Best Affiliate Marketing Programs

Best Affiliate Marketing Programs: 12 Amazing Examples You’ll Want to Copy

Enelin Toneva

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Affiliate marketing is a constantly evolving field with a promising future and an ever-increasing market. Its global value is projected to increase to $36.9 billion by 2030, more than double its current value. This signals affiliate marketing’s growing importance in comparison to conventional advertising.

If you haven’t already done so, it’s smart to start looking into building an affiliate program for your own brand. To help you, I’ve selected the best affiliate marketing programs from which you can take inspiration.

Why Do You Need an Affiliate Marketing Program?

The greatest benefit of the best affiliate marketing programs compared to conventional marketing is superior cost efficiency. Instead of increasing your brand’s reach solely through your in-house marketing capacities, you can outsource marketing efforts to affiliates, who receive incentives in return. This can dramatically cut down your marketing budget.

The other most obvious benefit is the greater flexibility and adaptability offered by affiliate marketing. With a strong affiliate network, you can easily implement multi-channel strategies and experiment with a broad content variety.

What Makes a Great Affiliate Program?

The quality of an affiliate marketing program can be gauged from two sides: the perspective of the affiliate marketer, and that of the brand doing the marketing. While for affiliate marketers the quality of the program is mostly determined by how easy it is to earn money, the perspective of the brand has other factors that take precedence:

  • High net revenue: A great affiliate program can bring in a consistent revenue stream while making sure that affiliate commissions and other expenses don’t harm your income.
  • Broad affiliate network: Successful affiliate programs are capable of mobilizing a broad network of affiliates across different platforms, channels, and niches.
  • High-impact affiliates: Some affiliate programs aim to onboard affiliates with high impact rather than simply going for quantity—leveraging influencers towards this goal is known as influencer affiliate marketing.
  • Convenient processes: Convenient onboarding, referral, payout, and other relevant processes will make the experience way more pleasant for affiliates, inspiring them to generate more conversions.
  • Affiliate nurturing: The same goes for building solid and supportive relationships with affiliates—they will appreciate working with a brand that is there to help them every step of the affiliate journey.

12 Best Affiliate Marketing Programs to Take Inspiration From

I’ve collected some examples of the best affiliate marketing programs that you may look into for inspiration. This includes both some of our own affiliate programs that we helped design and are especially proud of, as well as several others.

1. SafetyWing

SafetyWing Affiliate Marketing Program

The SafetyWing affiliate program was launched by our CEO in 2018, building a consistently growing affiliate network that currently generates over $350k in monthly sales.

This was achieved mainly by establishing successful affiliate relationships with high-impact influencers in the travel and digital nomad niches, such as Dear Alyne (over 3.4 million followers on multiple social platforms), and online communities such as Nomad List or Digital Nomads Around the World.

What Makes This Affiliate Program So Good?

The program’s success owes a lot to its convenience. The entire affiliate funnel is simple and well-designed, making it easy and intuitive for affiliates to create an affiliate link or widget and follow their progress through a special dashboard.

The 365-day cookie window also sets it apart from so many affiliate programs, which usually keep their cookie window to around a month. The minimum payout threshold is only $10, making it easy to withdraw money at any time, too.

2. Click and Grow

Click and Grow Affiliate Marketing Program

Click and Grow is an online store and portal dedicated to indoor gardening, with an affiliate program also designed by Vivian Agency. In the first six months, in the second half of 2021, the program reached $20k worth of sales, progressively going up to $350k in 2023.

The program’s overall reach has also been a success, beginning with 122 initial affiliates and now approaching four digits.

What Makes This Affiliate Program So Good?

This program shows the importance of a well-designed program that can easily manage multiple channels. Click and Grow’s affiliate program successfully integrated five Shopify stores, making them manageable from a single dashboard.

Encouraging affiliate bloggers and content creators to naturally include Click and Grow referrals into high-quality content of their own design helped the brand gain a positive, trustworthy reputation, bringing in even more affiliates.

3. OneWayFly

OneWayFly Affiliate Marketing Program

We helped design OneWayFly’s affiliate program in 2022, helping it become one of the top travel affiliate programs. Despite the company’s niche focus (one-way flights), the affiliate program helped it gain enough revenue to compete against well-established flight companies, by focusing the promotion on Asian travel communities.

Right now, the program reports over 120 active affiliates and roughly $40k in revenue.

What Makes This Affiliate Program So Good?

The program’s initial focus on Asian social media communities helped kickstart its later success—if cleverly used, a social media marketing strategy can create an unexpectedly high number of leads.

OneWayFly also offers a fairly unique perk to its affiliates—OneWayFly can use its channels to reshare affiliates’ original content, making the relationship more reciprocal.

4. Prep Expert

Prep Expert Affiliate Marketing Program

A well-established online provider of prep courses, Prep Expert already had an affiliate program when they contacted Vivian Agency to help with a revamp, optimizing the program for modern demands.

The results were fantastic—the first year of cooperation brought $136k in affiliate sales.

What Makes This Affiliate Program So Good?

One factor that helped the revamped affiliate program take off is the use of automations. This helped take the marketing team’s attention off certain repetitive manual tasks and focus on other activities. The revamped program helped build an expanded affiliate marketing network, primarily made up of micro-influencers in education and parenting niches.

Incentivizing the affiliates to promote Prep Expert’s free webinar also proved to be successful in creating conversions, which tells us that urging affiliates to offer incentives on behalf of the brand has a positive impact.

5. Resumeble

Resumeble Affiliate Marketing Program

Resumeble was another established client that approached Vivian Agency with the goal of revamping their existing affiliate program.

The result? The new program doubled the sales in only four months, expanding the brand’s presence to four different channels and bringing in a total of 500 affiliate partners.

What Makes This Affiliate Program So Good?

Resumeble’s niche—career advice and resume writing services—turned out to have a high potential for lead generation on LinkedIn, which was the focal point of the new program.

Along with this, we implemented a tracking system to monitor and analyze all affiliate traffic, sales, and performance data, letting us adapt the program as necessary by following real-time insights.

6. JRPass

JRPass Affiliate Marketing Program

JRPass, a Japan Rail Pass provider designed for tourists, was facing financial trouble that required it to raise its prices, making affiliate deals less profitable in the long run. This led many affiliates to drop out of the program.

To keep its affiliate program from falling in revenue and revitalize it, JRPass asked us for help. The result was a success, rebounding the sales back to their original value.

What Makes This Affiliate Program So Good?

The revitalization effort was a success largely due to a successful strategy of relationship building and affiliate nurturing. Open and honest communication about the consequences of the price hike led the affiliates to stay open about the potential upsides of continuing to work with JRPass.

With believably optimistic projections about the company’s future financial prospects and attractive offers such as cross-promotions, many affiliates were persuaded to stay on board, while some new ones were successfully onboarded too.

7. Shopify

Shopify Affiliate Marketing Program

Shopify is known to have one of the most high-paying affiliate programs, offering up to $150 for each successful full-priced plan referral. The program is only open to creators with an up-to-date website, an active audience, and original content.

Despite its lucrative rewards, the Shopify affiliate program is free to join.

What Makes This Affiliate Program So Good?

As an already established name in its industry, Shopify can afford to “gatekeep” its affiliate program. The relative exclusivity helps keep the quality of marketing on a high level, preserving the brand’s image.

An additional incentive for new affiliates is a generous affiliate package, including a creative library, lead magnets, a newsletter, and curated email content.

8. Semrush

Semrush Affiliate Marketing Program

Semrush is a leading SEO and digital marketing tool, hosting another of the most profitable affiliate programs available—with a flat reward of $200 available for every successful subscription sale.

With a unique twist, this affiliate program also offers a flat reward of $10 for every free trial activated through a referral link.

What Makes This Affiliate Program So Good?

Although the value of affiliate rewards may seem overwhelming, the premium cost of Semrush packages still means that any referral rakes in considerable profit for the company, while keeping affiliates heavily incentivized.

The affiliate package is also generous, including promo materials, access to online courses, and dedicated affiliate managers.

9. Rakuten Advertising

Rakuten Advertising Affiliate Marketing Program

Rakuten Advertising is an affiliate marketing platform that helps affiliate marketers connect with brands. It has its own set of affiliate commission structures that pay affiliates out according to specific terms set by the brand.

In most cases, this platform serves as a bridge between smaller, less established brands and people who want to work as their affiliates.

What Makes This Affiliate Program So Good?

Rakuten Advertising stands out due to offering several distinct commission structures that brands can choose from when building their affiliate program, many of them atypical when compared to most other programs. An example is Multitouch, which rewards first-click attribution.

These unconventional commission structures may fit certain product categories and brands more than others—for example, a perfume vendor may choose to offer rewards in the form of product coupons rather than money.

10. Amazon Associates

Amazon Associates Affiliate Marketing Program

Another well-known company with one of the best affiliate marketing programs on this list, Amazon uses its Amazon Associates platform to serve as an intermediary between Amazon vendors and affiliate marketers.

Amazon advertises its affiliate program as a convenient way for bloggers and content creators to monetize their traffic by including referrals to products they want to recommend.

What Makes This Affiliate Program So Good?

Amazon offers its associates a set of tools that make it extremely easy to set up referrals, guaranteeing marketing profit as well as convenience on behalf of the affiliates.

The flexible commissions, which range between 1% and 10% depending on the product category, help adjust commission based on market demands, making sure that the provider doesn’t come out short.

11. WP Engine

WP Engine Affiliate Marketing Program

WP Engine is a third-party WordPress hosting service that has its own affiliate program, rewarding affiliates who successfully refer people toward WP Engine’s hosting packages, as well as WordPress themes and plug-ins.

With a minimum commission of $200 per successful sale, it’s one of the most lucrative programs for affiliates on this list.

What Makes This Affiliate Program So Good?

The high cash reward is a perfect incentive for affiliates. Still, web hosting referrals statistically don’t make a lot of conversions. This makes payouts worth $200 or more only occasional.

In practice, most successful conversions will be made for the far cheaper WordPress themes and plug-ins, which are the real source of most of WP Engine’s affiliate revenue.

12. Hubspot

Hubspot

A comprehensive digital marketing CRM, HubSpot has a highly popular affiliate program that’s open to everyone, regardless of their experience with the software.

It has a somewhat unconventional commission model, offering a 30% rate for referred subscriptions, recurring for up to a year. 

What Makes This Affiliate Program So Good?

The affiliate program has two extra tiers—super affiliate and elite affiliate—which are unlocked by going over 100 referred signups per month.

This incentive encourages affiliates to drive as many conversions as possible, especially since the extra tiers come with bonuses such as content audits, more assets, or a dedicated affiliate manager.

Need Help Building an Affiliate Program? Don’t Hesitate to Reach Out!

Have you looked at the best affiliate marketing programs highlighted here, but are still not sure where to begin when building an affiliate program?

Don’t worry, we know it can be a daunting task—and that’s why we’ve got you covered.

You’ve seen some examples of our work right here in this article. Your own future affiliate program may join this list of successes—all you need to do is write to us or schedule a call so we can chat.