Five Checklists for a High-Converting Affiliate Funnel
Anyone who does affiliate marketing knows it is lucrative, but not everyone can boast that they get the most out of their marketing efforts. Not many things feel as fulfilling as passive income, which affiliate marketers experience daily.
A high-converting affiliate funnel can be the difference between a rewarding and frustrating affiliate marketing campaign. If the funnel isn’t high-converting, you get weak, few, or no leads. This means $0 made for as long as it continues.
In today’s blog, we have a checklist to create funnels that attract high-quality leads in large numbers. Keep reading to find out!
What Is an Affiliate Marketing Funnel?
Typically, what do you use the funnels for in your home?
Get stuff (usually liquid) into a storage unit. The same principle applies in marketing. But this time, you’re getting leads to become customers. Affiliate marketing funnels are just sales funnels for affiliate marketing purposes. The keyword remains “Funnel.” In marketing, we expect a funnel to be modelled after the customer journey, which entails different logical sequences a customer goes through before purchasing a product or service.
If the plan is to generate leads and customers, building your funnel by paying attention to the customer journey makes sense.
Four requirements for a successful funnel
A funnel must attract and retain leads by meeting customers at different points in their customer journey. Sometimes, a funnel cannot cater to all prospects as they are at various stages of their journey, but it must meet them at their level and make them customers.
Customers are either at the awareness, interest, desire, or action stage. Affiliate marketers must design funnels that meet customers at any of the four stages of their journey. To do this, determine if your funnel answers these four questions.
- Awareness stage: Does the funnel create awareness about the product/service?
- Interest stage: Is sufficient information about the product/service in the funnel?
- Desire or Consideration Stage: Is the information enough to choose the product/service over others?
- Action: What part of your funnel allows them to make a purchase?
What’s the fuss about a high-converting funnel?
A high-converting affiliate sales funnel means you get to:
- Target and attract your predetermined market segment at specific customer journey points.
- Attract high-quality leads who need and can pay for the product/services.
- Great value for your investment. Especially if you spend money on ads.
- A rewarding affiliate marketing career.
Five Things You Must Do to Set Up a High-Converting Affiliate Funnel
There’s no chance of creating a high-converting affiliate funnel if you can’t drive targeted traffic to the funnel, leverage lead magnets, nurture leads, stay in touch with leads, and optimise your funnel based on data insights.
That’s a lot. Let’s take it one at a time.
1. Drive targeted traffic to the funnel
A high-converting funnel needs the right traffic. Paid or free traffic sources, whatever works. Getting your product/service in front of the right audience is essential. There are many ways to do it.
A good start is figuring out which digital platform is best for reaching your identified customer base. You don’t want to drive traffic to the wrong people, so you must be clear about your ideal target audience from the get-go (using market research data).
For paid ads. You must take it a step further by defining your ideal target audience through demographic targeting and psychographic targeting. Digital platforms like Facebook allow you to target people based on their interests, type of device, recent school leavers, new parents, etc. The more specific, the better the outcome.
Whatever digital platform you intend to use to get your sales funnel to the world. Ensure you have optimised it to drive traffic. To do this, you must pay attention to best practices for that digital platform and leverage SEO practices where applicable in your content and landing page/website set up.
We strongly recommend that you use paid ads. If you cannot, there are free traffic sources you can explore. Nevertheless, you must know that paid ads give you far more reach than organic posts.
2. Use a lead magnet to capture interest
It's great to be aware that your product/service exists. But you need more to strike a chord in the minds of potential customers. A lead magnet is a great way to attract high-quality leads before pitching sales.
A lead magnet is valuable information you give out to potential customers who fit the profile of your ideal target audience. They are expected to give you their contact information in return, which is important to nurture leads and convert them at the right time.
A lead magnet could be anything valuable—an ebook, a checklist, a cheatsheet, a free webinar, templates, case studies, or whitepapers. Whatever you offer as a lead magnet (literally something to attract leads) must fall in the niche of the product/service you plan to sell to your leads.
For example, you have no business giving out an e-book on how to buy cars at a cheaper price when you hope to sell luxury shoes. A better resource would be confirming designer products, how to fit shoes with your fashion style, what shoes are appropriate for what events, etc.
Whatever you do, ensure the lead magnet is highly valuable. Top-tier value people don’t come around easily. The lead magnet determines the potential customer's reception to marketing efforts intended to nurture or sell at the end of the funnel.
Two important tips: Promote your lead magnet across social media for more reach. Lastly, email automation can capture leads and automate the sequence of emails to nurture and sell the product/service.
For a more straightforward setup, you can check Offer.one platform which has an excellent affiliate marketing program, creatives, and tools to deliver high-converting leads. Think of it as a program with an empowerment kit containing all the tools for lead generation, optimisation, and conversion.
3. Nurture leads through email marketing
As discussed in previous sections, a funnel is modelled with the customer journey in mind. Driving targeted traffic and using lead magnets caters to the awareness and interest stages of the customer journey. A part of the funnel must create desire.
This is where nurturing leads come in. Affiliates focus on supplying information that builds trust and further reinforces a desire for the product/service without coming off as salesy. It is a subtle, mild, and passive approach.
If it screams sales, you’ll lose trust, especially because you just got their contact information from a lead magnet.
To nurture leads the right way, you must start by assembling your email series and choosing the best email platform to automate it. Ensure each email offers value and builds trust, space them so your lead doesn’t feel disturbed, and pitch sales when right.
An email series looks something like this:
- Welcome Email.
- Give a relevant value.
- More value.
- More value.
- Subtle introduction of your product without selling it.
- Case studies, testimonies from people using your product/service.
- The offer is where you pitch sales with discounts or bonuses to create urgency.
It could be more or less based on how huge the purchase decision is to the average client.
4. Stay connected to your audience
Not every high-quality lead will buy immediately. You must have an email series ready to circle back to people who didn’t convert and prepare them for another sale.
Nonetheless, not every lead needs more convincing. They either can’t afford it now or don’t think the purchase is necessary. After a while, you can re-qualify leads to determine whether they are still worth your investment.
You also need to stay in touch with leads who become customers. They are your go-to list for future similar/related affiliate products/services.
To stay connected with your audience, set a routine to check in and share value or an interesting update that reinforces your brand in their minds. Ultimately, the goal is to increase customer loyalty and establish yourself as an authority in that niche.
If your leads follow you on social media, actively posting and engaging is a great way to reinforce your brand in their hearts.
5. Optimise the funnel for higher conversions
Optimisation is a necessary part of any high-converting funnel. Pre and post-campaign optimisation can help you maximise your leads.
Pre-funnel optimization, like A/B testing, allows you to try different CTAS, Headlines, and Landing pages to see how they would perform in real time if you use them. This will enable you to spend only on paid ads that yield the best results.
Post-campaign, you can exploit data insights to understand customer behaviour and identify parts in the funnel that need to be improved for the best results.
Other useful tips for tracking and optimising affiliate campaigns include optimising conversion rates, using affiliate tracking tools, and creating better creatives and messaging.
Conclusion
If you want a rewarding affiliate marketing career, you have to master creating highly converting funnels until you’re a pro at it. Try it repeatedly, learn from your mistakes, and optimise again—that’s how you become a pro.
Remember, a high-converting funnel means you attract and retain high-quality leads. Ultimately, these leads will convert for your existing products/services and related products/services in the future.
Good luck on your next trial!
Go Affiliates, go!