Pipeline and Keep
Move affiliates through outreach, understand the board numbers, undo a move safely, and nudge an activated affiliate who has gone quiet.
Open Pipeline after you save an affiliate.
The nine stages
Every saved affiliate sits in one of nine columns:
- Saved
- Contacting
- Replied
- Negotiating
- Onboarding
- Activated
- No reply
- Declined
- On hold
Drag a card to a column, or use its Move menu with the keyboard. The change saves at once. You have ten seconds to press Undo. Undo changes the status back. It can't unsend an email or reverse an AffiliateRail hand-off.
Declined and On hold ask why, in one tap, before the card moves. For example: "Commission too low" or "Asked us to follow up later". The reason is saved with the move, so a teammate knows why the card stopped. Cancel leaves the card where it was. Every other move asks nothing.
Do not contact
Do not contact is your own mark on someone: nobody on your account emails them until you lift it. Find it in an affiliate's drawer, and on each row in Saved.
- Pick why from a short list. The reason shows on the row.
- A new campaign leaves them out and counts them under "marked Do not contact".
- Lift takes the mark off. They can join the next campaign.
It's not the same as unsubscribing. When someone unsubscribes from Finder mail, that's their choice and it holds for every brand that uses Finder. Do not contact is yours, for your account only.
Moves made from outreach
Finder also moves a card when outreach reaches a known result.
- The first confirmed send moves Saved to Contacting.
- A human reply moves Contacting to Replied. A negative reply still counts as a reply.
- A finished sequence with no answer moves Contacting to No reply.
- A late human reply moves No reply back to Replied. The sequence gave up, the person didn't.
- An unsubscribe moves Contacting or Replied to Declined.
An old event can't overwrite a later move you made yourself. Finder verifies the stored event and records its ID with the move, so a retry won't move the same card twice. If events arrive out of order, the later event waits up to 72 hours for its earlier move. After that it is marked expired and stops being retried.
An automatic move offers Undo for ten seconds. Moving the card yourself in that window ends the offer: your move wins, and the board won't ask to undo it.
Activated has one extra rule. You can't pick it from the menu. Open the deal's activation sheet and add the affiliate to AffiliateRail, or choose I track them elsewhere. This keeps the board honest about where the relationship lives.
Filters and the five numbers
Filter the board by channel, list, country, owner, tag or campaign. Each column keeps its own count.
A column shows its first 100 cards. Past that it ends with Show more and the number it is holding back, and clicking it loads the rest of that one column with your filters still applied.
Once you connect an inbox, a strip above the board shows five numbers: Replies with reply rate, Deals agreed, Activated, Emails sent and Opens (estimated). Each has a 30-day daily chart and an all-time figure. Filters don't touch them. They always cover the whole brand. Opens are estimated, because some mail apps hide them from us. No inbox yet? Then the strip stays hidden, and in its place is a link that takes you to the page where you connect one.
The board refreshes every fifteen seconds while the tab is visible. An automatic move shows up on its own.
Growth accounts can rename and reorder the nine display stages from the board. The underlying stages stay fixed, and Activated still requires the activation sheet.
Keep
Open Keep from the Pipeline section when you want to check activated affiliates who have gone quiet. Pick 30, 60 or 90 days.
For an AffiliateRail partner, the card shows clicks, referrals and the last paid payout. These reads stay inside the same account as the Finder brand. A deal marked Tracked elsewhere has no AffiliateRail activity to read, so the card says you track them outside AffiliateRail and shows no numbers.
When Finder has a stored brand mention, the quiet period starts there. Without one, the card counts from the day you added them to AffiliateRail.
Copy their portal link copies the address of their partner portal, where they see their link and how they get paid. They sign in there with their email. Paste it into a note to them. Nothing sends from Finder.