Affiliate Marketing for Subscription Services: 5 Best Practices

In an affiliate program for subscription services, your brand partners with publishers to promote a subscription-based service. When someone makes a purchase using the affiliate partner’s link or code, the affiliate partner earns a commission on the sale.

Affiliate partners can range from content creators, social media influencers and bloggers to traditional news outlets and review or comparison sites. In some cases, brands may even work with a combination of affiliate partner types to grow and scale their subscription affiliate programs. Regardless, affiliate campaigns can lead to greater brand awareness and more conversions when launched and managed correctly.

Read on to find five best practices for brands launching or scaling their subscription service affiliate program.

Why Subscription Affiliate Programs Are Unique

Yearly or monthly subscription affiliate programs are unique in a few ways. Unlike a standard affiliate campaign, which promotes a one-time purchase, subscription affiliate programs lead to recurring transactions on the consumer’s part and potentially consistent income for the affiliate. Subscription affiliate programs can also result in compounded income growth for affiliate partners, who can stack referrals and earn more commissions with every sale.

With that in mind, affiliate partners may be enthusiastic to partner with your brand and promote your service. However, it’s crucial to establish clear goals, a fair commission rate and provide upfront training to ensure a positive collaboration long-term.

How to Build a Subscription Service Affiliate Program: Best Practices for Promoting Memberships and Subscription Offers

Whether you’re getting ready to launch an affiliate program for a subscription service or looking to scale, here are five best practices to help you achieve success.

1. Establish Goals and KPIs for Your Affiliate Program

Launching subscription affiliate programs without clear campaign goals or key performance indicators (KPIs) may lead to some success. However, clarifying your vision for your campaign, establishing a strategy and implementing regular performance checks turns moderate success into actionable, scalable, winning strategies you can implement long-term.

Work with your team to discuss your program goals, taking time to consider questions like:

• • What is the primary focus of your campaign? You may want to drive traffic to your site, increase conversions, lower acquisition costs or improve customer lifetime value (CLV)—or a combination of several objectives. Determine your priorities, then build your campaign to suit your needs.

• • What is your revenue goal? Think in terms of gross and net revenue, keeping in mind that affiliate partners will earn a commission on every sale.

• • What is your target conversion rate? Establish a benchmark conversion rate you can use to measure partner success. You may also consider the total number of conversions you would like your partners to drive, potentially within a certain timeframe (for instance, a single quarter, six months or annually).

Once you and your team have aligned on campaign goals, take some time to document them. It’s also a good idea to share at least high-level objectives with your affiliate partners. Doing so enables your affiliate partners to tailor their content to suit your goals.

2. Consider Commission Structures

Next, consider commission structures before reaching out to affiliate partners. Do some research to better understand market rates. Then, consider whether you plan to offer one-time or recurring commissions.

One-time commissions are often paid at or near the initial point of sale. Your affiliate partner will only make money off the buyer’s initial purchase. On the other hand, with recurring commissions, affiliates earn a commission on the initial sale, as well as every following purchase. For example, if a customer uses an affiliate partner’s link or referral code to purchase a monthly subscription, the affiliate partner will receive a commission on the first transaction, as well as the subsequent monthly renewals.

A one-time commission may seem appealing, since you’ll only pay the affiliate partner once for each customer. However, recurring commissions may encourage affiliate partners to push your services more frequently, leading to more conversions and a higher return on investment for you.

Consider the best option for you and your brand, and ensure you make a competitive offer, especially when approaching established affiliate partners with strong followings.

3. Select the Right Affiliate Partners

It’s essential to find the right publishers when launching or scaling a subscription affiliate program. It may be tempting to choose publishers with well-known brands or large followings, but you’d be surprised how successful campaigns driven by micro-influencers – or those with fewer than 100,000 followers can be.

Beyond audience size, however, it’s important to determine if the affiliate partner aligns with your brand’s image and messaging. With that in mind, consider details like:

• • Their niche: Does their industry or subject-matter expertise align with your brand?

• • Their audience: Do their followers reflect your ideal buyer? If not, you may be targeting the wrong crowd.

• • Their brand and values: Does their content and messaging style mesh with your vision for your brand?

• • Their content quality: Do they create high-quality, valuable content? Remember, the content they publish may form a potential buyer’s first opinion of your brand.

• • Their affiliate campaign experience: Have they participated in subscription affiliate campaigns in the past? It’s not a requirement, but having some knowledge of the onboarding, content creation and performance tracking processes can be beneficial.

4. Track and Optimize Campaign Performance

After onboarding your affiliate partners and launching your campaign, it’s crucial to track performance metrics. You may monitor performance through your e-commerce platform, using sales data to identify top affiliate partners. You may also use a third-party platform or software system, like our proprietary APVision, to help monitor performance.

APVision provides in-depth, customized reports, generated on a weekly, monthly or ad hoc basis. Our sophisticated software tracks the metrics and KPIs you set at the start of your campaign. Then, APVision generates reports to ensure you and your team are on the same page and can effectively analyze and optimize performance at any time.

5. Automate As Much As Possible

Finally, make sure to consider ways to automate your affiliate marketing campaign as soon as possible. Doing so enhances scalability and allows you and your team to focus your time, energy and resources on strategy, branding and development instead of rote tasks like generating reports or sending out onboarding materials.

If you’re not sure how to start automating, or simply want to partner with a winning team who can help accelerate campaign growth and success, contact our team at Acceleration Partners today. We bring decades of combined experience ideating and managing highly successful global and regional affiliate campaigns for brands of all sizes and niches. We also offer access to an exclusive, vetted publisher network and our in-house software platform, APVision, to help identify opportunities and improve performance.

Ready to get started? Contact our team today to learn how we can help you craft a winning affiliate marketing campaign strategy that drives meaningful conversions and increases ROI.