Automating your affiliate progression keeps your partners motivated without adding manual overhead. By using Flows, you can build a true promotion engine that automatically upgrades affiliates to higher-commission groups once they meet specific sales or referral milestones.
🛑 Required First Steps
To ensure your automation runs seamlessly, you must complete two manual setup steps before building or enabling your flow:
Create Your Groups: Navigate to Groups and build your individual group tiers (e.g., Tier 1, Tier 2, Top Tier). The flow builder requires these pre-existing groups to construct the promotion path.
Assign Existing Affiliates to Your Base Group: We highly recommend moving your current affiliates into your starting/base group before enabling the flow. When you enable the flow, you'll be able to use our historical sync tool to evaluate your affiliates and instantly fast-track them to their correct tier.
How to Create an Automated Promotion Flow
Navigate to Flows: From your Simple Affiliate dashboard, go to the left-hand menu, select Flows, and click Create flow in the top right corner.
Set Flow Details:
Flow name: Give your tier program a clear title (e.g., "VIP Program").
Trigger: Choose what action tracks progress. Select Sales to track performance by total revenue generated, or Referrals to track by the total number of orders driven.
Select Your Starting Group: Under Starting group, choose the baseline tier where your affiliates currently reside (e.g., "Tier 1 - 2.5%").
Build Your Tiers: Click the Add tier button to map out the progression. For each tier you add, configure:
Promote to group: Select the next step up in your tier hierarchy.
Threshold: Enter the milestone required to reach this tier (e.g., 100 for Tier 2, 500 for Tier 3, 2000 for Top Tier). Note: Threshold milestones must increase with each progressive tier.
Save Your Progress: Click Save in the top menu bar. Your flow will be saved as a Draft.
Enabling Your Flow & Syncing Existing Affiliates
Once your flow is saved, click the Enable button in the top right corner. A confirmation modal will appear with a historical sync option:
🔄 The Sync Feature: "Promote eligible affiliates based on current totals." Checking this box allows Simple Affiliate to retroactively scan your affiliate and automatically upgrade anyone who has met your milestone thresholds.
⚠️ Important Rules for Group Eligibility
Whether you are running the initial sync or the flow is processing ongoing data, the system adheres to strict group boundaries:
Targeted Promotion Only: Only affiliates who are currently part of the designated Starting group or in one of your connected tiered groups will be evaluated and promoted. This is why assigning your existing affiliates to the base group first is advised.
Exempt Groups: Affiliates assigned to completely separate, standalone groups outside of this specific flow will remain unaffected. Their commission group will never automatically be changed unless they are manually added to one of the group tiers.
What Happens Next?
Once you click Enable flow, the automation handles the rest. If you chose to sync historical totals, a loading screen will analyze your data, and a final notification popup will confirm exactly how many affiliates were successfully promoted to their proper tiers. Moving forward, the app will handle all upgrades automatically as sales or referrals hit your storefront, updating their affiliate dashboard metrics instantaneously.