Affiliate marketing has always been a great way of diversifying your income streams, so if you have a relatively successful blog or website, you might be looking for new opportunities.
And if you’re in the right niche, too, the GrooveFunnels affiliate program might be right up your alley. In today’s article, we’re looking at everything that it entails, from how much you can earn to what rules you are not supposed to break, and also giving you some alternatives, too.
GrooveFunnels is just one part of the apps that this company has to offer. Under the umbrella name Groove, the brand makes it possible for users to achieve most anything on the Internet.
Although it would be a little unfair, the best way of describing what Groove does would be to call it a marketing software company.
As a Groove associate, you can recommend a variety of digital products to your followers, from the obvious GrooveFunnels service that enables marketers and small business owners to scale their business as fast as possible to GrooveMail, an automation service that allows one to keep in touch with their email list and more.
Some of the other apps that you might be successful in recommending to your readers are the following:
It’s surprising, but the quality and feature richness of some of these products is outstanding. For example, with GroovePages, anyone can build a website with an easy-to-use page builder that comes with pretty much everything from a responsive design to thousands of templates to choose from.
GrooveFunnels can obviously be utilized for creating marketing funnels, but not just that – also selling products, getting leads, and following up on funnels created in the past.
GrooveMail comes with everything you need from an email builder to list marketing, forms, delivery, segmentation, and more.
GrooveSell acts as a replacement for services you might have heard of before, meaning ThriveCart, Infusionsoft, or SamCart – so you have everything in a single place when it comes to selling products and services online, from the management of transactional emails to collecting customers’ information.
The rest of the services are pretty much self-explanatory, but the point that we are trying to make is that there’s no shortage of things that you can recommend to your audience if you’re looking to be as successful as possible in your Groove affiliate journey.
As you probably know if you’ve used affiliate marketing before, the pricing plays an important part when it comes to convincing people to purchase pretty much anything online.
There is a free version of Groove available, so that’s one less thing to worry about, and it comes with plenty of features, but it also has more than a few limitations. For example, users who continue to rely on the free plan get 500 contacts and 2,500 email sends per month in GrooveMail, one custom domain and up to 25 pages hosted with GroovePages, one blog with GrooveBlog, unlimited ecommerce stores with GrooveKart, and more.
However, they don’t have access to the templates library, any email marketing templates, the email builder, or any integrations. By the way, they cannot access the second tier in the Groove affiliate program, so earning more is impossible.
The START UP plan comes with the same features we have previously mentioned but many extras such as unlimited integrations, a variety of gateways ranging from Stripe to PayPal, three automated webinars, three membership sites, and much more.
This plan is billed at $99 per month normally, but with the yearly billing model, the cost per month is going to be just $39.99.
As expected, the CREATOR plan comes with all of the features already included in the START UP plan and extras such as 5,000 contacts, 50,000 email sends per month, a 30% affiliate commission, unlimited integrations, gateways, and blogs, and access to the website template library.
The store fee when purchasing this plan is also waived, which makes a great selling point. The CREATOR subscription is billed at $149 per month but comes down to just $83 per month with the yearly billing model.
There are three other, more generous plans, called the PRO, the PREMIUM, and the PREMIUM + LIFETIME subscriptions, with the last one being the most expensive one but also including absolutely everything, from unlimited contacts and unlimited sends to access to the funnel graphics design platform.
Signing up to this program is relatively easy. The downside is that it doesn’t seem to be hosted on a separate affiliate platform, which means that you’ll have to control everything on the company’s website.
Additionally, you virtually have no way of accessing the program unless you have a Groove account, whether that be free or paid.
You can get to your affiliate dashboard only through your account by accessing something called the ‘partner program’, which comes with everything from promotions and links to your tracking links, bonuses, and everything else you might need.
Yes, Groove the company and the service GrooveFunnels are both legit, so that’s one less thing to worry about. You will not be recommending anything shady to your audience, so you’re not going to receive any complaints in that way.
There are more than enough positive reviews online for the service and it seems to be growing, both in terms of apps offered and when it comes to the features they come with.
You start out with a 20% commission for the memberships referred through your affiliate link and the leads you get in that way. This rate is available for people who have a Groove account, yet it is free or they haven’t yet upgraded to a premium one.
You need a specific type of premium plan, by the way – even the Start-Up one doesn’t include the 40% commission increase every affiliate is after in this case, which means you will have to upgrade to the Platinum Lifetime plan yourself for this rate to become available to you.
Since the Platinum Lifetime subscription cost can be prohibitive (it’s almost $2,000), there is an installment plan available so that you can make several payments instead of just one.
You can even choose a 6-installment model where each payment comes down to $597. The best thing is that once you’ve paid the entire sum, you get all of the Groove products with all of their features for life.
From what we’ve been able to gather, there are two main ways of being paid with this affiliate program – PayPal and regular bank wire transfers.
There are both advantages and disadvantages to both of those methods, but we’re not going to go into them since you simply need to pick the one that best suits your needs and preferences.
However, there is some info you need to be made aware of so that it doesn’t end up being a surprise later on. You can be paid weekly only after you have made two paid sales.
Given that some of the sales begin with a free trial that can last for up to 14 days, you will not see a commission in your affiliate dashboard in the beginning. After it appears, you can expect to have the possibility to withdraw the earnings after a period of 37 to 42 days.
The reason this waiting period exists is that customers can ask for a refund during the first month of them being subscribed to a Groove plan – there is then a buffer period that lasts for 7 days. Calculating the weekend and potential days off, it all comes down to 42 days.
To be able to withdraw your earnings or be paid weekly as per the regular payment schedule, you need to have filled out your tax information in your affiliate account.
Like any other affiliate program out there, this one, too, comes with advantages and potential disadvantages.
The commission rate is pretty decent especially when looking at the cost of the plans that we have mentioned in the first part of our review. If you do get people to sign up even to the START UP plan, you can make some pretty serious earnings.
In terms of requirements, there are no surprises since Groove asks affiliates to avoid promoting the same things as other affiliate program management companies – spam, cash rebates, scam, cookie stuffing, the use of fraudulent credit cards, or misrepresentations of any Groove apps or products.
As for the waiting period for when you can be paid, yet again, it’s not something out of the ordinary since some other companies have Net60 waiting periods, so you might be looking at two months to sit and wait for your earnings to hit your account.
Perhaps the only way this program could have been better might have been with a more user-friendly pricing model – what we mean by this is that while all of the marketing tools and perks included in each plan are great, selling the apps individually might have made for an easy job for you, as an affiliate, since the cost of each one wouldn’t have been as prohibitive.
All in all, this looks like a pretty sound affiliate program to sign up for, even with the slight drawbacks that we have mentioned – and the apps are great themselves, which means you’re going to be recommending something useful to your audience, not just for the sake of earning a commission.
We wrote a separate review of the ClickFunnels affiliate program in the past, so if you have some time, we definitely suggest that you give it a read.
In terms of pricing, this one is more or less similar to what we talked about when describing GrooveFunnels but we would like to note that the latter is a bit more generous in terms of apps, both in numbers and features.
Your base commission as an affiliate for ClickFunnels is 20%, but it gets to 30% and even 40% depending on how much business you have referred to the company. The payment methods are a little more varied here, since you can opt for anything ranging from PayPal, ECH, local transfers, or cheques.
This is yet another self-managed affiliate program that you might find works for you as an alternative to GrooveFunnels. It’s a lot less generous in terms of features, though, so we suggest getting it only as a way of not keeping all of your eggs in one basket.
As a SamCart affiliate, you can expect to make 40% out of what your referrals are paying for their subscription for the whole duration of their subscription’s lifetime. Do consider that the pricing on this one is very budget-friendly, with the lowest plan costing just $49 per month – so you’re not going to get rich fast with this affiliate program.
The Unbounce affiliate program is pretty straightforward yet we’d say that it is a little disappointing in terms of commission rates (especially when putting it side by side with what GrooveFunnels has to offer in this sense).
The rate you can expect for every completed sale is 20% – the good thing is that it is a recurring one, so at least you’ll be paid a commission each time your referrals renew their subscriptions, too.
The only ways to be paid with this one is through PayPal or Stripe.
So, does it make sense for you to use Groove for your affiliate marketing goals? All in all, this seems like a rather sound program, so we suggest that you give it a shot – especially if you’re looking to diversify your income streams.
And if you’re still not convinced, here are a few other alternatives (some of which we have reviewed in the past, so check out the links, too!).
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