Affiliate marketing lead generation is the process of attracting potential customers into your sales funnel. You can do this from a website or landing page by offering something for free in exchange for your visitor’s email. There’s many ways you can attract leads to an affiliate business. Here’s a few strategies:
- Lead capture pages – landing pages designed to get email leads
- Blog websites – See lead generation through content marketing
- PPC advertising platforms – pay per click adverts sending targeted traffic to either a landing page or blog/website.
- Pop ups – popups are a popular way to collect leads from a website or blog
Affiliate Marketing Lead Generation – Why Use It?
Lead generation is a good idea for affiliates because without building an email list of subscribers you must rely on passing traffic from your website/blog. This is expensive or time consuming to attain, or both. If you’re a blogger, it can take months or years to attract traffic to your site. With paid traffic, you can spend a lot of money only to have most visitors leave your website without having taken any action. Once they leave, they are likely to be gone forever!
But with an opt in offer, many of your visitors will sign up to your email list because you have an attractive offer or “freebie” to give them. Once they do, they enter your sales funnel. From this point you can continue sending them email messages for a much longer timeframe than would be possible simply from a website. Subscribers can unsubscribe from your messages of course, but many of them will stick around for months or even years; buying from you long after signing up to your email list.
On a website there is only a small window of opportunity to make a buying decision. Most website visitors only stick around for a few minutes. Once on your email list, this timeframe increases dramatically.
Affiliate Marketing Lead Generation – Best Strategy
Although there are many strategies for lead generation, one of the best is to send paid traffic to a landing page. A landing page is a specific website built with one purpose in mind: get the email address. On a website, visitors can browse your content and have a look around. But on a landing page there are only two options: Sign up or leave. This means the affiliate can optimise the outcome of sending paid traffic to a landing page in a much more effective way than they could on a normal website.
By cross testing different landing pages against each other, affiliates can see clearly which ones outperforms the others. Over time this means your marketing dollars will go much further. Sending the same paid traffic to a website will seldom have the same effect because much of the traffic will look around and leave, never to return! That means a lot of your marketing budget is wasted.
Follow Up Emails
Once people have subscribed to your email list, you can send a series of automated messages to help build trust, offer value and of course sell your affiliate products. By leading with value, your subscribers are more likely to open future emails and you can build a rapport with your communications. Emails should be used to get your audience to know, like and trust you. If they do, they are much more likely to make a purchase form you, if your product/s meet their needs.
The opposite is also true; if you put the sale first, before the value, it’s hardly likely that your subscribers will be opening your emails. So its important to lead with value in your emails; don’t go for the sale too early! You can offer value in a number of ways through email messages:
- Provide information and value on the subject matter they are interested in
- Give subscribers more insight into your products and what they can do for them (benefits not features)
- Let them know how you can help them
- Use a call to action – direct subscribers to more information and/or useful products
Summary
Affiliate marketing lead generation is a pretty important topic for affiliates. Without leads in your marketing funnel, you must rely on passing website traffic so you will be leaving money on the table. Most of that traffic won’t convert into a sale. Traffic is also costly or time consuming to acquire, so it pays to make the most of it.
Evidence shows that most online customers need several point of contact before making a buying decision. On a website, they have only one. So getting website visitors to sign up to your email list can give you a much better chance of selling something to them. Plus you can build a long term relationship with them by offering value and giving them some valuable insights and information.