An affiliate CRM is a somewhat new market for a SaaS product as there are simply not any real solutions on the market until StatsDrone created their game changing app.
The demand for CRM for affiliate marketers
Affiliate marketers have been growing their businesses organically since the invention of affiliate marketing. If you asked an affiliate today what tools they use to run their business, you would hear everything under the sun except for an affiliate CRM tool.
Let's break down some of the tasks and pain points an affiliate would have and some of the ways they solve these things today.
Affiliate marketing & CRM industry comparisons
Just how big is affiliate marketing as an industry compared with the CRM industry?
Let's look at the stats and data.
- Affiliate marketing industry size 2023 - 17Billion USD
- Affiliate marketing industry size 2030 - 36.9B USD
- CRM industry size 2023 - 71.1B USD
- CRM industry size 2030 - 157.3B USD
Within the CRM industry there are many sub industries including marketing automation.
Affiliate marketing has been said to hit $36.9 Billion USD in the next 6 years and if you factor in other marketing segments, it is possible the industry could double over. These 2030 predictions were made before things like AI and ML, Business Intelligence and CRM were factored in. Just looking the affiliate CRM space, this industry segment could become a big one.
What does the perfect CRM for affiliate marketing look like?
Speaking on behalf of affiliates where I have been building affiliate sites for nearly 20 years, I can say there is definitely demand for a CRM for affiliates but nobody has dared to try to build one for that massive community. For affiliate managers themselves, any CRM that comes to mind is Hubspot, Salesforce or Pipedrive as the most popular CRMs used by an affiliate program. Where I believe these CRMs for affiliate managers fall short is the CRMs are designed for sales but less friendly when it comes to retention.
Putting affiliate managers aside, affiliates are simply using many tools to do a big job that now is in a constant state of change than ever before.
Managing account logins
Using Google Sheets or password programs like Lastpass or Roboforms.
Managing negotiated deals
We've asked affiliates how they manage all their exclusive deals and the answers were everywhere; Excel, Google Sheets, Jira, Monday, Trello, Clickup, etc...
Tracking and saving their affiliate data
It is very rare that affiliates will use an affiliate stats aggregator to collect and store their data. The biggest affiliates in any industry will often build their own in-house affiliate stats tracker. Other affiliates record this data manually on spreadsheets and likely most affiliates don't record this anywhere.
Tracking payments and invoices
Affiliates will track invoices manually and some might use software like Quickbooks for all their accounting. The only problem is if you need to look up anything, you need to have 2 screens open at the same time: one showing your affiliate data and the other showing your Quickbooks accounts.
Affiliate program notes & conversation history
Do you know when the last time you talked with any affiliate program? You might have some of this in email but it will also reside in Skype, Telegram, Facebook, Skype, WhatsApp, LinkedIn or whoever that affiliate manager contacts you.
Taking a deeper look into more advanced features that a robust CRM would have.
- contact management
- sales
- lead management
- reports
- analytics
- mobile crm
- sales forecasting
- workflow
- marketing automation
- campaign management
StatsDrone affiliate CRM StatsDrone has 3 core features that make it a unique affiliate CRM and a one of a kind.
- Invoice generator
- Affiliate program notes
- Deal CRM
Invoice generator
In early 2023, StatsDrone created an invoice generator to make life easier for affiliates. This invoice generator saves time for affiliates and makes tracking payments easier. The generator gives affiliates the ability to save all types of templates from your company's invoice details, bank and payment details, payment notes and the ability to save the affiliate program's invoice details as well. The best part is you can view all of your invoices and make it easier to chase down unpaid invoices.
For payments you can setup payment methods like bank wire or ewallets such as PayPal and even do cryptocurrency payments like Bitcoin or USDT.
Affiliate program notes
Many affiliates take notes when doing business with any affiliate program and these notes are done on many systems. This can include spreadsheets, Clickup, Jira, Trello and even Notion. Those notes can also involve deals and other important bits of info that you want other people on your team to see.
Deal CRM
A question I used to ask affiliates: how do you manage all of your deals and offers?
The answers were a mix of everthing from Evernote, Notion, Trello, Google Sheets and you name it. The big pain point affiliates would share is that this data wasn't connected with other pieces of data and that affiliates wanted to have everything in 1 system rather than needing 4 or 5 different SaaS tools to use.
The Deal CRM allows you to configure the start and end dates of your deals and give you notifications when your deal is about to expire.
Changes in market conditions for affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is growing and definitely not under threat, but there are constant disruptions that affiliates have to deal with. A short list of things on the minds of affiliates that they have to stay on top of:
- Compliance issues
- Crytocurrency & blockchain
- AI & ML
- AV (audio & video)
- Advertising laws in countries
- Technology changes
- CRM
AI and Business Intelligence are the likely factors that could see affiliate marketing accelerate and grow in terms of market size. CRM has almost never been discussed as a sub marketing within affiliate marketing but is one that has a lot of potential for growth.