Automate Affiliate Onboarding via Zapier

When you’re bringing a new affiliate on board, you want to make sure you’re protecting your brand, agreeing on terms, staying tax compliant, and getting the affiliate set up for success. This doesn’t happen on its own as soon as you approve the affiliate, but it can be a lot to remember.

Why not use a checklist to help you vet and onboard new affiliates as they come in? That way, you’re ensuring the affiliate is a good fit to market your product, setting expectations, and complying with the law — all without having to rack your brains for the important thing you’re probably forgetting.

If you do your research thoroughly when a new affiliate applies, you can really save time by documenting your process. In this post, I’m going to show you a documented new affiliate onboarding process and then walk through how you can integrate it with Tapfiliate to save time and keep track of your affiliate applications.

How to keep track of your affiliate applications

When an affiliate registers through your Tapfiliate link, you collect a range of information that helps you make the decision as to whether or not they’re acceptable. Why not centralize your data by collecting it alongside the checklist automatically?

You can push Tapfiliate data to over 1,000 other apps by integrating it with Zapier, a freemium automation platform that lets you set up rules called ‘zaps’. For example, in this post we’ll look at a zap that runs a Process Street checklist and populates it with the applicant’s data automatically every time a new affiliate signs up with Tapfiliate.

Once the checklist is run, you can work through it and qualify or disqualify the applicant, working through the steps and collecting information as necessary. You might want to review their testimonials on your product, interview them, or instruct them on the best way to identify themselves as an affiliate. For some bigger deals, you might want to record the steps for a more hands-on onboarding process so you don’t overlook anything important.

To get started, first you need to add the affiliate onboarding checklist to your Process Street account by clicking ‘I want this for my business’’ in the embed below:https://www.process.st/checklist/new-affiliate-onboarding/

Then, go to Zapier and make a new zap. Choose Tapfiliate’s “New Affiliate” as the trigger:

Next, you’ll need to connect your Tapfiliate account. You can find your API key linked inside the prompt that Zapier displays.

Before you move onto the last stage of the action setup (“Pull in Samples”), you need to make sure you have at least one affiliate application that Zapier can hook into and use to test the integration. Go ahead and create a dummy signup in Tapfillaite if you don’t have data, otherwise continue on.

The second half of the zap is Process Street’s “Create Checklist” action. You can grab your account’s API key for authentication here. Once connected, you’re ready to select the template that the checklist run will be based on. For this example, it’s the New Affiliate Onboarding checklist.

Use the arrow highlighted to select your template. Next, we’re going to match Tapfiliate variables to Process Street form fields to ensure the checklist is populated with the applicant’s data as it’s created, and that you can easily reference the information while you evaluate them.

To do that, use Zapier’s “Insert Field” feature, represented by the icon to the far right of the field, highlighted below:

In this example, I’ve set the checklist name to always be the affiliate’s full name and their company name. This makes it easy for you to know which checklist corresponds to exactly which affiliate.

Next, it’s just a matter of matching Process Street’s form fields to Tapfiliate’s variables. The fields are almost titled the same, which makes it easy.

With the template filled out in Zapier, continue onto the test. A successful test will already create a test checklist in Process Street for you, so you can verify the zap is working by going into Process Street to see:

Now, you can be sure that you’re thoroughly vetting each new applicant, and keep a record of their basic information and your evaluation, all in one place.

Benjamin Brendall

Benjamin Brandall is a content marketer at Process Street, where he writes on startups, SaaS, and workflows to help businesses improve their systems. Find him on Twitter here.