How to Set-up High-Converting Affiliate Sale Funnels

An affiliate funnel guides a prospect through different stages of a buying journey to become a customer.

It can be a series of landing pages or goal-focused content. I explain how to build an affiliate content funnel in another post. While the principles remain the same, I’ll illustrate the affiliate sales funnels here using landing pages.

This system helps you make more affiliate commissions for several reasons, including:

• it uses frameworks to persuade the users that the product is the right one to solve a problem. Hence, buyers are less likely to request a refund.
• It educates on how a product contributes to fixing a problem.
• It works 24/7 without your input to reach multiple prospects simultaneously.
• it helps you build an email list to sell multiple related products to the same person.

How to Build High-Converting Affiliate Funnels?

With a sales funnel, you can make affiliate marketing a business.

It means that you don’t just send your visitors to someone else to be their client. You make a list of people around a topic where you can help; then you send these people to helpful products that you recommend.

Here is what you need to build high-performing landing pages for affiliate marketing:

Identify how the Product Fixes the intended audience’s Pain Points.

With affiliate marketing, you sell products for companies and get paid. You’re not creating the product, nor doing customer care services.

So, one of the first steps is to identify the audience the product that you promote is designed for. It helps you to send genuine educated customers to the merchants’ websites for:

• A higher conversion rate where you need fewer visits to grow an income.
• A higher retention rate, where you can make more revenue from affiliate recurring commissions.
• high-quality clients that give you a good position to negotiate higher commissions with merchants.

Also, learn how the product fixes the intended audience’s pain points. Use the product yourself and read the company’s features pages.

You’re pre-selling. The people you refer will likely convert when your page copy aligns with the merchants’ landing pages.

Design Pre-Sell Pages That Convert Using Proven Copywriting Techniques

Merchants pay you, the affiliate, for your influence.

If you get recommendations from a friend, you’ll likely try a service from a new company you would not otherwise, or you would have done a lot of research.

In the same way, your mission is to pre-sell. You present the product in a good light and address common objections. If you use your landing pages to build trust, you can persuade even strangers to buy from your affiliate links.

Use proven copywriting techniques for your affiliate landing pages:

• Inverted Pyramid: give the most important information at the top of your affiliate presell pages. Show the visitors the benefits that they get by purchasing the products right away. Some people won’t read the whole page or watch an entire video anyway, so you have the top of the page to convince them.
• AIDA: This framework helps you reach people at different stages of their buying journey with one page. AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. You get someone’s attention, you let them know what’s in it for them, you help them desire the product by showing all the benefits, then you recommend the action to take.
• PAS: It stands for Problem-Agitate-Solution. It’s a copywriting technique where you talk about the problem an audience faces. Then you show the impacts it has beyond the obvious. Then, you present the solution to that problem.

However, one of the more convincing elements of an affiliate landing page is proof that you get results using the products that you recommend.

Keep it Simple and Fast

An affiliate funnel can be a 2-step or 3-step system to guide a prospect to buy a product. It includes generally:

• An opt-in page or squeeze page: where you give a lead magnet in exchange for an email. It can be a discount, a course, a checklist, or something else related to the problem you want to fix or the product that you’ll recommend. If the merchant has pre-recorded webinars, build the page around those.
• a bridge page: This is where you explain, using text or video, the benefits of the products using copywriting techniques we talked about earlier. Help them know if they’ll find more info in the emails that you’ve sent. Most affiliates add their affiliate links on this page.
• a thank-you page: If you promised a freebie, you show gratitude on the download link and promote your affiliate offers.

However, keep it simple. If you can build an email list and recommend the affiliate product with a one-page marketing funnel, do it.

What is more important is to get the email address to nurture the audience until they are ready to buy, or show no clear interest in buying the product.

Nowadays, email marketing solutions include what you need to build an affiliate sales funnel from start to finish. Kit, formerly Converkit, is one of these software with a free landing page builder, email marketing with one automation free for up to 10,000 subscribers.

Try Kit today

Also, keep the landing pages fast with videos and images loading asynchronously.

Give the User a Reason to Act Now

Most merchants pay the affiliate whose link has been clicked last. So, to get credited for a sale, you need the user to sign up right away using your affiliate link.

To get them to act fast, give them a reason to do so.

Encourage them to overcome some objections:

• price: promote free plan, free trial, or get an advertiser’s promo code to promote.
• difficulty in choosing: compare the product to the alternatives and show why a particular product is the right choice.

Give them bonuses. If you give away access to your paid courses or tools for free to users who buy from you, you’ll get more people to act quickly. A good method is to give away a course teaching how to use the product. A win-win if it’s a product where merchants pay monthly recurring commissions.

Set up Follow-up Emails to Nurture The Audience

Some people will visit your landing page, but not be in the mood to buy a product. You can warm those leads so they buy using follow-up emails.

With email autoresponders, you can set up one or a series of emails to be sent to each subscriber to educate them further to buy the product that you promote.

It’s also a good way to recommend other products that fix other problems the same person may encounter.

Email software such as Kit or Aweber are excellent tools to set up autoresponder emails.

Reasons that you need marketing funnels when promoting affiliate products

You could just send traffic to merchants using affiliate links, and you’d make some commissions. Why do you need to take an extra step to build affiliate marketing sales funnels?

• Affiliate marketing funnels help you convert cold leads, those people who don’t see a reason to buy the product right away. With a sales funnel, you can educate these prospects to decide to buy the product.
• You build an email list of potential buyers if a merchant closes its affiliate product, doesn’t maintain the product quality, or if you develop your own product, you can reach out to your audience for a specific action.
• Your affiliate presell pages act as a salesperson persuading visitors to buy from you. Continuous conversions can be automated with traffic from search engines and social media platforms.
• It does not stop you from using other promotional methods to make affiliate sales.

Of all of what we’ve talked about, the most important is to identify the pain points of your audience. Use copywriting techniques to use words that clearly explain how a product helps fix a problem. Add to that what you already do for landing pages in general, such as optimize CTAs, benefit-centric headlines, and watch your conversion rate improves.