Create an opt-in or lead-generation form using Gravity Forms

Welcome to the second post in our short series on using AffiliateWP to reward your affiliates for generating opt-in subscribers and leads on your WordPress website!

In this post we’ll show you how to:

1. Use Gravity Forms’ integration with AffiliateWP to easily create a form that generates referrals for your affiliates (at $0.00, or for a monetary amount) – perfect for incentivized opt-in marketing and lead generation – and,
2. Use Gravity Forms and the AffiliateWP pro add-on Affiliate Forms for Gravity Forms to build a custom registration form which generates referrals – so you can reward your affiliates for signing up NEW affiliates.

We’ll also touch on how you can use Gravity Forms’ add-ons for popular email marketing services to collect form sign-ups for your potential leads or your opt-in audience.

Let’s get started!

Creating a form that generates referrals

Enable the Gravity Forms integration in AffiliateWP

In the WordPress admin, head over to the Affiliates → Settings → Integrations tab. Check the box next to Gravity Forms, and click Save Changes.

Create a form with Gravity Forms that generates a ($0.00) referral

When a visitor clicks on an affiliate referral link and lands on your site, and successfully completes and submits this form, the referring affiliate will receive a $0.00 referral.

1. In your WordPress admin go to Forms → New form
2. Give your form a title, and click Create Form 
3. Go to Form Settings, and in the Form Options section, tick the Enable affiliate referral creation for this form checkbox 
4. Click Update Form Settings
5. Go back to the Form Editor, add the fields you need, and click Update Form.

TIP: Which fields should you add? For opt-ins and lead generation, you’ll want to gather some contact details from your site visitor. We recommend adding some Advanced Fields such as Name, Phone, Address, Website, and Email.

Congrats! You’ve just created an opt-in or lead generation form that generates referrals for your affiliates. Yup, it’s that easy.

Create a form with Gravity Forms that generates a monetary referral

If you want to pay your affiliates a commission for opt-ins and leads they generate, you can set an amount (essentially, a “cost”) for the form that will then generate a commission for the referring affiliate. When a customer successfully submits the required details via a form, the affiliate will receive a referral with a value (i.e. $5.00 for every opt-in or lead they generate). Note: You need to be using a percentage referral rate type to use Gravity Forms in this way if you are also selling products on your site.

1. Set up a form following the same process as in the step above
2. When you have set up a form that generates referrals and added your required fields, click on the Pricing Fields drop-down box and add a Product field to your form 
3. Format the Product field by clicking on the small arrow at the top the of field, and in the Field Type drop-down menu, select Hidden (this will hide the “cost” of the form from the visitor) 
4. In the Price field, enter a cost that is a multiplier of your global referral rate percentage set in your Affiliates → Settings → General tab (for example, if your referral rate is 10%, and you want to pay your affiliates $1.00 for every opt-in/lead generated through this form, the price you would enter on the form would be $10.00. Adjust the price to calculate your affiliate commission for this form accordingly).
5. Click Update Form Settings to save your settings
6. When the form is submitted, a referral will be generated for the referring affiliate with a commission of $1.00.

If you’re only wanting to generate leads or opt-ins on your website (and not selling products as well), you can set your global referral rate type to a Flat Rate, and make the rate whatever you want to pay your affiliates per opt-in/lead (i.e. $2.00 per lead). Simply ensure referrals are enabled for that form.

NOTE: Remember, if set, a per-affiliate rate will override the global referral rate.

You can stop here if you’ve created an epic Gravity Form that generates referrals. Nice work!

If you want to take it a step further and find out how to reward your affiliates for signing up NEW affiliates, or how to use Gravity Forms’ add-ons to grow your opt-in mailing list or potential leads, keep reading!

Use the Affiliate forms for Gravity Forms pro add-on to build a form that generates new affiliate registrations, and awards referrals

The Affiliate Forms for Gravity Forms pro add-on is incredibly useful, as it allows you to create a custom affiliate registration form with as many or as few fields as you want.

NOTE: You can only have one affiliate registration form.

You can also enable referrals to be generated for this registration form, so when an existing affiliate shares a link to it, and a new affiliate successfully registers, the existing affiliate will be awarded a $0.00 referral or a dollar amount commission for signing up a new affiliate.

Here’s how you can use the custom affiliate registration form and Affiliate Forms for Gravity Forms to incentivize your affiliates to recruit new affiliates.

Setting up a custom affiliate registration form that generates ($0.00) referrals with Affiliate Forms for Gravity Forms

When you use Affiliate Forms for Gravity Forms, the form you create becomes the affiliate registration form (which appears on the Affiliate Area page, where the [affiliate_area] shortcode is used, plus anywhere the [affiliate_registration] shortcode is used).

1. Ensure that the Allow affiliate registration option has been enabled in the Affiliates → Settings → Affiliate tab, so the registration form will be visible on the Affiliate Area page (and anywhere you choose to place the affiliate registration form using the [affiliate_registration] shortcode)
2. With Affiliate Forms for Gravity Forms installed and activated, go to the Forms → New Form section of Gravity Forms
3. Give your form a title, and click Create Form
4. Check the Enable affiliate referral creation for this form option
5. Go to Form Settings, and in the Form Options section check the box next to the AffiliateWP registration option. Enabling this option means this form will become your affiliate registration form
6. Click Update Form Settings
7. Go back to the Form Editor, add the fields you require for your affiliate registration form, and click Update Form.

Add a Product pricing field to the form to generate monetary referrals

Using the method above to add a hidden product “cost” field to the form, you can generate a referral with a monetary amount for your affiliates when they register a new affiliate as an incentive. This process currently supports a global percentage referral rate type as set in the Affiliates → Settings → General tab. For example, if your global referral rate is 20%, and you want to pay your affiliates $0.50 for every new successful affiliate registration on your site, you would set the product cost on the form to calculate the final commission amount correctly. In this instance, the product cost on the form would be $2.50 (20% of $2.50 is $0.50), therefore, $0.50 is the commission awarded for a referred affiliate registration.

A few things to remember when creating a custom affiliate registration form

When an affiliate registers via your affiliate registration form on the Affiliate Area page, AffiliateWP performs several automatic actions:

1. A new WordPress user account will be created (this is required for an affiliate account)
2. A new affiliate account will be created (based on the WordPress user account)
3. The new affiliate is then automatically logged-in to the Affiliate Area.

If you place the registration form on another page of your website using the

Register a new affiliate account

Your Name

Username

Account Email

Payment Email

Website URL

How will you promote us?

Password

Confirm Password

Agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy

shortcode, remember to set up a redirect so your new affiliates land on a page that makes sense for your website. For best practice, we recommend redirecting affiliates to your Affiliate Area, however you may like to redirect them to a custom success page. This may show the affiliate a link or button to visit their affiliate area, their affiliate referral URL so they can start promoting your site and products straight away.

To set up a redirect, go to the Confirmations tab in your Form Settings and click Edit on the Default Confirmation.

By default, the confirmation type will be set to Text. Change this to Redirect and enter the page URL you want your affiliates to be redirected to in the Redirect URL field. Click Save Confirmation, and you’re done!

Using Gravity Forms’ email add-ons to collect email addresses

Gravity Forms is an excellent form-builder out of the box, however its various add-ons can make it even more powerful.

When your business or marketing focus is lead generation, contact details are crucial so you can follow up with qualifying prospects at a later date. Gravity Forms’ integration add-ons with various email marketing services will automatically add prospective lead details to your email list when a form is submitted. This makes it super easy to connect with prospects when you’re ready to get in touch with them.

Similarly, if your goal is to grow your website subscribers, these add-ons will allow you to easily add your opt-in contacts to a dedicated, manageable mailing list for seamless email marketing and communication.

You’ll need Gravity Forms, and a license or account with one of the supported email marketing services (listed below). When you have purchased a license or signed up for an account, you’ll have access to your account or API details for the email service, which are required to set up and use the integration add-on. Once the add-on is set up and ready to go, you can select the form you will use to collect contact information. In your email marketing system, set up a mailing list with a relevant title which is easily identifiable. Then, using the add-on, you can connect a form to your chosen mailing list so the data is automatically transferred to the list when the form is submitted.

Link a regular contact form so prospective leads and opt-ins are automatically saved into a mailing list. Or, use the Affiliate Forms for Gravity Forms custom registration form if you wish to quickly and easily capture the email addresses of your new affiliates.

The Gravity Forms email marketing system add-ons are available with either a Business or Developer Gravity Forms license. Check out the list of mail services Gravity Forms has created add-ons for below:

• ActiveCampaign
• AWeber
• Campaign Monitor
• CleverReach
• Emma
• GetResponse
• iContact
• Mad Mimi
• MailChimp

See the Gravity Forms website to find out more about the functionality of these add-ons, or check out Gravity Forms’ documentation.

TIP: You can also use these add-ons, along with your custom affiliate registration form (using the Affiliate Forms for Gravity Forms pro add-on) to collect your affiliates’ contact details and add them to a dedicated mailing list, so you can quickly and easily email your affiliates at any time.

Using the steps outlined in this tutorial, you can turn your AffiliateWP-powered affiliate program and integration with Gravity Forms into a streamlined lead-generation and opt-in marketing system, which will help make you more sales, grow your business, and boost the number of affiliates promoting your website and products.

Are you already using AffiliateWP as a lead-generation platform? Are you incentivizing your affiliates to bring in subscribers, or to recruit new affiliates? Leave us a comment below and let us know how!