Referral or affiliate programs are an excellent way to promote your business and reach a larger audience. It’s an effective marketing channel. Around 80 percent of brands use affiliate programs to generate sales.
The way affiliate programs work is straightforward; affiliates drive traffic to your website through social media, blogs, videos, paid ads, and other marketing channels. They get a commission for every sale they generate.
Of course, you need the right platform to manage your program.
An affiliate marketing platform like OSI Affiliate makes it easy to manage an affiliate program. The cloud-based referral software helps you scale your results by identifying your most loyal customers.
This OSI Affiliate review covers everything you need to know about this referral program software. Let’s start by discussing the platform’s features.
OSI Affiliate Features
OSI Affiliate boasts an extensive set of features for managing your in-house affiliate program. Here are the key features of the platform.
Campaign Management
You manage your campaign from a central dashboard. There is a dashboard for your business and a second one for affiliates that they can access from the user login. The admin dashboard lets you track your affiliates, see how they perform, set up campaigns, and manage your payouts.
The affiliate dashboard helps your affiliates see how they are performing. You can customize the affiliate dashboard, so it fits with your branding.
OSI Affiliate has integrations with lots of different platforms. There are integrations with leading SaaS eCommerce and sales software like Shopify, MailChimp, LeadPages, BigCommerce, etc. The integrations allow for effective affiliate tracking.
Fraud Detection
Fraud is a major problem in affiliate marketing. OSI Affiliate has five fraud protection features. The fraud detection features help you identify unscrupulous affiliates.
The software detects in various ways. For example, it analyzes the IP address of each click or impression to ensure they’re unique. You can also track things like the refund rate across your affiliates.
You can monitor the Affiliate Tracking ID, track unique clicks and impressions, and more through the dashboard. Reducing the risk of fraud will save your business a lot of money.
Smart Rewards Distribution
You will have a lot of affiliates on your affiliate program. Naturally, you want to reward your best affiliates.
OSI Affiliate allows you to reward or incentivize your affiliates or referral partners in various ways. For example, you can offer discounts, percentage commissions, and even gift cards.
You can view sales and statistics from your central admin dashboard. Affiliates or referral partners can track rewards in real-time on their dashboards too. The feature makes it easy to track and compare affiliate performance.
The platform uses a multi-tier system to reward and support affiliates. Rewarding your best affiliates will incentivize them to work harder to promote your business.
Social Media Sharing and Email Campaigns
You can run affiliate campaigns across multiple channels with OSI Affiliate. Your affiliates can share their affiliate links across whichever channel they have a presence.
You can create affiliate marketing packs for your affiliate networks as well. For example, you can create banner graphics for social media, email swipes, etc. The resources you upload are accessible via the affiliate dashboard.
OSI Affiliate also has an influencer directory you can use to search for affiliate partners. It’s handy for identifying affiliates.
Finally, OSI Affiliate has an email/newsletter option. You can use this to manage your affiliate recruitment funnels. You can create and automate email campaigns to send to affiliates. With the email triggers, you can track who has opened your email, read your message, and responded.
Coupon Code Tracking
Everyone loves a discount.
Running promotions through your affiliates is a great way to boost sales from your customer base. You can issue your affiliates coupon codes and set custom commissions with OSI Affiliate.
Everything can be tracked from the dashboard. You can see how often the code was used, sales, and how much you need to pay your affiliates. The data is available in real-time.
OSI Affiliate Pricing
OSI Affiliate has two billing options — monthly and yearly. Payments are spread across two packages.
The Basic package is $47 a month or $470 a year. You get up to 25,000 unique visitors and 200 affiliate users. That’s more than enough for most small businesses.
The Professional plan is $97 for monthly access or $970 a year. You get access to everything in the basic package, a dedicated account manager, and a thank you pop-up survey.
OSI Affiliate offers a 15-day free trial for new users. You can try the paid packages for 15 days for free. You can cancel anytime.
OSI Affiliate Pros and Cons
You should now have a sense of what you get with OSI Affiliate. Below is a summary of the pros and cons of the platform:
Pros
- OSI Affiliate supports both affiliate and referral marketing.
- Multiple payment options. You can pay affiliates via PayPal, gift cards, or by check.
- The OSI Affiliate fraud detection feature helps you weed out the bad affiliates. You can check duplicate sales, sales abuse, and unique impressions.
- You can use OSI Affiliate to run affiliate contests and offer smart rewards to your top affiliates.
- OSI Affiliate has integrations with most ecommerce platforms, payment gateways, and social networks.
Cons
- You need to input your card details to sign up for the 15-day trial. Keep track of the signup date to avoid a surprise billing.
- It can take a while to get used to the dashboard.
Final Thoughts
If you’re looking to get into affiliate marketing, you need specialized affiliate marketing software. OSI Affiliate offers a robust platform that helps you run both an affiliate and referral marketing program.
OSI Affiliate has a great range of features. You can manage your campaigns, reach out to potential affiliates, distribute payments, track coupon codes, and detect fraud. It is easy to set up and integrate with most ecommerce software. OSI Affiliate does have a learning curve. However, it is a well-designed product that can help you expand your business and build better affiliate partnerships.