Use the Keap / Infusionsoft referral module to track and pay commission on off-line sales to affiliate/referral partners.
Keap / Infusionsoft has a pretty powerful affiliate (referral partner) module built right into the commerce functionality.
Now, this is great. But what if you are selling products offline – can you still track leads and reward partners with a commission? Say you are a B2B company where the final transaction does not occur online – can those leads be tracked through Keap / Infusionsoft and rewarded with sales commission?
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Yes they can. Check out my video below.
If you have any questions regarding this please drop me a line.
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TRANSCRIPT
Hi, in this short video, I’d like to show you how you can create an offline referral programme using Keap Classic. Okay, or formerly known as Infusionsoft. So Keap classic, has a built in referral partner module, or affiliate marketing module, which is fantastic if you’re using e-commerce. So for instance, if you’re selling £10 plastic widgets, then it’s very easy to collect the money, record the affiliate sales and reward affiliates with commission, very easily. Everything is online, right through to the actual transaction. Now, if you’re selling something offline, maybe it’s consulting, maybe it’s property, maybe it’s accountancy services, or whatever it may be. That’s typically not an online purchase, no credit card details exchanged, so Infusionsoft can’t capture very easily the actual transaction that has been confirmed. But we can with a bit of creative thinking, we can use the referral module or the affiliate partner module to track offline referrals. And I’ll show you here how to do that.
So I created a LucidChart here to give you the essence of how this works. So basically, imagine this is your website here, you might have a referral partner signup form. Okay, so this is a special form in Infusionsoft. I’ll call it Infusionsoft still . A special form where someone can fill in the form, we can automatically create a referral partner record for them.
Once we do that, there in a section here I call referral partner marketing. So there’s two big hurdles with regards to referral partner marketing. The first one is actually to get them to sign up. So we take it here that you’ve talked to him or what have you, done your marketing, they come to your website, they sign up as a referral partner, because they want to earn commission from you for passing sales to you. So we automatically create a referral partner. And then we start a marketing campaign to referral partners because that’s the second hurdle. You might sign up the the affiliate or the referrer. And they very quickly forget, they very quickly don’t do anything. So you could build a whole marketing campaign using Infusionsoft to activate those referral partners, email marketing, follow up calls all the rest of the good stuff we can do in Infusionsoft.
So those referral partners, start getting their affiliate link out to their members or their email list. So we can automatically send them a link that they can use and say to all their readers or customers, hey, here’s a here’s a great deal. Click this link to get the offer. Okay, so these are the customers now they’ll get the link, they click. Yeah. And that’ll be in about your website. So we say maybe have a contact us form on your website, a landing page. Yeah, there may be different landing pages, whatever you doing, but as soon as they fill this form in here, the consumers, okay. We automatically pass over the referring partner details and that follows through to the contact record for that customer. Okay. Now, that’s great. But one of the shortcomings in Infusionsoft is that it stores and records their third partner or affiliate but there’s nothing we can actually automate off of that. Okay, and we need to, that’s why we use a free tool called Funnel Bots.
This Funnel Bot (called Affilate Namer), by Fix Your Funnel is free so has no cost. And what this can do is, as each contact comes in, it can search to see if they’ve been referred by an affiliate or a referrer. If they have, it will take the referrers name and store it as a custom field in the contact record. And it will also apply a tag to say that they’ve been referred by a referral partner, which is fantastic. At that point, then using Zapier, which I’m afraid is not free it will cost £20 a month or so, yeah, at that point, Zapier then can be triggered. And that can push the contact details along with the referrers name into a Google Sheet for instance. Okay, so now we start to build an independent Google Sheet with all our contacts and who they have been referred by so from the sheets from the start, you could say to referral partner you referred 20 people to us this month or you referred 30 people to this year. Good stuff.
We can start to see now what’s happening? But we can go one step further than that. So say, it’s an offline sale, and we’re dropping into the sales pipeline. Okay, so contact goes into a sales pipeline. Maybe the sales team are following up. Yeah.
And some of those enquiries will become a client that we won. So as soon as it’s in a sales pipeline, we move them to won, again, we’re using Zapier, we can trigger Zapier to talk to Google, talk to Google Sheet and update a contact record in a Google Sheet to say they’ve now completed another sale, or the complete two sales or whatever we were to record it into Google Sheets. Okay, so it will update, the Google Sheet records the contact. So now, at the end of each month, you can look at your Google Sheet by date, and say to a referral partner, you referred 20 people to this month, and two people ordered, and therefore we’re going to give you a commission. Yep, so then you are reporting via your Google Sheet. And obviously, then if you wanted to get really fancy. You might decide, you want to use Google Data Studio and create create fancy charts and pie charts and all the rest of it, if you so wish. But least all your referral partner data is in a Google Sheet where you can action it and there’s other things you might want to do as well, for instance, when the first sale comes in, you might trigger to send the referral partner manager an email, let them know the first sale has been made for that affiliate, or after every subsequent sale. But the key point is you’ve got a Google Sheet with all your data and it builds up over time and updates automatically. So you can always be on top of your offline referral partner module. And that is how I do to for my clients. I hope you found that useful. If you’ve got any questions, give me a shout. Okay, Cheers. Bye.
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Cheers
Julian
