The average affiliate conversion rate will vary from product to product and affiliate to affiliate. Different affiliates promote products in different ways, leading to a different experience. However, an average affiliate conversion rate would probably fall between 0.5% and 1% meaning that over with 1000 website hits you make 5- 10 sales.
Conversion rate = sales ÷ visitors
You might be using website visitors in your numbers or you could also use your email opt in numbers. Generally speaking your email list should give you a better conversion rate because you have much longer to sell something to each subscriber. On a website, visitors come and go within a few minutes. But once on your email list you can put your products in front of your subscribers time and time again. Email subscribers can make a purchase even years after subscribing to your list.
That’s why one of the best things you can do to improve your conversion rate is to get an email list and start collecting subscribers. You can access one for free here.
Average Affiliate Conversion Rate
But what else can you do to increase conversions? Traditional sales people would go door to door selling their wares. More doors meant more sales. But clever sales people knew that if they could increase their conversion rate, they could earn more from fewer door knocks! The same applies to affiliate marketers. Some affiliates will get thousands of visitors to a website, but their sales will be much lower than average. Others might have far fewer visitors but a much larger conversion rate.
So if you’ve been focusing on getting a tonne more visitors to your website, this might help shift your viewpoint. More visitors doesn’t necessarily equal more sales. To get more sales out of fewer visitors, you need to do a few things well.
Average Affiliate Conversion Rate: Target Audience
To help you improve your affiliate marketing conversion rate, it’s a very good idea to learn about your target audience. Your “target audience” is the small sub section of the people on the internet who are most likely to buy from you. There’s a saying in sales that if you try and sell to everyone, you sell to no-one. This phrase is never more true than it is for affiliates. With affiliate marketing you have the whole world to aim at with your marketing. 99.99% of those people don’t give a hoot about what you’re selling! You need to figure out who the 0.001% of the market is so you can talk directly to them!
When you understand the people you are talking to, it’s much easier to speak to their needs, gain their trust, and place your marketing in front of the right people. When you know where your target audience lives, how old they are, what they read and what they watch, you’re much closer to understanding their needs and meeting them with a possible solution (your products!).
Average Affiliate Conversion Rate: Congruence
What does it mean to be congruent in your marketing message? If a person clicks off your website to your affiliate product, they expect the message on your website to relate to the product you’re offering. So, for example let’s say you have a website which discusses nutritional foods to do with losing weight. Your product should be aligned with your website’s content.
If it isn’t, you’ve going to be very unlikely to make any sales. So if your product is about building abdominal muscles, but your website is about losing weight there might be a disconnect between the two. Although these topics are of a similar nature, you need to make sure your content is aligned with your product. Otherwise, people won’t connect to it.
People looking to lose weight might not actually care about building six pack abs, for example!
Customer Journey
The customer journey is equally if not more important than having congruence in your messaging. If for example you send website visitors to a landing page, but the page looks nothing like your advert, or conveys a different message, they may click away because they assumed a mistake has been made.
This is all about the customer journey from your content to the final product. Ideally you should use the same messaging and similar images and colouring in order to connect your different pieces of marketing together.
If something is off, or disjointed, many visitors will click away, reducing your conversion rate. A good conversion rate (from advert to landing page) can be up to 40%. This means 40% of people landing on the page convert into email subscribers.
Many factors affect the conversion rate of a landing page including marketing message, colours, titles, images, page load speed etc.
Product/s
If you have successfully defined your target audience as an affiliate, it is much easier to make sales because you understand who you are talking to. You can present your products to them in a more congruent way which meets their needs and which talks to their problems/pains.
However, if your product is not good, then there’s a problem! Not all products are created equal and some are better than others. So if you’re having problems selling, make sure you actually believe in what you are selling. If you don’t, chances are you are subtly communicating this in your marketing (subconsciously).
Think of the sales person standing on your doorstep trying to convince you to buy something you don’t need or want, when they don’t even believe in their product! As an affiliate, despite the power of automation and online selling, we can still send out conflicting messages if we aren’t truly aligned with what we are doing!
A good product will convert at much higher rates (to the right audience) than a bad product!