How to Create An Affiliate Marketing Sales Funnel That Converts

If you are wondering how to create an affiliate marketing sales funnel to generate high-converting leads, this quick guide is for you. Take note of the steps.

Affiliate Marketing Sales Funnel

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If you are looking for one of the most lucrative ways to earn money online, affiliate marketing tops my list. 

But how do you become a successful affiliate marketer? You need to learn to create an affiliate marketing sales funnel that can effectively convert your audience into customers for your clients. 

And this market is booming. According to Mhojhos Research, the global market size of affiliate marketing was $19.03 billion in 2020.

Image via Mhojhos Research 

 

Affiliate marketing has proven its worth as a low-risk and low-budget marketing technique for businesses to grow their visibility and boost sales. Businesses today understand the benefits of affiliate marketing and are ready to invest heavily in it due to this reason.

The good part about being an affiliate is that there’s no limit to how much you can earn from affiliate marketing. Being a performance marketing method, you can earn more so long as you keep bringing in new sales.

It all begins with understanding how to create an affiliate marketing sales funnel that constantly generates revenue for you. 

In this post, I will help you understand what affiliate marketing is, how it works, and share actionable tips on how to create an effective affiliate marketing sales funnel. 

Let’s dig right in.

What is Affiliate Marketing? 

Affiliate marketing is a popular marketing strategy where a brand hires influencers or publishers to become its affiliates and market and sell its products. 

The affiliates promote these products or services on their websites or social media profiles to generate sales for the business. In return for every sale they generate, the affiliates receive a fixed commission. 

Image via Oberlo

 

This performance-based marketing technique is profitable for both the brand and the affiliates. Brands get more sales and affiliates receive more commissions. 

For this partnership to be successful, it is vital to create an affiliate marketing sales funnel that constantly directs qualified leads toward the promoted products or services.

Understanding the Affiliate Marketing Sales Funnel

Affiliate marketing is all about introducing a product to users and enticing them to make a purchase using a special trackable URL. The secret to this lies in understanding the steps customers take to move from becoming aware of a product to going ahead and buying it. 

The affiliate marketing sales funnel defines this journey of the customers and highlights the important touchpoints in this journey. As a publisher or affiliate, it is vital for you to understand the structure of an affiliate marketing sales funnel and how it works to be able to drive sales.  

Only when you are well informed about the customer journey, will you be able to create an effective affiliate marketing sales funnel to convert more leads and generate greater revenue.

Segments of Affiliate Marketing Sales Funnel

As mentioned earlier, customers take different paths through the sales funnel before converting. While brands closely monitor these paths, you as an affiliate need not analyze each step in great detail.

Instead, you need to practically understand each segment or stage of the sales funnel in a way that you will be able to engage your prospective customers effectively and motivate them to move to the next stage. That’s how you can create an effective affiliate marketing sales funnel.

According to the popular AIDA model, the affiliate marketing sales funnel is generally segmented into four parts.

  • Awareness 
  • Interest 
  • Desire
  • Action

1. Awareness

This is the first stage of the customer journey where the user is unaware of the product or services you are promoting. As an affiliate, you can write blogs for affiliate marketing, make  creative shoppable videos or use your social media profile to introduce the products to your audience and make them aware of what they are all about. 

2. Interest

Now that your target audience is aware of the product or the service you are promoting, provide them with insightful resources to trigger further interest. 

At this stage, you explain how your offering can add value to their lives. By answering fundamental questions, you invite them to learn more about the product.

3. Desire

When your audience reaches this stage, they are convinced that the product is worth a try and have a desire to purchase it. But they are looking for customer reviews, testimonials, and other social proof to ensure that they are making a good choice. 

4. Action 

The last stage in your affiliate marketing sales funnel is when a lead actually goes ahead and makes a purchase. As a publisher, you need to make all the efforts to ensure that every potential customer who reaches this stage should convert and make a purchase.

Steps to Create a High-Converting Affiliate Marketing Sales Funnel

The success of your affiliate marketing business relies greatly on the marketing techniques you adopt and how you create your affiliate marketing sales funnel. When designed smartly, this sales funnel can deliver consistent earnings to you. 

Here’s a step-by-step guide to creating a high-converting affiliate marketing sales funnel in 2022.

1. Build Your Audience 

Alright, so you’ve decided to establish yourself as an affiliate marketer. 

Assuming that you are a blogger or social media influencer with some authority, you should focus on building an active audience base that will respond to your affiliate marketing campaigns positively.

Start by engaging your audience with valuable content and build a rapport with them. The key is to build a solid rapport with them so that they become loyal followers of your website or social media profile. 

Once you’ve built a strong audience base, you can use some of the top ClickFunnels alternatives to engage your followers and fill your sales funnel with quality leads.

2. Select Your Products Wisely 

What’s the most important element in your quest to affiliate marketing success? It’s undoubtedly the products or services you choose to promote.

This step requires a lot of research and brainstorming as you must select affiliate offers that are more likely to be accepted by the larger audience to earn good online money

No matter how well you create your affiliate marketing sales funnel, if you choose a program that does not click with the buyers, you will never generate the revenue that you wish to.

You have to consider the credibility of the brand, whether the product is ethical or not, general feedback, and commission rates before signing up for an affiliate program. 

Programs like Amazon Associates allow you to set up your own Amazon Affiliate Store and earn commission by recommending their products. 

Image via Amazon

 

You can check out CJ Affiliate Program, eBay Partner Network, and several other affiliate networks to find the most profitable offers. 

3. Create High-Quality Content

The next step in creating a good affiliate marketing sales funnel is to work toward creating high-quality content.  

Some of the popular content types you can consider are: 

  • Blog posts
  • YouTube videos
  • Social media posts 
  • Reels and Stories 
  • Discussion forum posts 

All content you create should achieve two goals – establish you as an authority on the topic and trigger curiosity in your audience to go and check out your offer. 

Make your content readable, valuable, and engaging to provide value to the audience. By creating your content with a unique perspective, you can move them further down the affiliate marketing sales funnel.

For example, you can follow the top skincare Instagram influencers that create creative content to sell their client products over social media platforms.

4. Design a Great Landing Page 

Now that your audiences have read your blog, watched your product demo or are inspired by other social media posts, it’s time to redirect them to the next stage of the sales funnel.

Designing a highly engaging landing page is quintessential if you want to convert your visitors into customers. This page should showcase all the information about the product or service, how it addresses a pain point, and its uniqueness in a convincing manner. 

This landing page is also a great place to showcase testimonials, reviews, and case studies to enhance the credibility of your offering. 

You can create different versions of the landing page with unique headlines and CTAs to see which one works the best with your audiences. 

5. Set Up an Opt-in Option

While your landing pages pique the interest of your visitors and nudge them to make a buying decision, they are also a great place to insert an opt-in page. 

The opt-in page or opt-ins are an integral part of your affiliate marketing sales funnel and are vital to building your email list.

Knowing the effectiveness of email marketing, you should use a good online form builder to create a crisp opt-in form that gathers all the relevant information about your leads to stay in touch with them regularly. 

What’s the use of creating an email list, you ask? 

Well, you can automate your email campaign every time you sign up for a new affiliate program and reach your subscribers with a single click. This can help you get them to buy using your affiliate links repeatedly.

You need to be mindful not to bombard your potential buyers with tons of promotional emails. But rather aim at providing them useful information and interesting offers through every email.

6. Design A Creative Product Page 

Once your leads are convinced of the value of the product or service you are offering, they move to the next stage of the sales funnel which is decision making. 

When you create an affiliate marketing sales funnel, use a custom product page to persuade the potential buyers to go ahead and make the purchase.

This page can be optimized in multiple ways to convince your leads to buy the product or service. 

You can include a video of customers using the product or tool and how it has yielded great results. To make the offer more desirable, you can include an exclusive promo code using which the customers can avail special discount. 

To create a sense of urgency, give a limited period offer. Seal the deal with an action-worthy CTA.

From here, your audience is led to the sales page on the affiliate company’s website where they can make the purchase.  

7. Follow-Up Promptly 

Ideally, when your leads leave the product page, they move on to make the purchase and you earn your commission. But there are chances that once the potential buyers reach the sales page, they change their minds or delay buying the product for various reasons. 

This means a potential loss for you and it needs your immediate attention. That’s why follow-up emails should be included when you create an affiliate marketing sales funnel. 

You can follow up with your leads by sending them a reminder email about the abandoned cart, persuading them to make the purchase, gathering feedback about the product, and sharing valuable discounts to win their loyalty. 

Such efforts will all add up to make your sales funnel stronger and grow your affiliate marketing customer base. 

Get Ready to Create a Strong Affiliate Marketing Sales Funnel 

To join the league of successful affiliate marketers, you need to understand how to devise marketing techniques that click with your audience. 

There’s no magical formula or secret to quick success here. But once you build your authority and create a strong affiliate marketing sales funnel, you will certainly see an increase in your conversion rate. 

Are you passionate about affiliate marketing? Are you ready to make a steady income through this channel? 

Then go ahead and use the above-shared steps to create an effective affiliate marketing sales funnel and pave your way to becoming a successful affiliate marketer.