Partner programs allow you to set up referral relationships so that others can sell and refer your product and earn commissions. Referrals are among the most effective ways to dramatically boost your sales, as they cost far less than attracting new leads. They’re also likely to draw more qualified customers to your business.

Partner programs are available for Ontraport Plus and higher level users.

Create a partner program

Before following these steps, be sure that you’ve configured the global settings for your partner programs first.

• Go to → Programs → .
• Name your program.
• Select the type of partner program you’d like to create, called the Program Type.
1. 1 Tier: Your partners make a commission when one of their referrals buys your product.
2. 2 Tier: Your partners can also make another — usually smaller — commission when one of their referrals becomes a partner, and one of their referrals buys your product.
1. This option rewards your partners for referring people who also refer.
• Choose how much information you want to share with your partners, such as full name and email address or keeping sales anonymous.
• Show partners information on declined charges: Check this option if you want to share information about failed transactions with your partners in their affiliate center.
• Show partner complete purchase history for each referred client: Check this option if you want to show a referral’s complete purchase history in your partner’s affiliate center.
• Notify partner when they have earned a commission with an email: You can choose if you want to send an email every time your partner makes a sale.
1. Select “Send Email Notification,” and choose which email you’d like to send.
• Click .

Add commissionable products

Commissions are paid only on products that you add to each partner program. You won’t pay commissions on products in your account that are not connected to a partner program.There is no limit to the number of products you can have in the program or the number of times the same product appears in various programs.

• Click on your partner program to go to its settings.
• Click .
• Select your product from the dropdown.
1. Or click + New Product to create a new one.
• Type: Choose if you want to offer a percentage or a flat rate for your commission.
• Level 1 Commission: Add the percentage or flat rate for your level 1 commission.
• Level 2 Commission: Add the percentage or flat rate for your level 2 commission.
• Click .

Customize and view the data in your Partners collection

Once you set up your partner program, you’ll be able to access your data by clicking .

To customize the data you see, click to add any of the following columns to your Partners collection.

Here’s what each column tells you:

Partner – Your partners’ contact information

1. By default, this column will show your partners’ name and email address. To add more fields, click ›.

Owed – The total amount of commissions you owe to each partner

Visits – The number of unique visits generated by your partners’ promo tools

Leads – The number of leads generated by your partner

1. This number is not unique — it counts the total number of forms your referred contacts submit.

# Sales – The number of sales made by your partner

Total Sales – How much your referred customers have spent on promoted product — shown in dollar amounts

Total Commission Paid – How much you’ve already paid your partner — shown in dollar amounts

Signup Date – The date your partner joined your program

# Refunds – The number of sales made by your partner that were refunded

1. Refunds will only appear here if you’ve already approved the commission and paid your partner.

Total Refunds – How much you’ve refunded to your referred customers — shown in dollar amounts

1. Refunds will only appear here if you’ve already approved the commission and paid your partner.

Check out this article to learn more about paying your partners.

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Before you can create your first partner program, you’ll need to set your partner global settings, which will apply to any partner programs you create. If you decide to set up more than one partner program, each will have its own settings, while the global settings will apply across all programs.

• Hover over  on the top right of your screen, select  → Advanced Features → Partner Programs, and toggle the switch to .
•  will appear in your main navigation across the top of your screen. Hover over it and click  Settings → Global Settings. Configure your settings:
1. Indicate how partners will be paid (PayPal, check or their choice).
2. Decide on a pay threshold, which is the amount of commissions that must accrue before you pay the partner.
3. Select whether you wish your commission to be paid to the first or last referrer.
4. Select when cookies expire. Cookies are used to track people who click on links. If a potential referred lead clicks on a partner’s link, it’ll cookie the lead in their browser for the amount of time you set here. That means that if the lead fills out the form or makes a purchase during that time, the credit will be given to your partner; if the lead completes these steps after the cookie expiration, there is no way to track which partner should get credit for the sale.
• Click .

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Promotional tools are the assets you’ll provide to your partners to promote and sell your products and services for you. Promotional tools can come in the form of links, banners, lightboxes or HTML email messages.

The most common type of promo tools are affiliate links. Once you’ve created an affiliate link, a merge field will be created for it. You can use merge fields in an email message for your partners to provide them their unique affiliate link to start promoting your business. 

To use other types of promo tools — banner, lightbox and email message — you need to create a WordPress partner center.

• If you haven’t set up your partner program, do that first.
• Go to  → Programs at the top of your screen, and click on the partner program for which you wish to add a promotional tool.
• Go to Promo Tools → .
1. Name the promotional item.
2. Type in the URL of the order page or opt-in form for the product the promotional item is selling.
1. Each URL must have the Ontraport tracking script installed in order for the referral to be tracked to the referrer properly. If the page is an Ontraport Page (including if it’s an Ontraport Page hosted on a PilotPress-integrated WordPress site), the tracking script is automatically appended so you do not need to worry about this.
3. Select which product group this promotional tool will belong to (optional).
4. Select what type of tool you wish to create.

   Direct link: This type of promo tool uses the raw URL of the page you’re linking to. Note, if you change the destination URL of a direct link, the promo tool will break; therefore, we highly recommend using standard links.

   Standard Link: This type of promo tool briefly redirects clicks through your Ontraport tracking domain or through your custom domain if you’ve got one set up. The advantage of this is that if you ever need to change the location of the page you want prospects driven to, you can easily do so, and all your partner links will still work.

   Banner

   A banner ad is a commonly used method of attracting a click from a prospect. You’ll design the banner ad, then upload it. Then, your partners can download the banner, which will contain their partner referral link, and add it into their web pages.

   Lightbox

   Upload any image and, when your partners download it, they’ll get a special code which they can paste onto their web page. That code will create a pop up lightbox that has that image containing their partner referral link.

   Email message

   These are marketing emails written by you, usually containing links (either direct or standard links, as explained above) to your product pages. Your partners will simply copy and paste the email message into their own email service and send them to their mailing list.

5. Complete the following optional items, which support the organization of your promo tools in your account:
1. Type in an ad campaign name
2. Type in an ad name
6. Select a stored image (only if using lightbox or banner).
• Click .

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Before you begin promoting your partner program, we recommend testing the following:

• Your partner sign-up process: This will confirm that someone can sign up for your partner program and get added into the appropriate partner program.
• A referred customer’s opt-in or purchase: This will confirm that a referred customer can sign up (or purchase a product from your business) and that the referral will be tracked and credited to the partner that referred them.

Part 1: Test your partner sign-up process

• Navigate to the page that contains your partner sign-up form and fill it out using a test email address. Make sure you use an email address that’s not currently registered in your account.
• Check the new partner’s contact record (the contact record that was automatically created for the test email address you placed in the form) to ensure it has populated the name of your partner program in the Partner Program field in the Referral Info tab.
• Check the email inbox for the address you entered for the welcome email you send to those who sign up to be a partner.
1. If your welcome email includes a promo tool link, click on that unique link to make sure it leads to a page containing your opt-in form or order form so you can test the opt-in next.
• If you have a partner center, follow these steps:
1. Check the inbox for the email address you entered for the email containing your username and password for the partner center inside the WordPress site.
2. Use that information to log in to your partner center.
3. Go to the promotional tools section and copy one of the tool links. Make sure this promo tool link leads to a page containing your opt-in form or order form so you can test the opt-in next.
4. If you have an integrated WordPress site, a partner center, and have added a step in your automation map to Give WP Membership Access to Partners, you can also check your WordPress site Memberships tab to see if the new partner was added as a member after that partner has logged in for the first time.

Part 2: Test a referred customer’s opt-in or purchase

• Compose an email outside of Ontraport that includes your partner’s unique promo tool link. This could be the link inside the partner’s welcome email in Part 1. Send the email to a different email address that you own, but make sure you use an email address that’s not currently registered in your account.
  1. Send this email just as one of your partners would, from their regular email account – not from within Ontraport.
• In your default browser, make sure you clear the browser’s cache and clear the browser’s cookies before proceeding.
• Open the email that you sent and click the promo tool link in the email. It should load the page with the opt-in form you created. Fill out the form with a different email address that you own, and submit it.
• Go back into Ontraport. Find the new contact record, which was generated when you filled out the opt-in form, and click the name to open it.
• From within the contact record, click the Referral Info tab to make sure that both the first and last referrer fields have the new partner name and the partner’s email address in them.
• Still within the contact record, log a purchase of a commissionable product for this contact. Here’s how:
1. Click on   at the top of the contact record.
2. Select a commissionable product that is part of the partner program from the drop down under Item.
3. In the Payment Info section, select Log a Transaction (don’t charge card) from the drop down next to “I would like to…”
4. Click  to add the purchase to the contact record.
• Go to → Commissions → Pending Commissions. You should see the pending commission for the transaction you just logged. If you do, you have successfully tested your partner program!

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A partner center is a user-friendly place where someone who has signed up to be your partner can go to access information about being a part of your partner program. They’ll be able to:

1. View and export their earnings for commissions, refunds and payments
2. View and export their affiliate reports based on date range
3. Update their PayPal email address information
4. Update their login information
5. Access their promotional tools, links and SubID code

If you only want to give your partners affiliate links, and you have a partner program in Ontraport, you don’t need a partner center. However, if you want to use banner, lightbox or email promo tools or give your customers a place to check on their sales, you need a WordPress partner center. A partner center will also help your partners be more self-sufficient and organized, and it tends to reduce the number of support requests. Partner centers are available to those with Ontraport Plus accounts and above.

Prerequisites:

• You will need to create a partner program in your Ontraport account before creating a partner center if you haven’t yet
• You will also need a WordPress site that is integrated with Ontraport and has the PilotPress plugin.

Steps

• Enable the partner center in WordPress by logging in to your WordPress site and going to Settings → PilotPress → Ontraport Integration Settings.
  
• Check the box for Enable Partner Center.
• In the PilotPress Settings, you can set the page you’d like your partners to land on after they log in by going to the Post Login Redirect Settings. Select Partners Redirect to Partner Center, then click .

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Once you have your partner program set up, you will create a sign-up form to get partners enrolled into the program. If you’ve created a partner center, you’ll also need to send them their partner center login information so they can retrieve all their unique affiliate links to promote your products. Finally, you’ll want to send a welcome email and possibly set up ongoing milestone automation to recognize the efforts of partners who achieve a certain amount of sales.

In Ontraport, there’s no need to build this automation map from scratch — we’ve provided a prebuilt automation map in the Automations Marketplace that you can download to your account for free.

Partner sign-up, approval and welcome automation

• In , select  and select Partner Sign Up, Welcome and Thanks from the list.
• Once you’ve uploaded the automation, follow the step-by-step directions on the right.

Thank partners for each sale they make:

• Go to  → Messages →  and create your email.
• To turn on the email notifications in your partner program:
  1. Go to  → Programs, and select your partner program.
  2. Locate the section called “Notify partner when they have earned a commission with an email” and select “Send email notification.”
  3. Select the email message created above.

Acknowledge partners for reaching milestones:

For each milestone you wish to create, follow this process:

• Go to  → Messages →  and create an email.
  1. In your email congratulating your partner on reaching a milestone, you may wish to use the [Total Sales] or [Number of Sales] merge fields to indicate their exact achievement.
• To create goals for milestones, go to  and create a new automation map or edit an existing one (you can choose to use the Partner Sign Up, Welcome and Thanks for this).
  1. Add a trigger for Field is Updated.
  2. Select the field Total Sales. Click .
  3. Add a condition and set it “equal to” the value of the total sales for the partner milestone.
  4. Add the following trigger settings to ensure that contacts only achieve one milestone at a time and will move up to the next milestone in the future:
     1. Who can activate this trigger?: Only contacts on this automation map.
     2. If contact is already on map, then …: Add here again when triggered.
     3. This trigger can only be activated once per contact: Check this box.
• Add a element below the trigger and select the email you created for the milestone in step one.

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The Ontraport partner programs use cookies to track your referred customers and identify the partner who referred them. A cookie is a small, invisible text file that remains available in the customer’s browser. When the customer opts in or purchases a product, the Ontraport tracking script and form processor read the cookie and add the partner information into the customer’s contact record. This makes the referral information extremely reliable.

There are two different useful tracking tools that your partners can use to their benefit: Partner SubID Tracking and Partner Tracking Pixel. These are available for Ontraport Pro and above accounts.

Partner SubID Tracking

Partner SubID Tracking allows your partners to track their promotional efforts so they can see what is and isn’t working as they work to sell your products. This feature is only available to your partners if you have a partner center and your partner has been given access.

For example, let’s say you’re a partner and you decide you’d like to spend some money to generate traffic for an offer, so you bid on a few different Adwords keywords. The SubID Tracking feature allows you to add a tracking ID (aka SubID) for each keyword so that our system will tell you (the partner) which keywords are generating visits, leads and sales. Armed with this information, partners can make more confident decisions about how to spend money and ditch the things that aren’t working for them.

To add Partner SubID Tracking, the partner needs to add a bit of code with a tag (aka a SubID) to the end of their partner links, and Ontraport will automatically track and report their visits, leads, and commissions. To do this, the partner will log in to your partner center, click on the Reports tab, and follow the instructions there to simply add &sid=[my subID] to the end of their partner links.

Partner Tracking Pixel

If your partners use a third-party shopping cart to sell your products, they will need to place the partner tracking pixel on their shopping cart’s checkout confirmation page in order for Ontraport to correctly track their sales.

These steps should be followed by an Ontraport Certified Consultant or professional developer.

• Go to  → Developer Preferences and Resources → Get Partner Tracking Pixel.
• Copy the Partner Tracking Pixel to the clipboard to use in the other application.
• Configure the pixel as shown in the Get Partner Tracking Pixel dialog to pass the information you want sent back into Ontraport.

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Once you have your partner program set up and your partners are making sales, you will need to manage your partner commissions and pay your partners.

• If you’ve already set up your partner program, go to  → Commissions. When a partner refers a product and makes a sale on a commissionable product, that sale appears in the “Pending commissions” section.
• There are a number of actions you can perform on a pending commission. Select one or all of the pending commissions to apply the following actions:
  
  1. Approve: Approve the commission. Once a commission is approved, the referring partner will be eligible for payment when they reach their pay threshold.
  2. Email: Send an email to the referring partner regarding the sale.
  3. Export: Download a CSV file of all the pending commissions. This is useful for separate review of the commissions.
  4. Cancel Commission: Decline the commission for a particular sale. If this is done in error, you can re-run the commission on the sale inside the contact record to reinstate the commission.
• Once you’ve approved a commission for a partner, the partner’s sales totals will update in the “Pending payments” section. There are a number of actions you can perform on a pending payment sum to a partner. Select one or more entries to perform these actions:
  
  1. Pay partner: This is where you can mark the commission “paid” after you’ve completed the payment. This has no action other than marking it paid in Ontraport; you still need to pay the partners using the below options.
  2. Download PayPal CSV: Export a PayPal MassPay CSV that you can upload into PayPal and pay via PayPal.
  3. Export: Export the commissions in a regular CSV file for import into your accounting software.
  4. Email: Send an email to the partner regarding payment.
• Once you’ve approved a commission and marked it paid in the pending payments area, that data will appear in the “Commission history” section.

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Once you’ve created a partner program, the partners who join your program will be promoting your product or service using various promotional tools. When referred prospects click on the promotional tool links, they are tracked so that their eventual purchase may be credited to the referring partner.

In some cases, prospects may click multiple promotional tools from various partners. You, as the owner of the partner program, have the power to determine which partner gets paid for that purchase by setting the first and last referrer settings. You will establish these referral settings when you are setting up your partner global settings.

First referrer vs. last referrer

First referrer

When your partners publish a promo tool and prospects click it and then opt in or purchase, their contact record is created in Ontraport and the referring partner’s information is inserted into the first referrer and last referrer field of the contact record. The first referrer field never changes after that.

Last referrer

The last referrer field may change if the contact clicks another partner’s promo tool link and fills out an opt-in form or order form as a result.

Advantages and disadvantages of each

A first referrer payment system encourages partners to work hard to “close the deal” early in a launch. They know if their promo tool link leads to an opt-in or purchase, they have “locked in” the commissions for that contact. The disadvantage is that partners may not have an incentive to continue to support the contacts they have given you, as they have no fear of losing those commissions.

The advantage of a last referrer payment system is that it encourages partners to continue to promote your offer during the entire launch. It may encourage them to continue future promotions and maintain higher service levels because they know they can lose future sales commissions to another partner. The disadvantage is that partners may not mail early in a launch cycle.

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