For our Enterprise customers, Bonus rewards allow you to create automated incentives for affiliates as they reach specific benchmarks. Those benchmarks can be based on lifetime sales revenue or number of conversions
This is a great way to encourage affiliates to bring in more sales for a reward. For example, if an affiliate has 4 conversions and they know that a 5th conversion will grant them a bonus, then it’s more likely they’ll work harder to reach that milestone.
You also have the flexibility to decide how to reward your affiliates: what benchmarks to set and how many there are.
How to Set Up an Offer with Bonus Tiers
Once the bonus tiers feature has been enabled on your Refersion account, you can navigate to the Manage>Offers tab and click into any of your existing offers to configure bonus tier settings:
This tab won’t be immediately available to you when you’re creating a new offer. After creating the offer and saving your changes, the Bonus Commissions tab will appear thereafter.
On this page you’ll be able to configure a few settings:
Bonuses Enabled: You have the option either enable or disable bonus tiers for the particular commission offer that you are editing.
Base Bonuses On: You have 2 options for calculating each bonus tier: Total Sales Amount or Number of Conversions (Please note: in both of these cases only approved conversions will be used to track bonus tier movement).
Bonus Delivery: You have 3 options for rewarding your affiliates when they reach a new bonus tier.
Choose How to Reward Affiliates
Let’s take a closer look at the bonus delivery options
Commission: When a new bonus milestone is reached, a bonus commission credit can be automatically issued to the affiliate. You’d pay your affiliate for this bonus commission just like you pay them for the commission that they regularly earn
Gift Cards: When a new milestone is reached, a gift card can automatically be created for and sent to affiliates (exclusive to Shopify Plus stores).
Report: Upon reaching a new bonus tier, Refersion will automatically generate a report that’s emailed to you and you can reward affiliates however you’d like — merchandise, manual payments, etc.
Important Note: Our bonus tiers feature looks at your affiliates' lifetime performance in their current offer. This means that if you move affiliates from one bonus tier offer to a new offer that also has bonus tiers, then your affiliates will be able to re-earn bonuses on the new offer, but they will be starting from scratch.
How Can I Use Bonus Tiers to Motivate My Affiliates?
One route that we’ve seen merchants find success with is by setting one very low benchmark that all affiliates can easily obtain.
It’s not uncommon to find that only a small percentage of your affiliates are driving the large portion of your revenue. If this is the case for your program, then an incentive like Bonus Tiers can be a great way to push under performing affiliates over the finish line to recording their first few conversions.
By setting a bonus tier at a very low barrier (maybe 5 conversions or even just 1) and offering a low-cost reward to your affiliates like a commission bonus or free swag, you’ll be able to drive more overall engagement with your affiliates and prevent a loss of consistent promotion.
Have More Flexibility with Your Commission Structures
Bonuses are also a way to keep your affiliate program costs within budget, while simultaneously keeping your commission rates competitive
Typically, we advise kickstarting your program with a lower commission offering. By offering the highest commission possible within your margin, you limit the ability to raise commissions later or offer additional incentives. This also sets a tone for your affiliate program that can later be a major disadvantage in the case you ever need to lower commissions because of costs.
Ultimately, bonuses give you more flexibility. You can set a commission rate that fits well within your budget, and then use bonus offers to attract top talent. It’s also a way to avoid having to lower commissions, instead you can only offer bonuses that fit with your budget for specific affiliates
Interested in having this feature turned on?
Bonus tiers are available for our Enterprise clients. Shoot us a message at [email protected] or using the in-app chat if you'd like to discuss.