Segment your affiliates by who already bought your product, then ask them for their personal story instead of swipe copy. Matt McWilliams did this for Jeff Goins’ Tribe Writers launch, pulling affiliates who were also students and asking them to share their own experience, the same approach that earned him $13,847 promoting Michael Hyatt’s course with a list under 2,000.
By Matt McWilliams, four-time Affiliate Manager of the Year (Affiliate Summit Pinnacle Awards and AbestWeb Affiliate Awards) and author of The Book on Affiliate Management
How do you find which of your affiliates are also customers?
Pull your affiliate list and your customer list and match them by email. If your affiliate platform doesn’t do this on its own, ask whoever manages your course, membership, or ecommerce platform to run the comparison for you.
That’s exactly how this started. During Jeff Goins’ Tribe Writers launch, I asked Jeff to pull a list of every affiliate who had also purchased the course. He had it to me in minutes, because it wasn’t a complicated technical lift. It was a two-minute query against data he already had.
If you’ve already written off turning your own customers into affiliates, this is a reason to go back. The overlap between “customer” and “affiliate” is where this entire tactic lives, and you can’t run it until you know who’s in that overlap.
If your lists don’t connect cleanly, a manual pass still works for a program of almost any size. Export both lists to a spreadsheet, match by email address, and flag the matches. It’s tedious once. After that, tag new customer-affiliates as they join so you’re not rebuilding the list from scratch every time you want to run this.
What do you say to an affiliate who already bought the product?
Tell them plainly that you know they’re a customer, then ask them to promote using their own experience instead of the swipe copy everyone else gets. Make it a separate email, not a line buried inside your regular affiliate blast.
Here’s part of the email I sent during that Tribe Writers launch, published in The Book on Affiliate Management:
“I asked Jeff to get me a list of all the affiliates who are also students of Tribe Writers and he said you purchased in the past. That gives you a HUGE… MASSIVE… UNBEATABLE advantage! You have a unique story about your experience with Tribe Writers. So I want to encourage you to SHARE that with your audience. Don’t focus on the swipe copy or the facts. Focus on your EXPERIENCE.”
I backed that up with my own results so it didn’t read as a theory. I made $13,847 promoting Michael Hyatt’s 5 Days to Your Best Year Ever with a list under 2,000 people, and beat Jeff Walker by one spot on the leaderboard doing it. The next year I made $19,991 with a list of barely 2,500. Same tactic both times: skip the swipe copy, tell the story.
Why does a personal story outperform swipe copy?
Because every other affiliate got the same swipe copy, word for word. A customer-affiliate’s story is the one thing in that launch nobody else can send.
Swipe copy is written for the average affiliate in your program, which means it fits no one especially well. It’s also a big part of why so many affiliates sign up and then never send a single promotion. They don’t have anything to say that feels like theirs, so they say nothing at all. A customer-affiliate already has the one ingredient that’s missing: a real answer to “what happened when I used this.”
There’s also a trust difference the reader can feel. A reader who sees the same testimonial rotating through every affiliate’s email starts tuning it out. One affiliate’s own account of signing up, going through it, and getting a specific result doesn’t read like marketing copy at all, which is exactly why it still works.
This is the same idea behind The Importance of Getting Personal in Your Affiliate Promotions, which goes further into why a borrowed voice underperforms even great copy. Read it if you want the case for personal promotion beyond this one launch.
What do you send to affiliates who haven’t bought anything?
Send them your normal swipe copy and testimonials from people who have used the product, since they don’t have a personal result to draw on. Don’t ask them for a story they can’t tell.
This isn’t a two-tier system where customer-affiliates get the good stuff and everyone else gets leftovers. It’s matching the ask to what each affiliate has. Someone who’s never touched your product can still promote well if they adapt the swipe copy to their own voice and lean on other people’s results instead of pretending to have their own.
If writing two versions of every promotional email sounds like more work than you have time for, Affiliate Email Pro is built for exactly this. It’s an AI tool trained on 2,000+ high-performing affiliate emails that helps you draft both the customer-story version and the standard swipe copy without starting from a blank page each time.
What if the customer-affiliate signed up and never promoted?
Send them this same ask instead of a generic nudge. A customer who joined your program during a launch and then went quiet is often still sitting on a result they never got asked to share.
Affiliates who stall out usually aren’t lazy. They never got to a first promotion that felt natural to write. A customer-affiliate has an obvious one sitting right in front of them. If you run a regular reactivation process already, fold the personal-story ask into it rather than treating it as a one-off. The same logic from reactivating affiliates who’ve gone quiet applies here, and it tends to move faster, because getting an affiliate to a first sale is easier when the promotion is about something they lived through firsthand rather than something they’re guessing at.
Leaderboards work well here too. Beating Jeff Walker by one spot wasn’t an accident, it happened because the Tribe Writers launch had a leaderboard worth climbing. How to Run an Affiliate Contest that Actually Motivates Your Affiliates covers how to build one that pulls in affiliates who aren’t already winning, not the usual handful of names every time.
How do you ask without it feeling transactional?
Lead with their result, not your request. Acknowledge what happened for them specifically before you ask them to do anything.
Notice what the email above doesn’t do: it doesn’t open with “please promote this.” It opens by telling the affiliate something true and specific about them, that they’re a customer with a real story, and that the story is worth more than anything you could hand them. Build this into your onboarding sequence for any affiliate who signs up after a purchase, so the ask feels like part of welcoming them rather than a separate favor you’re calling in later.
If you’d rather not write this email from scratch, there’s already a template for it. Affiliate Activation Templates is a free set of email templates built for getting affiliates who’ve gone quiet, or never started promoting, back into motion.
One thing worth admitting: not every customer-affiliate will take you up on it. Some will read the email and never write a word. That’s fine. You’re not trying to convert 100 percent of them, you’re trying to find the handful who have a story and only needed someone to ask for it instead of handing them a template.
Frequently asked questions
Do customer-affiliates need a different commission rate?
No, not because of the story angle alone. Pay them the same rate as any other affiliate at the same tier. The personal-story email is about what you ask them to send, not what you pay them. If you want to reward strong customer-affiliates specifically, do it through your normal commitment plans or tiers, not a special rate tied to being a customer.
How soon after a purchase should you ask a customer to promote as an affiliate?
Wait until they’ve had enough time to form an opinion worth sharing. For a course or community, that’s usually after they’ve gone through enough of it to describe a real result, not the day after checkout. Asking too early gets you a thin, generic story that reads like swipe copy anyway, which defeats the point.
What if a customer-affiliate doesn’t want to share their story publicly?
Respect it and move on. Some buyers are private, and pushing turns a potential advocate into someone who unsubscribes from your affiliate list entirely. Offer an alternative, such as a short quote you can use with permission, or let them promote with your standard swipe copy instead.
Does this only work for expensive or course-type products?
It works anywhere a customer can describe a before-and-after, which covers far more than high-ticket courses. A $27 template, a supplement, and a piece of software can each produce a story once the customer has put it to use. The price point matters less than whether the product changed something the customer can point to.
How do you know if the personal-story ask worked?
Tag affiliates who received the customer-specific email differently from your general list, then compare their open and promotion rates against affiliates who only got standard swipe copy. If your platform supports it, track whether the customer-affiliates convert at a higher rate, since that’s the entire bet behind sending a different email in the first place.
Can you run this same play outside of a launch?
Yes. The launch framing gave this particular story a deadline and a leaderboard, nothing more. Outside of a launch, the same ask works as a standing part of your program, sent whenever a customer’s result is strong enough to be worth sharing, rather than saved for one week a year.
