SaaS Affiliate Program Checklist: Your Step-by-Step Guide to Launching Successfully

When you are ready to create a profitable SaaS affiliate program; follow this checklist to ensure you cover all the necessary steps for a successful launch and maximize your affiliate earnings right from day one! It will also help you to avoid any problems later down the line.

Pre-Launch Checklist & Key Steps

Step	What to Do	Why It Matters
1. Define Clear Goals & KPIs	Decide what success looks like: e.g. number of affiliate-driven signups, revenue contribution (% of MRR), CAC via affiliate channel, and conversion rate.	Helps you measure impact and justify resources. Top-programs set KPIs like click → sign-up rate, LTV of affiliate customers.
2. Validate Product-Market Fit & Customer Retention	Ensure consistent free trial → paid conversion and reasonable churn (e.g. <5-10%). Get feedback from early users so affiliates promote something solid.	Affiliates won’t maintain promotions if customers drop off fast. Make sure the foundation is good.
3. Assess Financial Viability	Compute your LTV, CAC, margins. Make sure you know these numbers, allowing you to start creating your commission structure & stay healthy.	Benchmark SaaS programs commonly allow 10-30% of customer (lifetime) value for affiliates.
4. Build Tracking & Technical Setup	Set up conversion tracking (trial → paid), cookie window (60-90 days is typical), affiliate links/coupons, integrate with Stripe or API for the payment system.	Accurate attribution builds trust, but also avoids any manual work going forward. Setting you up for scale.
5. Legal Terms, Commission Models & Policies	Draft terms: commission type (recurring vs one-time), payout thresholds, rules for promotion (allowing paid ads or not for example).	By creating clear terms, affiliates know what is allowed or not. Avoiding any disputes later in the program.
6. Design Attractive Commission Structure & Incentives	Consider tiered commissions or one time bonuses, and competitive percentages. With Reditus you will always work with recurring commissions and monthly payouts.	Motivates affiliates by setting up multiple tiers and attractive commission percentages. Pay them out on a monthly basis.
7. Prepare Marketing / Affiliate Assets	Create banners, blog copy, landing pages, demo content, product photos/screenshots, email templates. Retain a media kit.	Make it easy for affiliates to promote you fast! Assets reduce friction for affiliates and improve early traction.
8. Onboarding & Support Plan	Prepare resources: affiliate landing page, onboarding emails, FAQs, help guides. Assign someone to manage affiliate relationships.	Make sure you can guide affiliates to success. Setup integrations to push affiliate data to your CRM.
9. Set Up Monitoring & Feedback Loops	Plan weekly or monthly reviews: affiliate activity, conversion rates, passive vs active affiliates. Leverage the report section within Reditus to do this!	Helps spot issues (bad traffic, inactive affiliates) and optimize.
10. Post-Launch Review & Iteration	30-90-day check: is affiliate channel delivering expected revenue? Are commissions sustainable? Adjust commission, terms or messaging if needed.	Experiment to find the sweet spot! It is not a set and forget channel, it will require iterations & time to make it work for your SaaS.

See below per step more information, examples & templates you can use to get your affiliate program up and running quickly.

Step 1: Define Clear Goals & KPIs

Pick your core KPIs before launch, such as: number of affiliate-driven signups per month, percentage of MRR from affiliate channel, activation rate of new affiliates, and affiliate retention. See below an example of metrics you could track.
Benchmark: many mature SaaS affiliate programs get 10-30% of approved affiliates to become real active promoters. If your activation rate is much lower, it may indicate onboarding, asset or overall program issues (commission, company maturity).
Also consider setting goals around time frames: e.g., within 3 months, X number of affiliates, Y conversions; within 6 months, affiliate channel contributes Z% of new ARR. These timed goals help you evaluate readiness and adjust quickly. Create a sheet like below to map out the entire program for yourself.

Step 2: Validate Product-Market Fit & Customer Retention

Setting up an affiliate is not a magic bullet, or a way to get your first paid clients. Having a good foundation (PMF) will make sure the channel becomes a success.

Ensure conversion from free trial or onboarding to paying customer is stable; if 20-30% of trials convert, you have some product traction. If trial conversion is very low (<5-10%), affiliates might promote but yield low return and they will leave.
Study churn: for recurring commissions, churn rate matters. If churn is high (>10-15% monthly or >30-40% annual depending on plan), recurring commissions won't be that long for affiliates > making them leave at one point.
Use feedback from early customers/adopters to ensure messaging, features, support are solid. Affiliates will use your product positioning; if the product fails expectations, it reflects poorly.

Step 3: Assess Financial Viability

Leverage the sheet from Step 1 to calculate the LTV:CAC ratio for your affiliate program performance.
Run a cash flow model: simulate scenarios (low affiliate performance, slow adoption, high churn) to ensure you can afford commission payments without harming operations.

With affiliate marketing you would only pay affiliates when you received a payment.

Step 4: Build Tracking & Technical Setup

Make sure the tracking works fully automated & you offer affiliate multiple ways to promote you (link or coupon tracking). Full installation guide, or see the individual steps needed;
- Install tracking script; places cookie when someone clicks an affiliate link.
- Install sign up snippet; sends email (and/or UID) from referral signing up.
- Connect payment processor; Connect Stripe or setup API to send payments
- When using stripe; this works out of the box with Reditus, you don't need to do anything here. When a commission is not paid yet and the original payment is refunded, the commission will automatically be rejected.
- When using the API; You can send us refund data, see the API endpont here.
Choose a cookie/attribution window; many SaaS programs use 30-90 days. The cookie period is only related to the click to sign up period, once someone signed up (becomes a referral) there is no time limit anymore.

Step 5: Legal Terms, Commission Models & Policies

Provide a clear written affiliate agreement covering: commission type, payout schedule, thresholds, refund/chargeback policy, permitted vs restricted promotional channels (e.g. no trademark bidding, no spam, no misleading claims), disclosure requirements. Use our template for this, make a copy!

Add the Reditus tracking script to your privacy terms & add Reditus as a sub processor. Good to know; You DON'T have to ask for cookie consent when adding the Reditus cookie.
Want to exclude certain products / subscriptions to exclude from generating commissions? You can do this. By adding Meta data to your Stripe products you can exclude them from generating commissions. See here how to set this up.
Do you allow affiliates to run paid ads? Setup your policy within Reditus and automatically reject referrals generated via Google paid ads.

Step 6: Design Attractive Commission Structure & Incentives

Commission model decisions. Use tiered commission structures or have only one. Leverage one time bonuses for affiliates who do something for you; write a blog, do a review, create a video, publish a social post etc.
Want to give something to the referral? A discount, extended trial, extra credits or anything else? Leverage our webhooks to assign this automatically in your systems.

Check out the Reditus marketplace to see what other SaaS companies are offering affiliates.

Step 7: Prepare Marketing / Affiliate Assets

By creating ready to use assets, affiliates can easily & quickly start promoting you. Maybe even more importantly, the materials they use will stay on brand!
When creating a resource folder, think about adding;
- Logo's
- Screenshots of your SaaS
- Banners / Visuals
- (Explainer) video's of your SaaS
- Product walkthroughs (gifs / video's / other)
- Your Ideal Customer Profile
- Blog materials/ Idea's
- List of your best performing landing pages / content / keywords
Want to take it one step further? Think about creating a GPT, which is trained on your company details and for affiliates. So whenever they want to create some kind of content, they can simply ask your GPT. It will help to keep things on brand, accurate & keep you in control.
Examples: Some programs (in “20 SaaS Affiliate Marketing Statistics”) say that affiliate programs with higher performance provide ready-made creatives, and those assets correlate with higher growth.

Ask yourself; how do I want my affiliates to promote me? What would they need to do this quickly? Make sure you provide everything they need.

Step 8: Onboarding affiliate & Support them along the way

The first thing to do; set up an automated onboarding sequence: welcome email, tutorial or guide, FAQs, contact point.
- Set up the automated onboarding sequence via Reditus
- Send affiliate data to your CRM, to use your own e-mail system.
Invite your own network & partners. The are people which already know you + your product, and could be giving a kick start to your affiliate program results.
- Add "Affiliate program' to the footer of your site
- Create a landing page for your affiliate program
Provide ongoing support: monthly updates, content prompts, promotional ideas. Encouragement matters: programs with regular communication see higher affiliate retention.
Track affiliate activation: how many affiliates take action; link clicks, generated referrals etc. Segment affiliates and create campaigns per segment to activate the dormant ones and motivate the active affiliates to do even more.
Run campaigns with one-off promotions; "Create a Blog post mentioning us upcoming month and receive a $50 bonus." Kick start content by offering an one-time bonus for affiliates. Do make sure you only offer to high quality affiliates with a certain Domain Authority.

FAQs for Launching your Affiliate Program

Q: What Minimum Revenue or Product Milestones Should I Hit Before Launching?

A: While it depends on your model, many SaaS wait until they have $20k Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) that can support commission payouts, stable conversion rates, and product retention.If you want to do anything sooner, consider an in-app referral program.

Q: How long will it take to see results from an affiliate program?

A: Affiliate programs often take 3-6 months to build momentum; recruiting, onboarding, creating content, and establishing trust with affiliates take time. You are adding two more layers to your marketing/sales funnel; you have to recruit affiliates, and they have to promote you. Keep this in mind when expecting results.

Q: How does Reditus help us to achieve (quick) results?

A: If you want Reditus to help you to get more affiliates, you want to look at listing your affiliate program in affiliate program marketplace. Affiliates see in their dashboard the new programs listed, and could apply to your program directly.

Q: What payout thresholds are fair, without hurting cash flow and avoiding faurd

A: Many SaaS affiliate programs use a threshold (e.g. €50-€200 or local equivalent) and pay monthly. The way payouts work; affiliates have to generate paid referrals, which generate commissions. The commissions will be accumulated into a payout, payouts are generated at the 1st of the month. The payout treshold will kick in now; affiliates are only be paid out when the accumulated amount surpassed your set treshold.

Q: What happens if a customer refunds or cancels; how does that affect affiliate commission?

A: When a referral cancels; no more commissions will be generated. We will only generate commissions when you actually received a payment. When you use Stripe and gave a refund, we will automatically reject the commission (if it isn't paid yet). If you are using our API, make sure to send us refund data.

Watch Now: Maximize Earnings with Affiliate Marketing

Check out our YouTube video for expert tips on boosting your affiliate program’s success!