Case Study: How We Grew The Lasso Affiliate Program From $1K to $40K/month in 10 months

ByJamie I.F.

Last year, we grew the Lasso affiliate program from $1,000 per month in revenue, to touching $40,000 in monthly revenue from affiliates. 

TLDR: The breakdown:

  • More than a 40x increase in affiliate revenue between January and December 2023.
  • Over 1,500 new affiliates were onboarded to the Lasso affiliate program.
  • Successfully operated campaigns focused on Google SEO, YouTube, and Twitter influencers.
  • Overtook SEO as the largest acquisition channel for Lasso.
  • A dozen B2B partnerships were set up to promote Lasso to their audience and customers.

And, a significant increase in brand awareness and brand search for Lasso, which helped scale Lasso’s SEO traffic to over 3,000 organic clicks per day – an almost 6x increase.

Here’s exactly how we did it:

Part 1: Dialing In Affiliate-Market-Fit

Lasso is an affiliate marketing analytics tool. But, despite being an affiliate marketing company, the affiliate program was not driving any significant revenue.

The first thing we reviewed was the commission structure: why were people not promoting Lasso?

We surveyed great-fit potential affiliates for feedback. They said the program was not lucrative enough for them to promote, so our first point of call was to make the offer more attractive.

The current program was 50% of the first 3 months revenue. But, this meant that if the average customer stayed for 24 months, the overall affiliate commission rate on LTV spend was just 6.25%. This is very low for SaaS, and was worse than the commission structures offered by Lasso’s competitors.

We agreed to the increase of commission rates with Lasso’s founder and CEO. Generally, we recommend a minimum of 30% recurring affiliate commission for SaaS (though this depends on the product and niche) as this helps make programs more attractive for affiliates to promote, but in this case it was 30% for the first 12 months.

We eventually got the green light to add a higher commission rate tier for “Super Affiliates” who converted more than $5,000 in SaaS sales in a month, too.

(Generally, once you hit 30% recurring commission in SaaS affiliate programs, the exponential effect of massive promo and sales begins to kick in. Some huge, huge results have happened in the AI SaaS space with 50% commissions that have driven millions in revenue in weeks for bootstrapped startups. Somewhat like the curve above.)

Part 2: High-Touch Outreach

For Lasso, a priority was placed on Google SEO affiliates, YouTube creators, and Twitter influencers (who often also became paying customers of Lasso after our outreach – what a nice bonus!).

We spoke to hundreds of great creators and completed dozens of affiliate and influencer deals to promote Lasso.

Some of these included:

Blog product reviews

Youtube product reviews

Blog associated topics

Youtube associated topics 

Fortunately, because Lasso had several different use cases and ICPs for different features, this widened the pool of people, and collaborative opportunities, that we could pitch to people.

This meant that when we were doing high-touch personal outreach, we could recommend specific aspects of the product that best fit that person’s own use, and their audience’s – based on similar content they had created, and our own research on that creator.

These included creating direct reviews of the product, as well as creating “vs” articles comparing Lasso to other existing products, especially popular ones with organic search volume, as well as showing affiliates which other keywords (such as “alternatives” keywords for competitors) to create content around to maximise their sales.

We also added an affiliate recruitment message flow into the post-purchase email flow. This email asked if they wanted to become an affiliate and use their personal experience with the product to earn money.

Part 3: Capitalising On Trends

A lot of Lasso’s customers are affiliates who use Lasso to promote the Amazon Associates program and earn money by referring people to buy Amazon products. 

While managing the affiliate program, Amazon announced they were no longer going to support Amazon SiteStripe affiliate links.

The blogging community was melting down. Some of these bloggers had 16,000+ SiteStripe affiliate links, and it would be completely impossible to manually change so many links over manually before the deadline.

We noticed this very quickly and created a tool that automatically converts SiteStripe links across a website to new, compliant affiliate links. We released this as a feature within Lasso.

We then contacted the popular YouTubers in the affiliate program and let them know that this was a popular topic, but that there had not been a solution video created yet.

It was very highly searched, and people were in a stage of panic – they would buy anything that solved that problem.

Some videos our affiliates created included:

This led to a huge increase in sales as everyone watched the video, saw Lasso had a solution, and purchased Lasso.

One affiliate created one single video tutorial, and earned 5 figures from it.

But it required noticing a trend that traditional keyword research tools would never pick up, and having our ear to the ground in the community. 

Most businesses don’t have dedicated affiliate strategists seeking out opportunities to react to big events and capitalise on this. I think this is short-sighted – and this is something we focus on extensively for our clients.

Part 4: Further Focus on CR and EPC

We continuously worked to increase the EPC (earnings per click) that affiliates were earning.

The theory: The more you can make your affiliates earn, the more they’ll promote you and send more traffic and sales.

To increase EPC, we A/B tested the main product landing page and created new feature-specific landing pages to convert better, and allow affiliates to send traffic to those specific features if they wanted to.

SaaS businesses should always continuously be testing to improve conversion rates anyway, which also has the benefit of improving EPC for affiliates as a higher percentage of their traffic converts.

And nothing motivates affiliates like seeing conversions and sales. 

It’s a lot easier to convince people to promote you when they can see how much they’re making by doing so, and they’ll find ways to promote you themselves if they’re making good money from it.

Additionally: The more data clients give us access to, the better we can perform with our channel growth, and the better the recommendations we can make to the client on how their internal marketing efforts can be improved to complement what we do.

Part 5: Scaled the Influencer & Hybrid Influencer-Affiliate Channel

A lot of affiliates now want money upfront to create a video or add you into a blog post, and are reluctant to take pure CPA affiliate deals.

These sponsorships are a great way to test their audience fit, before forming deeper partnerships.

Another benefit is if you have the budget for paid sponsorships, you skip any negotiation and get them right into your network and affiliate program. You can move faster.

From there, if the sponsorship goes well and they earn extras from the affiliate commissions, then it’s an easier sell to get them to do additional promotion as an affiliate-only CPA deal with no money upfront.

With Lasso, we sponsored many newsletters, of which the best-performing partnership was the Niche Site Lady newsletter. Most of the others we sponsored did not work that well, but this one drove 4-5x ROI in direct sales within 24 hours, even before accounting for the other benefits in longer-term brand awareness.

A note: If doing sponsorships, never do a pure sponsorship without some kind of performance-based incentive.

If a more click-attributable platform like a blog post, get them into the affiliate program and get them to track clicks via their link, so they can earn from these sales as well.

If a more general brand awareness campaign on TikTok, or Linkedin where no affiliate link is used, get a code/coupon created, and also consider paying them based on metrics such as content impressions.

You’ll soon be able to create these hybrid deals in the Endorsely software platform. 

Part 6: Larger Partnership Marketing & Co-Marketing Initiatives

We consider ourselves a full-service bespoke partnership marketing agency. This includes typical affiliate outreach, recruitment, engagement and growth, but also influencer and other sponsorships, and business partnerships.

While working on the Lasso project, we created a longlist of companies in adjacent sectors that were not competitors but had similar audiences.

We then built partnerships with many of those companies, to promote each other in a mutually beneficial way.

We struck deals to promote Lasso to the audience and customers of:

  • Odys Global
  • Empire Flippers
  • Link Whisper & the Niche Pursuits audience
  • My Content Pal
  • Query Hunter (now Spindrift)
  • PeakSERP (now Content Raptor)
  • Cuppa
  • Popcorn Theme
  • Advise.so

And many others.

A major success campaign was our Black Friday offer. We felt that we could get viral attention, as well as convert really well with a mega offer, where if they purchased Lasso, they’d get a choice of 6 different other products completely free.

We then struck deals with these partners who sold products our customers would also be interested in, such as for a WordPress theme, internal linking, SEO, AI writing, that affiliate marketers (Lasso’s customers) would be interested in.

It meant we didn’t have to reduce the price of Lasso during Black Friday too, while also getting Lasso promoted to the audiences of 6 different other companies, leading to huge sales over the BFCM period.

The great thing about trackable referral links is that with partnerships with other businesses, you can keep the score very easily to ensure each brand is giving a similar level of results for each other. If not, you may need to reevaluate the partnership.

I’ve written and spoken extensively on B2B partnerships and how you can make them work in your partnership marketing program, but you can feel free to email with any questions you have here.

Other learnings and tips

Here are a few other tips of note I hope are useful which worked especially well on this client’s campaign:

  1. Promote your affiliates’ personal brands whenever you can. 

If your SaaS has an industry newsletter, make sure you mention any cool content they’ve put out and give them shine, too. It’s a partnership after all, and you want to always make them feel valued.

These are some ways you can motivate your affiliates and build the relationship, without paying them more.

  1. Go the extra mile and recommend content you have data on that performs well that they can create. 

Learn SEO and keyword research to give them good content ideas that get organic search, as well as YouTube content ideation. If they are missing high-value content other creators have created, bring this to their attention.

  1. Look at where else in their evergreen funnels they could add Lasso.

Often in courses, newsletter welcome sequences, YouTube video descriptions, webinars, e-books, etc, had good places to recommend adding Lasso. These drove clicks and awareness to Lasso in perpetuity.

What we should have done to get even better results

  1. More aggressive outreach to affiliates outside of our networks.

Now both within our agency, and the Endorsely software product, we encourage people to reach out to far more people.

We mostly stuck to a certain type of affiliate, and while we did onboard over 1,000 new affiliates over this timeframe, we could have done even more. We scale outreach far faster now than we did last year for our clients, to get them to $100K+ per month faster.

  1. We should have increased commission rates quicker. 

It took a few months to get the commission rates increased to 30%, at which point EPC rose significantly, and the affiliate program started really scaling. But if we’d done this months earlier, we could have scaled it far faster.

If you’re a SaaS/other business owner, I recommend thinking of affiliate commissions in this way:

“If you’re giving away 30% commissions to affiliates, you are NOT losing 30% of the revenue, you are GAINING 70%.”

The big breakthrough in getting buy-in from Andrew, the Founder of Lasso, was to break down the CAC, and CAC:LTV for the affiliate marketing channel at each level of commission rate.

At 30% for 12 months, if a customer stayed for 3 years, this was a 10:1 CAC:LTV rate. Well past the 3:1 ratio which is considered the “gold standard” in SaaS.

The 30% CAC was also significantly cheaper than Lasso had at that point been able to buy customers for with paid ads. So if you have this data to compare this versus your other acquisition channels, it’s easier to campaign for increased commission rates if you are running their affiliate program. 

Interested in Scaling Your Affiliate Program?

We’ve scaled brands to huge growth (such as Lasso in this case study), and alongside our client work, we are really in the field on the cutting edge learning how to best drive you results.

We have:

  • Driven millions of dollars in affiliate sales as actual affiliate marketers for existing programs.
  • Scaled our own SaaS portfolio using mostly affiliate marketing. Some brands we also have significant equity in include Content Raptor, Answer Socrates, QuizWizard.ai, and of course Endorsely.
  • Built the Endorsely affiliate software because it was the software WE WANTED while building affiliate programs for our brands.
  • 40x’d affiliate revenue for clients such as Lasso.

We only onboard a limited number of clients each month, and we do turn down opportunities if we don’t feel they’re a good fit.

If you would like to see if we can work together, get in touch here.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *