Referral marketing automation is one way to generate greater financial independence. Rather than cold calling or doing door to door sales, digital marketers use automation and online selling processes. Anyone can learn to do this too, even without any products of their own.
With referral marketing, you can sell other people’s products and services over the internet. This is also known as affiliate marketing. Affiliates align themselves with products and services they believe in. They create automated selling systems which bring customers to their products and services. When someone makes a purchase, the affiliate (or referrer), makes a commission on the sale.
There’s all kinds of products and services you can refer people to online. The processes are much the same, whatever product you decide to sell.
Referral Marketing Automation – Selling Systems
Online selling systems can take many forms. You can sell products online using many different strategies. See 22 ways to promote affiliate products. But to automate the process in the fastest possible time, it’s wise to use paid marketing platforms and large value products. Without the right products and services, and the best commissions, it’s much harder to use these platforms and still make a profit. See affiliate marketing business models.
You can still use referral marketing automation without using paid marketing platforms of course. This article is an example of content marketing. If someone reads this article and purchases a product from this website (or they click on an advert), I’ll make a commission. But once created, content can bring in sales for years to come. This is another form of automation – using content to automate sales over the internet.
One of the main strategies used by referral marketers is email marketing. The power of email marketing is pretty awesome for online marketers. They can reach tens or hundreds of thousands of people with a single email through using an autoresponder. An autoresponder is a tool used by marketers to collect subscribers information, build trust and offer value. When a marketer has built up a huge list of subscribers, and built trust through delivering value, a single email can encourage thousands of purchases through their affiliate link to a product or service.
With the right product/s that email could be worth tens of thousands of dollars/pounds worth of income.
Marketing Platforms
Marketing platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Adwords (to name just three) are hugely powerful too. With a marketing platform, you can reach a global audience. Referral marketers can sell almost any product globally, without even dealing with a customer or touching a product personally. So long as a product or service has an affiliate program, anyone can sell it for a commission based on the sale.
With marketing platforms like these, you can also target people very specifically based on what they are like, where they live, how old they are and a number of other demographics. This can be hugely powerful if you have a product to sell. By learning which audience is likely to buy your referral products, you can create a globally scalable business which can run completely on autopilot!
From a marketing platform, people are sent to a landing page where some information is exchanged for their name and email. Once they have entered their details, they are entered into a database of subscribers who are sent automated email messages. If the marketing is right, and the emails are valuable to the subscriber, they will be. likely to trust the marketer and purchase products and services which are recommended through automated email messages.
Referral Marketing Automation – Digital Products
Although there are many physical products you can refer as an affiliate, digital products offer one of the best opportunities. With digital products the costs are far lower than for physical products.
There’s no postage, handling or storage costs and manufacturing costs are considerably less than with physical products. Digital product owners therefore can afford to pay much larger commissions. Some digital products also offer memberships and software products which carry ongoing subscriptions.
This is great for the referrers of these products when they can earn ongoing, passive income from sales they have generated. Digital products too have less boundaries globally, unlike with drop shipping (physical products).
Some digital products offer high ticket commissions and ongoing recurring commissions (memberships and software products). Physical products can’t compete with this and commission structures are vastly different between the two. Physical product typically carry commissions of 1%-12%, while digital products can pay out from 30%-60% commissions on a sale. See affiliate marketing commission rates.
An Automated Sales Funnel
Referral marketing automation is done through an automated sales funnel; with a powerful marketing “engine” at one end, and valuable products and services at the other. Anyone can benefit from such as system without any prior skills or experience.
An automated sales funnel is effectively a system of products and software which generates income for the owner. It takes time to set up a system like this but ultimately it should run on autopilot once everything is set up and working properly.
Effectively, this can give you a money “system” which when you put in $100 at one end, you get $200 out the other end! The testing and measuring of this system is the basic process which any new affiliate marketer must master to make this a reality.
Learn how to market a referral marketing automation system: access here.