I have side project where we charge 60€/month to our customers (mostly small businesses but also individuals). What we did to build a userbase is to pay a small fee (1,5€) to freelancers of our trust who would find possible clients (not random but selected people) and write a personalised message for them that we would send. Whenever someone becomes a client, they get extra money (7€). If you run the numbers, it's ju…
That seems to be a low payout. If the ltv is say $600 your affiliate program pays out just over 1% of that. How do you get away with that?
First, the affiliates do this to get some extra money, they aren't making a living of that.
Regarding the 1% of the ltv, you should also think about the conversion rate. Let's say we get 1 final customer of every 30 prospects the affiliate has selected. He is making 52.7€ which pretty much covers a full month of what the client pays.
Also, the ltv of our service is more like 300€ (I wish it was more, but for now that's good enough).
Another point is that finding a prospect isn't much of an effort. It can take them from 5 to 10 minutes max. At 5 min that would be a minimum payout of 18€/h. That's without counting on the +7.5€ if it becomes a client. If every 3 hours they can make a client, they make 20.5€/h. I don't think that's a bad payout for something you can do whenever you want without any obligation.
Lastly, there's the fact that some affiliates are better than others and have better conversion. The better you do, the more money you can make. Taking it to the extreme, let's say 1 of 3 became clients and it takes you 5 minutes to find one, you would be making 48€/h.