5 amazing affiliate marketing strategies to generate more sales
In the post-pandemic world, affiliate marketing has become one of the most popular work from home options for people with a flair for marketing products and services. Affiliate marketing constitutes 10 to 20% of the advertising spend in industries like fashion, sports accessories, health/wellness, and beauty. According to the Affiliate Marketing Trends 2020 report, as much as $6 billion was generated by affiliate marketing in the United States alone in 2019. In our previous blog, we discussed why affiliate marketing is great for WFH. In this blog, we will dive deep into the affiliate marketing strategies that you can use to scale up your game. With an excellent marketing strategy in place, your efforts and tactics can pave your way to becoming a successful affiliate marketer and have an edge over your competitors.
Here are a few interesting affiliate marketing strategies you can employ to boost your sales.
Email marketing campaigns
While some may consider email marketing campaigns archaic in the world of social media, as many as nearly 89% of marketers still consider it to be one of the most effective marketing strategies. Email marketing’s ability to track end-to-end campaign metrics, including conversions, open rates, CTR (click-through rate), and RoI (return on investment) will always make it a useful tactic for affiliate marketing.
The success of email marketing, much like the success of your website, depends on the relevance of its content to your audience. Try to draft highly engaging and insightful emails about the problems faced by your audience and how your partner’s products or solutions can help them. Adding relevant pages with your affiliate links in your mail can increase your click-through rate.
Try to segment your audience and customize your emails to improve your audience’s engagement. Google Analytics can help you analyze and segment your audience. Send tailored custom messages to each segment to get better conversion rates.
For example, if you are promoting CRM and Marketing automation software, segregate your audience into two categories, namely sales and marketing, and promote the respective product to the specific category or segment based on the pages they visit on your website.
There are several marketing automation software available that can help you manage your email marketing campaigns. With these tools, you can not only create custom lists of emails, but also schedule and automate your workflow or emails. They also offer powerful integrations with WordPress, CRM, and social media channels, providing meticulous insights on your campaign, enabling you to track your performance.
Pro tip: You can use free marketing automation tools to improve your results.
Banners
Banners are an interesting way to grab the audience’s attention. It is an advertisement strip that can be embedded in websites to lead traffic to a website that you want. Many affiliate programs provide their partners with banners. You can also make your own personalized banners to stand out.
Make sure your banners are eye-catching with bold fonts and clear images on a distinctive background. According to this study, banners that are placed above the fold and close to the content are the most successful and get high click-through rates. Always ensure to embed your referral links in your banner ads to increase your click-through rates significantly. For optimum engagement, always create banners of different sizes for different devices.
This catchy banner from a recent Freshchat social media ad campaign is one of the top performing ad banners. This banner garnered a whopping 148865 impressions and 774 clicks exclusively from Facebook and from a single region. With bright colors and a friendly vibe, the quirky design compliments the copy. It also brings out the message of the campaign, which is Freshchat-Whatsapp integration through the logo and the copy.
Pro tip: Use heat maps to improve banner placements.
Reviews
Did you know that 88% of customers read at least one review before buying a product? That is why reviews of your products are a significant affiliate marketing strategy that can drive traffic to your website as well as improve your click-through rates.
Trust and loyalty can be built amongst your audience only with impartial reviews. Make your reviews informative and gripping. Your product descriptions must be detailed and accurate. You can bring more authenticity to your reviews by adding product screenshots. Keep your audience notified of the latest product updates. Make the technical component simpler to reach a wider audience. Draw comparisons between your competitors and persuade your subscribers toward your product.
Take Capterra for instance. It is a renowned and trusted platform that writes comprehensive product reviews assisting millions of consumers to choose the right product. Their reviews include all necessary elements like pricing, features, competitor comparison charts, et cetera. In this review of Freshdesk, they have also added a short video about the product to keep their audience engaged.
As an affiliate, you are not always expected to write extensive product reviews. Try to understand your audience’s needs and highlight specific features of the product that might help resolve customer issues.
Pro tip: Add Customer testimonials to your reviews to enhance credibility.
Coupons
Discounts are an effective way of attracting value seekers among your audience. A time-bound discount or coupon can also create a sense of urgency in your audience to try out a product.
For the affiliate marketer, coupons or discounts are a quick way to track growth and stay ahead of the competition. While coupons and discounts can decrease the average deal size, it will compensate for the loss with an increase in deals and overall revenue.
There are several coupon partners available for you to choose from. Make sure you choose a trusted, phishing-safe coupon vendor to provide your coupons to your audience.
Pro tip: Use coupon management system to monitor your coupon performance.
An optimized landing page
A landing page is a destination page made exclusively for advertisement campaigns. All the strategies mentioned above should eventually lead your audience to a landing page. A landing page must address three things clearly—the problem that’s being addressed, the solution offered to that problem, and the action to be taken by the audience.
A landing page should clearly state the value the product has to offer. A compelling action-oriented CTA on your landing page will drive your audience to enter the funnel. Remove any distractions that can lead the user away from your landing page. Optimize your page speed, so that you don’t keep your audience waiting. Google offers a tool to check your page speed insights. Keep analyzing and testing your landing pages until you attain your desired conversion rate.
For instance, let’s take the landing page of Capella University. The webpage has an excellent copy and minimal information that clearly states its unique selling points. The page also has a very prominent and enticing CTA that will make the user carry out the required action, thereby making it an ideal example of a landing page.
Pro tip: Make sure your landing page has 3 CTA buttons placed at the top menu bar, above and below the fold, respectively. For more information on how to build an affiliate marketing program, read our blog.
Conclusion
Affiliate marketing can prove to be very powerful when strategized in the right way. While there are several strategies to make your affiliate marketing efforts work, the real effort lies in implementing these strategies wisely, while avoiding these common affiliate marketing mistakes. With the right combination of channels, and strategies, you can increase traffic to your site and also boost conversions.
