Affiliate lead generation is the act of collecting leads, usually in the form of an email address. Some affiliates build their own list of leads and then deliver email messages to their subscribers promoting their affiliate products. Or, you can also send leads directly to an affiliate company if you’re working on a pay per lead basis.
In my personal experience as an affiliate I’ve built my own email list through offering some giveaway on my website or landing page. The benefit of using a landing page is that a landing page is a web page designed for the specific purpose of collecting emails. Whereas a website is different in that there’s more choices on a website.
On a website, visitors can have a look around and browse your posts. But on a landing page there’s only two choices: sign up or leave. This allows the marketer to “tweak” the details on the page to optimise the rate at which visitors opt in. This allows them to drive down the cost to acquire a lead.
Affiliate Lead Generation – Why Generate Leads?
Affiliates use lead generation to build an email list of subscribers. By sending out useful email messages which deliver some kind of value, they can build trust with a subscriber. It can be a challenge to sell an affiliate product directly from a website. A website visitor only sticks around for a few minutes on average, often less. Plus they only have one opportunity to buy from you if they never return.
Since most online shoppers will need between 6-8 touch points with a product/website online before they buy, it makes sense to connect with visitors more frequently through the use of email marketing.
Affiliates therefore have a greater opportunity to sell their products through email marketing than they would from a website alone. With email marketing, an affiliate can sell a product to a subscriber days, weeks or even years after they have joined an email list. This just isn’t possible from a website so a good way to optimise your affiliate sales is to capture emails from a website by offering a giveaway of some kind to deliver value to those who opt in.
The Lead Magnet – A Legitimate “Bribe”
The lead magnet is a legitimate bribe with which you can attain the details of your website visitors. A lead magnet should resonate with your customer avatar/target audience and also align with whatever product/s you are selling through your email list.
On this website I offer my ebook Affiliate Marketing For Beginners as a giveaway when visitors join my email list. Access here. A lead magnet could be anything but many affiliates choose an ebook or a course which can be delivered automatically via email.
Affiliate Lead Generation – Communicating With Your Leads
Once you start attracting leads to join your email list you’ll want to give them some useful information which will be beneficial to them. If you’ve ever joined someone’s email list, and all they do is spam you with products to buy, it’s unlikely you’ll keep opening their emails for long!
But if you offer them some genuine value through your email messages, and if they are a good fit for you, they are likely to open your messages more regularly. They might even start to trust you!
Trust online is a powerful thing (especially online) because there are so many people wanting your hard earned cash, it’s worth building trust by genuinely trying to help your subscribers somehow.
If you build trust first, and sell later, people are much more likely to keep opening your email messages, trust you and buy from you if it’s appropriate to their needs.
With an email autoresponder you can queue up messages ready to be sent out on autopilot when someone subscribes to your email list. You can access an autoresponder here for free.
Affiliate Lead Generation – Control
There’s another powerful reason to build an email list of subscribers too. To get visitors to your website requires either a considerable amount of work (in building content) or a considerable sum of money in paid advertising. If you use content to acquire traffic, Google can shift the algorithm any time and you can easily lose your rankings overnight, meaning your traffic can quickly drop.
Or, if you run out of advertising budget and stop paying for traffic, your visitors will drop off almost immediately.
Building an email list gives you control over your traffic so you’re not as reliant on either Google for traffic or a paid advertising budget. Some affiliates will build their list to over 100,000 subscribers! A single email sent to their list can mean hundreds or even thousands of link clicks which could mean either traffic to your website post or a sale of an affiliate product.
Control over your traffic is huge for affiliates because without traffic you can’t make any affiliate sales.
Summary
Affiliate lead generation is a powerful tool. On a website most visitors leave within a short period of time. This gives an affiliate only a small window of opportunity to make the sale.
But if the affiliate collects leads from their website, it gives them more opportunity to sell through email messages. Once someone joins your email list, you can follow up via email over days, weeks, months and even years and decades. This gives you more opportunity to give value, built trust and sell your affiliate products.
Since most online consumers will require between 6-8 touch points before they make a purchase, it makes sense to use email marketing so you can achieve this.