Running iGaming Affiliates on Telegram: An Affiliate Manager's Onboarding Checklist and Deal Tracker

An iGaming affiliate manager with 80 partners has 80 Telegram chats, and the deal terms for most of them live in the scrollback. CPA or RevShare, which GEOs, which tracking link, whether the second payment went out: it is all in there somewhere, on whichever account the partner first wrote to. The affiliate platform tracks clicks and commissions. It does not track the conversation that produced the deal.

This guide is for affiliate managers and heads of affiliates at operators and affiliate programmes. It covers the fields worth tracking on every partner chat, a ten-step onboarding checklist, a follow-up cadence that does not need a spreadsheet, and what to do so the partner book stays with the programme when a manager moves on.

Your affiliate platform (Cellxpert, Income Access, MyAffiliates, Affilka or an in-house system) is the system of record for tracking, commissions and payments. Keep it that way. Nothing below replaces it.

What the platform does not hold is everything before and around the numbers: the first message from a streamer's manager, the negotiation over a hybrid deal, the "can you whitelist this GEO" request on a Sunday, the creative a partner asked for twice. That lives in Telegram, and on most desks it lives on the personal accounts of individual managers.

Two problems follow from that:

1. Nobody else can see the pipeline. The head of affiliates asks "how many partners are waiting on a tracking link?" and the answer requires five people to scroll.
2. The book walks. A manager who leaves takes the relationships, because the relationships are chats on their phone.

Keep the set small enough that managers fill it in while the partner is typing.

In Entergram these are custom fields on the chat, which turns questions like "every RevShare partner in Ontario still waiting on a tracking link" into a saved filter. If your partner list already sits in a spreadsheet, import it: the columns become fields, and each contact resolves by username, or by phone number when there is no username.

The Platform ID field matters more than it looks. It is the bridge between the conversation and the numbers. Without it, every performance question becomes a manual lookup.

Onboarding is where partners go quiet. They signed up, got a link, never sent traffic, and nobody noticed for a month. Each step below is a status change or a field update, so the board shows where every new partner is stuck.

1. Qualify. Traffic source, GEOs, rough volume, and links to their sites or channels. Set Stage to New and fill Traffic source and GEOs.
2. Check fit and compliance. Are their GEOs ones your brands are licensed for? Does their traffic source break your marketing rules? Write the answer as an internal comment on the chat, so the next person sees why a partner was accepted or declined.
3. Agree the deal. Set Deal model. Put the exact terms in a comment, because the platform will hold the numbers but not the reasoning.
4. Create the account in the affiliate platform. Copy the platform's partner ID into the Platform ID field.
5. Send tracking links and creatives. Stage to Onboarding. Set Next action date to three days out.
6. Confirm the first click. Check the platform. If nothing has come through by the next action date, message them.
7. Confirm the first depositing player. This is the real start. Stage to Live.
8. First payment. Note the date in a comment. A partner who was paid on time once is a partner who answers your messages.
9. 30-day review. Volume against what they said in step 1. Adjust the deal or the expectations.
10. Hand over to account management if your programme splits roles. Reassign the owner. The history goes with the chat, so the new person reads it instead of asking again.

The Next action date field does most of the work. Every morning, filter to chats where the date is today or earlier, sorted by stage. That is the to-do list.

For updates that go to many partners at once (a new brand launch, a GEO opening, a creative pack), Entergram broadcasts send the same message to many chats with per-recipient merge fields, from real accounts, and can spread the send across several connected accounts with Telegram-aware pacing. Replies come back into the shared inbox against each partner's record, so a broadcast turns into tracked conversations instead of 60 unread chats on one phone.

A few rules worth keeping:

• Segment by stage before sending. A partner in Negotiating should not get the "new creatives for live partners" message.
• Respect the marketing rules in each partner's market. The tool sends what you tell it to. It does not check what a partner is allowed to promote.
• Do not cold-message people from scraped lists. Entergram resolves contacts you already have; it does not harvest members from groups the account has not joined. Finding new partners is covered below.

Tipster channels, streamer communities and affiliate groups are on Telegram already. Entergram's live search finds people, groups and channels outside the workspace by name or username, through a connected account, and labels each result with visibility, member count where Telegram exposes it, and whether anyone in the workspace already knows it.

Its limits matter: it matches names and usernames, not message content; it is rate limited to protect the accounts; and it does not get you into private groups the account was never admitted to. It is a way to build a prospect list, not a way around consent.

Affiliate desks often run several accounts per manager: one per brand, or one per region. Entergram connects them all to one inbox, filtered by account instead of logging in and out, and each account is routed through its own unique proxy. Five accounts per seat are included on every plan; extra accounts are EUR 5 per month in the same seat.

The guide to managing 10 Telegram accounts without getting banned covers the account hygiene side in detail.

The partner book is the programme's most valuable asset, and on Telegram it is the easiest one to lose.

• Run partner relationships on accounts the programme owns. A manager's personal account leaves with the manager. A company-owned account stays, and the next manager continues from the same identity.
• Fields, comments and stages belong to the workspace. The incoming manager sees every partner's deal model, GEOs, platform ID and history.
• Privacy controls keep the list from leaving in a screenshot. Entergram can hide usernames and group member information from team members, and block editing and deleting messages, so access to the inbox is not the same as a copy of the partner list.
• Reassign before the last day. Filter by Owner, reassign every chat, and have the departing manager leave a comment on each top partner: open promises, pending payments, anything that is not in the platform.

1. Partners by stage. How many in Onboarding for more than 14 days? Those are the ones who will never send traffic unless someone acts.
2. Overdue next actions by owner.
3. Response time per manager account. Entergram analytics show messages sent and received, response times, and busiest hours and days per account. Partners who wait a day for an answer start testing other programmes.
4. Live partners with no contact in 30 days. A short check-in costs nothing.

An AI assistant connected through the Entergram MCP can do the first pass: fill fields from the conversation, list partners stuck in a stage, or compare reply times across manager accounts from the raw message events.

Add the eight fields to your partner chats and backfill Stage and Owner for everyone this week. The checklist and the weekly review only work once those two exist.

For the player-facing side of the same desk, read the casino VIP host playbook. For how support, VIP and affiliate accounts share one workspace, see Telegram CRM for casinos. For partner updates sent to many partners at once without tripping Telegram, read how operators pace sends across accounts.