Do you ever wonder how to make your website visitors or customers share your products with others?
This is a common question for many website owners using WordPress. The answer lies in effective affiliate management tools. These tools help turn your visitors and customers into partners who talk about and promote your products. When they do this, more people learn about what you offer, and your sales can grow.
In this post, we will explore the top affiliate management tools available for WordPress.
Let’s begin!
Why a Good Affiliate Management Tool is Important
Think of your affiliate program as a special part of your business. Like you use various tools to keep your business running smoothly, the same goes for managing an affiliate program. The right affiliate management tools aren’t just helpful—they’re crucial.
These tools are more than just software to track your affiliates’ activities. They are the backbone of a successful affiliate program.
They help you find and team up with new affiliates, including influencers, and even turn your regular customers into promoters of your products.
However, finding the best affiliate tracking software is the first and crucial step to take if you really want your business to scale.
Though there are many great tools to bolster your program, we have made it easier for you by only finding the best ones. We’ve looked at every aspect of running an affiliate program to bring you these recommendations:
- Affiliate link tracking
- Signing up new affiliates and influencers
- Turning customers into affiliates
- Affiliate automation
- Creating personalized content
- Affiliate analytics
- Paying affiliates
Your affiliate marketing platform should help you create a great program, but these affiliate management tools could give you the extra boost you need.
The Best Affiliate Management Tools for WordPress
Think about your e-commerce software.
You might have the best e-commerce platform but still use additional tools to boost conversion rates.
Top affiliate marketing programs do the same thing, so knowing what affiliate management tools are out there is important.
Let’s look at each of these affiliate marketing management software in more detail.
1. AffiliateWP
AffiliateWP is the best affiliate management plugin for WordPress, and it’s going to give you the perfect platform from which to grow your program.
With AffiliateWP, you get everything you need to quickly set up your own affiliate program, sign up affiliates, and track affiliate links. It’s also got tons of built-in affiliate management tools, such as:
- Email Notifications
- Reliable Attribution with Advanced Fraud Detection
- Customizable Affiliate Registration Forms
- Custom Affiliate Dashboards
- Smart Commission Rules
- Affiliate creatives
- 1-Click Payouts
- CRM integrations
- World-class customer support
- And much more…
However, perhaps the biggest benefit of AffiliateWP is its customizability (through templates, hooks, and APIs). When your program runs on AffiliateWP, you own the platform and your data, which gives you unlimited possibilities to extend its capabilities.
A wide array of integrations helps you do this, and you’ll find every affiliate management tool on this list will effortlessly sync with your AffiliateWP program.
Check out AffiliateWP’s pricing!
Note: Does your website not run on WordPress? Check out these alternative affiliate software for other platforms like Shopify: Post Affiliate Pro, Refersion, Tapfiliate, LeadDyno, Everflow, Tune Partner Marketing, or Partnerstack.
2. Zapier
Zapier is a dream for affiliate managers who are looking to automate basic affiliate management processes.
It’s a SaaS tool that allows you to connect thousands of applications and set up “Zaps” – automated sequences that help your program run on autopilot. For instance, you might connect AffiliateWP with your accounting or email marketing software.
Essentially, Zapier helps all the digital marketing software you’re paying for come together to work more efficiently. As such, it’s a must-have affiliate management tool!
3. RafflePress
RafflePress is a tool we absolutely love for affiliate management (as well as many other things).
It’s the perfect way to keep affiliate partners motivated and engaged with your program.
How?
By setting up affiliate giveaways.
The key thing with RafflePress is that it helps you set entry requirements that grow your referral program, and track results. So, rather than just offering a prize to your top sellers, you can incentivize affiliates to take all kinds of actions:
- Writing a product review on their blog
- Filming a tutorial for YouTube
- Running a social media campaign for your new promotion
With custom entry actions, you can quickly create a giveaway that drives affiliate performance. It’s incredibly user-friendly and a great affiliate management tool (it complements other marketing channels too).
Check out RafflePress’s pricing!
4. OptinMonster
We always say that signing up an affiliate is a similar process to making a sale.
One of the things you commonly find with sales is that people don’t make a purchase the first time they land on your site. They go away, consider their options, and then purchase, perhaps on their 4th, 5th, or 6th touchpoint.
The same happens when someone lands on your affiliate signup page.
You need to ensure that you can create more touch points with potential affiliates who’ve exited your signup page, and the best way to do this is with OptinMonster.
OptinMonster is the most powerful conversion optimization toolkit, and it will help you turn would-be affiliates into engaged affiliates.
As a bonus, it can also help turn your best customers into brand ambassadors!
OptinMonster offers incredible targeting options and a host of different ways to attract new affiliates, making it one of the best affiliate marketing tools.
Check out OptinMonster’s pricing!
5. ActiveCampaign
Good affiliate tracking software like AffiliateWP will offer comprehensive email and push notification capabilities, but your email marketing software will always offer a little more.
ActiveCampaign is an excellent email marketing provider, and it syncs nicely with AffiliateWP to boost your affiliate management options.
Once set up, you’ll be able to build comprehensive email marketing campaigns for many different scenarios:
- Affiliate recruitment
- Affiliate onboarding
- Product education
- Information on new promotions
- Affiliate giveaways and competitions
It’s not possible to run large-scale affiliate marketing campaigns without some level of automation, so it’s preferable to invest in good email marketing software like ActiveCampaign.
Check out ActiveCampaign’s Pricing!
6. If-So
If-So’s primary focus isn’t affiliate marketing. Nevertheless, it makes for an excellent affiliate management tool.
It’s the number 1 WordPress personalization plugin, allowing you to deliver dynamic content to your users. Using dynamic content is a top marketing strategy, and it can be beneficial for your affiliate marketing efforts in 2 ways:
- Deliver personalized content to potential affiliates
- Deliver personalized affiliate content to potential customers
Let’s look at the first scenario.
With If-So, you can deliver different content based on the person’s first visit to your affiliate signup page or a return visit. You can even show location-based messages such as “40% of our sales come from Germany, meaning they’re a hit with your target audience.”
This ability to deliver targeted content to attract new affiliate partnerships is also extremely beneficial for increasing affiliate sales. When you connect If-So to AffiliateWP, you can deliver content to your website visitors specific to the affiliate they were referred by.
For example, you might show a banner with the Affiliate’s personal content, or put an image of your affiliate wearing your branded t-shirt and using your products.
You can do many great things with If-So as part of your affiliate management.
7. Built-in Affiliate Payouts
You want to make it as easy for your affiliates to get paid.
The best way to do this is with the payout methods built into AffiliateWP. You can pay affiliates straight to their bank account through Stripe, send payouts to their PayPal accounts, or pay them in store credit, all from the Pay Affiliates screen without leaving your WordPress dashboard.
On the Pro plan, Automatic Payouts can pay your affiliates on a weekly or monthly schedule, making affiliate payments a doddle!
Check out AffiliateWP’s affiliate payouts!
8. MonsterInsights
One of the best things about having your own affiliate program as opposed to using an affiliate network, is that you own the data. That data is hugely valuable but the tricky thing can be realizing its value.
An awesome affiliate management tool (as well as SEO must-have) to help you with this is MonsterInsights.
Although affiliate marketing software solutions like AffiliateWP give you advanced real-time metrics, MonsterInsights is able to add additional functionality. Its simple integration with AffiliateWP helps you track affiliate performance and transactions in Google Analytics.
This data is invaluable because it helps you understand how affiliate traffic interacts with your website. With the additional data, you can identify trends and use your new insights to streamline the performance of your affiliate program.
Now Try These Free Affiliate Growth Tools
We’ve talked about the best affiliate management software, now, let’s look at some affiliate marketing tools you can use to grow referrals.
With AffiliateWP, you get access to a host of amazing growth tools that are specifically designed to boost conversions:
- Affiliate Leaderboards: Get your affiliates’ competitive juices going with monthly affiliate leaderboards.
- Vanity Coupon Codes: Allow your affiliates to create branded coupon codes that stand out on busy platforms like social media and email marketing.
- Direct Link Tracking: Eliminate the need for ugly affiliate URLs with a direct link tracking solution.
- Affiliate Landing Pages: Create personalized landing pages that build on the relationship your affiliate has with the customer.
- Custom Affiliate Slugs: Let your affiliates choose their own link structure.
Small changes to your conversion rate can make a big difference to your bottom line, and these affiliate growth tools can give you the boost you’re looking for.
What’s the Best Affiliate Management Tool?
AffiliateWP is the best affiliate management tool because it gives you everything you need to start a successful affiliate program.
The other tools in this list are a great way to build on the awesome platform AffiliateWP gives you, but ultimately, you can create a hugely successful affiliate program without the need for additional plugins.
Although great affiliate program management can help you reach your goals a little bit more quickly, as can these additional resources!
- How to Set Up an Affiliate Program in WordPress (Complete Guide)
- 10+ Best WooCommerce Affiliate Plugins for Affiliate Management
- A Complete Guide to Setting Affiliate Commission Structures
- Shareasale vs ClickBank vs AffiliateWP (Merchant’s Guide)
Now, there’s only one thing left to do.
