Running a SaaS company is hard. Sales, customer support, product bugs, new features, and investors are all a balancing act. But the most difficult, and most important, part is generating growth. Growth is the difference between a side project and a real company. Growth is what gets you taken seriously. Growth is the difference between success and failure. The problem is that growing your SaaS company can feel overwhelming and unpredictable.

“Partnerships are one of the fastest and most efficient ways of scaling your software business.” –SaaS Coach Dan Martell via danmartell.com

Even if your company is lucky enough to already have a following, continued growth requires an expanding audience. The quickest and most effective way to grow is by borrowing the audience of another.

Continue reading “Why every SaaS company should have an affiliate program”

We’ve been working on adding top-level metrics that can give you and your affiliates a gauge on the performance of your affiliate program. This week we added the two most important vital signs for the health of your affiliate program: referral growth and churn.

These are metrics you’re probably already familiar with for your company. Now you can track them for your affiliate program as well! These metrics give you a gauge of the success of your affiliate marketing efforts. They can be compared (as long as the selected periods are the same length) to the overall company metrics.

We hope that this helps to improve your overall visibility to the ROI from your affiliate efforts.

Continue reading “New Feature: Referral Churn”

Over the course of 2018, LinkMink has been helping Coach Catalyst grow their revenue by sharing it with their promotion partners.

Coach Catalyst helps fitness pros, nutritionists, life coaches, executive coaches and all other types of coaches change more lives while keeping their administrative overhead low. Their software helps coaches communicated with their clients, run challenges, provides customizable done-for-you content and much more.

At the end of 2016, Coach Catalyst was growing primarily through one-on-one sales. This was a labor-intensive and time-consuming process. They were looking into more scalable channels to expand their reach when they started considering an affiliate program. Kane, Coach Catalyst’s founder, described the humble beginnings of the affiliate program saying, “when I decided to start our program, we only had one affiliate at first. He was already a customer who loved our product and who had an audience.” And with that loyal customer, their program was born.

Continue reading “How Coach Catalyst’s affiliate program has grown to $128,682.56 in revenue”

Introduction

SaaS companies are positioned to take advantage of their high margins in order to drive growth that traditional businesses could only dream of. By design, SaaS companies are built to scale up with very low marginal costs. This means that every new customer can directly affect your net profits. Some customers, however, are more valuable than others.

The value of a customer must be judged based on their marginal lifetime value (LTV). A new customer brings you revenue immediately. But they also cost you something to acquire – through your sales and marketing process. In addition, it costs you something to provide your service to them. You have servers to run, technical and customer support, and other costs associated with each new customer. And some customers stay with you much longer than others.

Continue reading “How to Run a Successful SaaS Affiliate Program”

We’ve just released a new feature that will track leads and clicks for both the brands their affiliates. When a visitor comes to your website through a referral link, they will now be visible as a lead within LinkMink. You’ll be able to see where that lead came from, who referred them and what page on your site was visited. The new leads feature will be available for both the brand and the affiliate to track and nurture their leads.

Continue reading “Announcing LinkMink’s new Leads Feature”

Today we released a feature we’re calling once approved, always approved.

While approving commissions is important, for SaaS companies it can become repetitive when you’re approving a recurring commission from a known referral every month. That’s why we’ve build automatic rules for approving commissions.

Continue reading “Announcing Automatic Commission Approvals”