Wondering about affiliate marketing funnels? Affiliate marketing funnels are designed to sell affiliate products through an email marketing campaign. When someone visits a website, they’re offered a “freebie” giveaway in exchange for their email address. When they do, they enter the funnel!
From there, follow up emails are sent out. Emails can be automatically sent and/or sent manually. Emails are designed to lead subscribers to products they might be interested in. They also build trust with the subscribers by offering value.
Affiliate Marketing Funnels – The Lead Capture Page
A lead becomes a lead once they subscribe to the list by opting into a form on a website or landing page. But before this happens, the affiliate marketer must get their audience to that particular page. To do this, they might decide on a particular marketing strategy (more on this later).
Affiliates can attract people to their website, where they can place an opt-in form. Or, they can design a specific page for opt in purposes only (a lead capture page). Here’s an example of a lead capture page:
Lead capture pages are much better at collecting leads than websites. With a website, there’s all sorts of distractions for the visitor. A website visitor can browse around. They can look at various articles and posts. On a lead capture page, there’s only 2 options for the visitor: sign up for the freebie, or leave the page.
Affiliate Marketing Funnels – Getting People To The Lead Capture Page
Before someone lands on an affiliate website or a lead capture page, they must have a reason for going there. It’s the affiliate marketer job to promote their website and landing pages and get people onto their email list. They can do this through a number of different strategies. These could be content creation, paid marketing, link building, SEO (search engine optimisation), social media marketing, and so on.
Many affiliates use paid marketing to send targeted visitors to their landing pages. Paid marketing is the best strategy in many ways because it allows the affiliates to focus on automating the sales process and scaling up their business more quickly.
Slower marketing strategies are those such as blogging, organic video marketing and SEO. It can take much longer to generate revenue from affiliate marketing funnels with organic marketing.
Paid marketing is fast, reliable and also scalable. Although in the first instance it can take some testing and measuring of paid marketing to determine the right target audience and target them using any given marketing platform: Google Adwords, Bing, Facebook, YouTube etc. How To Know Your Target Market.
Affiliate Marketing Funnels – Entering The Funnel – Email Marketing
Affiliate marketing funnels use email marketing to sell products to subscribers. Once signed up, the subscriber will receive an email, usually linking to some free resource. This can be part of appeal to opt in – the lead magnet. Giving away some valuable resource is the strategy affiliates use to entice the subscribers to opt in. Once they are opted it to the list, emails are automated to follow up over a predetermined time frame.
Emails can entertain, inform and build relationships with the subscribers. But they are most of all used to promote affiliate products and services which will be of interest.
On a website, a visitor only has around 10 minutes to sell something. After that time, most visitors will have left. Most of them without taking any action to purchase anything. But once a website visitor signs up to an email list, this time frame is massively extended. Sometimes subscribers can purchase something from a list even years after signing up.
Affiliate Marketing Funnels – Products
A good affiliate marketing funnel will have multiple products in it. After the subscriber has received the giveaway product/freebie they signed up for, they will likely receive an email promoting the first product in a range of products.The first product in a funnel is usually priced at the lowest value than the other products in a range.
Once a product is purchased, that customer will usually be “segmented” onto another email list. That way, more appropriate and better targeted emails can be sent to customers and leads according to the actions they have taken. For those who have purchased, the next level product can be the focus of the email messages.
This continues as they purchase more and more expensive products the further down the funnel they travel. A good funnel for affiliate marketers to use will include:
- An entry level product to offer leads
- A subscription type of product which pays the affiliate a recurring income
- High ticket products to offer existing members
- A built in sales team – closing sales automatically
- Multi-tier commissions – the affiliate can earn from sales made by their referrals.
See SFM Digital Business System for more on this.
Uptake For Leads To Sales
Most leads won’t convert into sales within affiliate marketing funnels, and as you go through the funnel, even fewer people will purchase the higher value products still. But with a product range which offers the above strategy, and a good marketing strategy targeting the right kinds of leads, you should make sales as your leads go through the affiliate marketing funnel.
With a range of digital products which offer huge value, some leads will purchase those particular products. Of those customers, some will go on to purchase the higher level products and spend more with you.
Attrition and Membership Products
With membership products you can earn ongoing income from affiliate marketing funnels. So it’s a good idea to use membership type products if you’re going to become an affiliate.
Some of your members will drop out over time. But many of them will stay and with good products they can become loyal customers for a lifetime. This means you can earn lifetime commissions if you find the right products for the right customers.
Get Your Own Affiliate Funnel
If you want access to a pre-built funnel, training, resources and an online business community. Click the image below and access a free video series.
