral link that they can promote your program with. They have never accessed the Tapfiliate platform.
Prospects become full-fledged affiliates and are invited to log into the platform access when they're promoted to become an affiliate
An affiliate is someone who was invited to join the program, or has been previously promoted. They're given access to the Tapfiliate platform, where they can indicate their payout method, retrieve their referral link & marketing assets, as well as review the converisons & customers they've driven.
Below we will discuss the ways in which an affiliate prospect may be promoted and becomes an affiliate.
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Promoting an affiliate prospect
When you promote an affiliate prospect, it means that they have officially become a full-fledged affiliate and will be moved to your Affiliates Overview.
There are three different ways an affiliate can be promoted:
1. After the prospect drives a conversion or creating a new customer
If a the affiliate prospect drives a conversion or customer with their referral link, they will automatically be promoted and become an affiliate.
2. Advertiser manually promotes affiliate prospect
You can manually promote the affiliate prospect from within your account, on your List of Prospects page.
You can do this via batch management - simply check the box next to the affiliate's name. The promotion option will appear near the top of the screen.
3. When the prospect logs in
If the temporary password is delivered in the first email the user receives, and the affiliate prospect logs in to their account, they will be immediately promoted and become an affiliate.
Inform your affiliates when they're promoted
Remember to set up trigger email notifications to inform your affiliates that they can access the account. You can use the event "Affiliate prospect promoted" for this purpose.
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FAQ
Is this feature available with all plans?
Affiliate recruitment is a standard feature and available with all of our plans.
Where can I customize my Action messages?
You can customize your Actions messages in the Triggers section of your platform. You can read more on how to create custom notifications here.
Can I create affiliate prospects via the REST API?
Yes, you can create affiliate prospects using the REST API. You may use this endpoint.
Why do I need to set up an SPF record?
First impressions are important, and we want to make sure that these customers you recruit can get directly in touch with you in the event that they have any questions about your affiliate program.
To set up your SPF record and Sender's Address, please refer to our SPF set up guide.
Why are my affiliate prospects not being added to the list?
When a charge is recorded, the customer must have a name set, this is required. The name attribute needs to have a name that consists of at least a first and last name (separated with a space). I.e. having only a first name (e.g. “Ryan”) won’t work.”