Far-L

When we ended the marketing relationship we had with another company that was running the affiliate program for Homegrown we had to start from zero. We decided the most fiscally responsible move for us was to wait and see how our own traffic numbers looked for a few months before we offered any sort of affiliate program.

Once we saw what was economically sound for us we decided on a pay per active signup. We paid $30 on a $34.95 monthly sign up from a $4.95 trial which was not a popular move with our prior program's affiliates that were once used to getting between $40 to $45 in the old program with pps on a free trial.

However, those that actually moved over found that they were making more money with the new program because suddenly there were far fewer chargebacks and credits.

Interesting to note, we didn't have any aggressive xsells going and we completely lost our mail list so we were mostly devoid of upsells other than our hard goods. For that reason, we had to look at the sustainability of launching a program based on our site sales / retention alone.

The most important number to look at is how much money do you earn, everything else is interesting for the sake of analysis to add predictability and improve averages but only that bottom line number tells you whether you are right or wrong.

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