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Affiliate Marketing Funnel: Boosting Product Sales
Are you new to affiliate marketing and looking for the best affiliate marketing funnel to boost your product sales? If yes, make sure you read this guide. Let’s first get familiar with the concept of affiliate marketing.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
The concept is actually simple. In affiliate marketing, a company signs up an individual or other companies, known as affiliates, to sell its products. The affiliates are usually webmasters or influencers who use advertisers’ ads to sell their products and charge a specified amount as a commission or referral fee based on their performance. The performance is measured in terms of clicks, conversions, registrations, sales, leads, etc.
Focus Keyword Phrase: affiliate marketing funnel
However, as easy as it may seem, convincing people to buy your product is not that simple. You need a strategy and planning to promote your product to the relevant audience and persuade them to buy it. In this blog post, we’ll discuss the affiliate sales funnel and how you can build an effective affiliate marketing funnel for your campaign. So, let’s begin:
Understanding the Affiliate Sales Funnel
Before diving into the details of the affiliate marketing sales funnel, it’s good to know what a sales funnel actually is.
What is a Sales Funnel?
A sales funnel is a defined path that a consumer takes before purchasing a product or service. It includes different steps for potential customers so that they can easily move towards purchasing the core product, thus generating your sales. The purpose of a sales funnel is to sell a product or service or to entice leads for a marketing campaign.
Selecting the Right Affiliate Product
Selecting the right product to promote is often a major area of neglect. Many affiliates complain of not getting sales even if they put a lot of hard work into promoting the products. The problem is choosing the wrong products. When you make your decision based on what others are selling, higher commission rates, or popularity, you’ll not end up getting good results.
A good rule of thumb is choosing a particular niche before choosing an affiliate product. Go for a niche that has a lot of high-quality products as well as a good commission rate. Here’s a quick list of preferred affiliate networks that you can join as an affiliate:
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Clickbank: Clickbank is a huge affiliate network that primarily focuses on selling information products like e-courses or e-books etc. It has been around since 1998. Clickbank is a diverse marketplace with a lot of product options that you can pick and choose to promote based on your target audience.
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ShareASale: ShareASale is a popular affiliate network having around 4,800 merchants. Depending on the merchant you decide to work with, there is a huge library of products to choose from and promote. Besides that, ShareASale offers flexible payment options with quick payouts, which is a great plus.
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JVZOO: JVZOO, popular for selling internet marketing products, was founded in 2011 and has successfully made its mark as one of the best affiliate networks. Fees for the merchants are charged after a sale is done and JVZOO pays you an instant commission rather than on a weekly or monthly basis.
Some of the other programs that you can also consider are Amazon Associates, MaxBounty, Shopify, SEMrush, or other in-house affiliates in your niche.
You hold a better chance of earning a great commission if you go for a product that helps fulfill people’s needs. If you find such a product, do not miss a chance to promote it as many people will buy it to satisfy this need.
Choose affiliate programs that offer lucrative commissions and recurring payments. When you sell a product with a recurring commission, you keep on getting a commission as long as the customer keeps using that product. That’s a great way of generating a stable passive income because you do not have to make any additional effort to sell a product to that customer again. It’s like a snowball effect.
A good thing to consider to help boost your sales is choosing a product that belongs to an assortment of related products. Consumers are more likely to purchase more than one product from the same line or developer. For example, when someone purchases an Apple iPhone, they are likely to buy other Apple products as well.
Before finalizing a choice of products to promote, you should do thorough research, based on the product’s recognition and the track record of the product developer. The higher the brand recognition, the easier it is to sell a product. If a potential customer trusts the brand, half the job is already done.
Types of Affiliate Marketing Funnels
There are different types of funnels you can consider for promoting your affiliate product. Let’s take a look at some of them:
Course Funnel
In a course funnel, a low-priced course is created in order to get more people enrolled in the main affiliate product. It is a conversion-boosting strategy for customers to buy a small-priced course that supplements the main product. More often, when someone enrolls in your course, they need to buy your affiliate product to implement what you teach in your course.
There are several online course platforms like Teachable, Thinkific, Podia, etc. which allow you to host your courses and craft them strategically. These platforms let you focus on marketing your courses without the need to deal with technicalities. You just have to make sure that you are providing enough value to your customers to boost affiliate conversions. In some cases, when customers buy your course, it is better to drip feed the lessons to them so that they don’t binge-watch your course. Plan the entire course and only provide access to the next lessons at specified times.
Webinar Funnel
A webinar funnel is all about attracting your target audience, inviting them to attend your free webinar, and then leading them towards the objective. The objective can be to provide valuable training or to promote your product. If you want to maximize the show ups in your webinar, you may consider hosting the webinar at a very low price.
This trick works because people show commitment to the fee they have paid and at least watch the webinar if not purchase the product. In this way, you can get a great show up rate and promote your brand or product to the maximum audience. A free webinar, however, works for most new businesses. Usually, when hosting free webinars, you get a show-up rate of around 30% to 35% percent whereas in the low-priced webinars, it can reach up to 70% to 80%. Suppose, you are hosting a free webinar. You get 100 registrations but only 25 people show up. On the other hand, if you host the same webinar for a low price, you will see 70 to 80 people attending the webinar.
Free Plus Shipping Book Funnel
Among all the successful sales funnels, a “free plus shipping” book funnel works wonders, especially when you have a limited customer acquisition budget. Here, you provide the physical books for free and charge only for shipping. When looking to buy a great book, everyone loves to see the “free plus shipping” offer. It is a great way to make people interested in not only your product but your brand as well.
Russel Brunson is the perfect example when it comes to leveraging the book funnel to onboard great qualified people to his product, ClickFunnels. Instead of offering something cheap, you offer something for free and continue upselling to that customer as you keep providing more value.
Mechanics of a Successful Funnel
There are some important mechanics of a funnel that you need to pay attention to for building a successful sales funnel that generates leads. Have a look at them:
Traffic
Your traffic can be of two kinds:
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Organic Traffic: It comes from the people who try to find answers to their queries through search engine results. Search engine optimization (SEO) is used to rank high in organic search results. Check your rankings with the SERP checker.
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Paid Traffic: Paid traffic comes from visitors who click on the links in advertisements paid by businesses to promote their products. It can be of two types:
- PPC (Pay-Per-Click): In this method, businesses pay for each click on their ads.
- Display Ads: These are the ads that display on websites, apps, or social media platforms.
Authority Building
People always love to buy from authoritative sources or people. So, build your authority in your niche by selling good-quality products and providing honest opinions.
Urgency
Provide a limited-time offer on your products and ask your audience to take quick action.
Social Proof
Use social proof elements like testimonials, case studies, and reviews to enhance your credibility and show that your claims are honest.
Automation
You can use apps like Zapier or Integromat to integrate and automate the processes that you are handling manually. These apps connect almost every web app/service and allow you to automate your entire workflow.
Retargeting
Add a Facebook pixel to your landing page and retarget people on Facebook who’ve already visited your page.
A/B Split Testing
A/B split testing lets you know which titles, headings, keywords, or emails work best for your funnel to increase conversions. Create two or more different versions of your landing page and test them on your visitors to see which one gets better conversion rates.
Conclusion
Which sales funnel works best depends on your product and your business. Different sales funnels are best for different niches and work in their own way. So, before selecting a sales funnel for your next affiliate marketing campaign, it is better to understand your affiliate product first. After gaining a good understanding of each funnel, map out your promotional plan. This is how you will be able to choose the perfect affiliate sales funnel for your campaign.
In case of any questions, please let us know in the comments.
Guest Post Author Akshay Hallur
Akshay Hallur is the founder of BloggingX, his blog BloggingX (previously GoBloggingTips) helps aspiring bloggers and businesses to leverage the power of the internet and content marketing to spread their brand message.