A viral sales feature request (Auto-Enrollment Referral Program)
Picture this:
- After purchasing, customers automatically get a referral link in their welcome email (and account dashboard) that they can share to earn.
- Once they have enough referals for a payout, they enter their payment email and I pay them.
Right now they have to apply, so there's a bottleneck; the application process.
Many of my customers are interested in being affiliates, but not interested enough to apply.
By being customers, I consider them worthy of instant approval.
It would be great if customers could get a referral link in their accounts.
What do you think?
Yes, I know I can manually make customers into affiliates, but I need to know their payment address. My thinking is I only need that when they want to get paid.
Most customers will never refer anyone, and most referrals won't purchase, so the payment address is only really necessary for a tiny percentage of affiliates.
Hey Nicolai . Here are some ideas that may help:
I like the idea of removing friction from the process, especially if payment details are only requested once an affiliate actually reaches the payout threshold.
From a technical perspective, this should already be possible through the API. We used to build similar workflows with other platforms.
FluentAffiliate provides a REST API endpoint for creating affiliates:
https://dev.fluentaffiliate.com/restapi/affiliates
So you could automate a flow such as:
Purchase completed → Create affiliate ( FCRM StoreS the affiliate ID and referral URL → Send the referral link in the welcome email (via automation or API).
FluentCRM already exposes FluentAffiliate data such as the affiliate ID and referral URL through its smart fields, so those values could also be used in automations and emails.
That said, I would make auto-enrollment optional and configurable by product rather than automatically turning every customer into an active affiliate.
Just our experience.
Qualifying affiliates is just as important as qualifying leads.
There is a big difference between building a group of genuine brand ambassadors and creating a database with hundreds or thousands of inactive affiliates who will never generate a referral.
A hybrid approach could work particularly well:
- Enable auto-enrollment only for selected products or customer segments.
- Give customers their referral link immediately, without requiring payment details.
- Ask for payout information only after they reach the minimum payout threshold.
- Identify the customers who actually share, generate clicks or produce referrals.
- Invite the strongest performers into a more deliberate partner program with leaderboards, special campaigns, perks and rewards.
For example, you could give selected partners a specific launch or event to promote, share a live ranking and reward the best performers. That creates a real affiliate campaign rather than simply telling every customer: “Hey, by the way, here is your referral link.”
In my experience, people, especially existing clients, respond very differently when they are treated as genuine partners rather than as traditional affiliates.
So yes, I see real value in the feature. I would just combine the low-friction auto-enrollment with qualification and a stronger partner experience for the people who actually engage.
Thanks Jorge de los Reyes that’s all good advice.
I left two other affiliate programmes because of the friction. The issues in those were different (much bigger; like needing a business paypal account, confusing reference urls, etc) but friction has always been my primarly problem so far.
I do realize I may be introducing new problems by getting rid of the friction, and I'm sure I will play around with the ease of signing up over time but for now I need to reduce it for the particular people who are most likely to be my best candidates, including customers who are well known in their communities that write to me to tell me that their people would love my products too.
Most of the people I want to sign up have purchased a $60 specialty product that requires specific knowledge and skill to use, so I consider those people to be well-vetted and pre-qualified. I already reject applicants from coupon sites, or similar, and they are not likely to buy a $60 product to become affiliates.
I am convinced by your warning of the danger of having a huge list of inactive affiliates in the database and with that in mind your API, or similar, idea is very interesting.
I think what I will probably land on is some kind of hybrid where clicking a smartlink completes the affiliate signup.
I'm not going to even mention the affiliate program to most people, But for those for whom it's appropriate, I want it to be there and "active" as fast as possible.
Thanks for the thoughtful suggestions.
Also, fluent affiliate has a really nice (and a bit hidden) feature: creating custom landing pages for affiliates.
I’d suggest checking it out.
Eg.: you can invite those clients to have a “use case”; “success stories”, in your site. And they can actually share their success case landing page, and get the referral that way. Haven’t try it yet in FA, but it’s worth exploring for this tandem with clients 😄