Wouldn’t it be nice to know that your affiliate traffic is converting better than all other marketing channels? In theory, it should. Affiliates drive traffic from a new audience, with a special note about why they like your product. Yet most companies are still sending that traffic to the same landing pages of the other channels and hoping for the best. The question of how to increase affiliate conversions isn’t asked enough. So if you are into saving your company money, driving more conversions, and helping your partners make more, lock in for strategies you should be testing.
How to Increase Affiliate Conversions
Creating a high-converting affiliate program is done by using the right networks and affiliates and the best strategies to sell your brand’s products to potential customers. By understanding your target audience and their needs, you can tailor your approach to appeal to them specifically. But before we show you how to increase affiliate conversions, let’s start at the beginning.
What are Affiliate Conversions?
An affiliate conversion is when a visitor makes the desired action – for example, purchases your product after clicking on an affiliate link. A conversion can be any number of actions beyond purchasing your product, such as signing up for your newsletter, contacting your business, scheduling an appointment, or using a coupon code. The conversion itself might vary, but the concept is simple: drive traffic interested in the product.
When tracking affiliate conversions, it’s important to differentiate between a click on an affiliate link and an actual conversion. When someone clicks on your affiliate link, that does not automatically create a conversion.
Why are Affiliate Conversions Important to Marketers?
Affiliate conversions show whether or not a marketing strategy is working well. Understanding the conversion rate of each affiliate link in a marketing strategy is pivotal to knowing whether you’re targeting the right audience, using the right channels, working with the right partners, and writing the best sales pitch. Knowing which affiliates convert more viewers into customers, you can better allocate your budget and resources.
Now, let’s get into the science of how to sell your product to an audience in the 21st century.
Proven strategies to boost affiliate conversions
Many factors are necessary to increase affiliate conversions. It starts with selecting the right influencers to promote your brand, choosing the proper networks to manage your affiliate links, and monitoring your data correctly to make necessary adjustments.
Below are some basic things you can do if you’re wondering how to increase your affiliate conversions.
Optimize Your Landing Pages for Better Conversions
The content on your landing pages should be clear, concise, and exactly what the audience wants to hear before purchasing. Optimizing your landing pages starts with understanding the terms your audience uses in search tools. Try using this free keyword research tool to find the best keyword terms for your audience. Once you know your top keyword terms and phrases, you can edit your content around them to ensure you’re talking about what the customer wants to hear.
Let’s take two examples from Oura Ring:
- Lindsay Vaughn is a pro skier who has followers that like her style. The landing page caters to her audience of Olympic watchers.
- Clue is an app that created a co-marketing campaign with Oura since they have a great overlap in ideal customers.
Even though the audience demographic has some big overlap, the messaging is different. These pages are built to cater to the needs of the audience.
Focus on Proven Winners
Not every affiliate will produce the same results. It’s important to track metrics such as EPC (earnings per click) and conversion rates for every affiliate to pour your resources into the top performers and find more similar affiliates.
Write Consistent and Persuasive Calls-to-Actions
Your content may be great, but if you don’t have clear call-to-actions, consumers won’t convert. Every landing page the viewer visits needs a clear and consistent call to action that encourages them to do something. Keep this simple, but make sure it’s clear and easy for them to interact with your business.
For Example, Optimal Bone Health clarifies what to click on their Power Plate landing page.
Check Your Website Speed and Visitor Workflow
A slow and bulky website will detract viewers quickly. If it takes too long for the link to load, or if your website is too confusing to use, many people will click away quickly. Have some people test your website and give you feedback on areas of confusion or difficulty. You can test your website’s speed for free using this website speed test.
The Role of Content in Affiliate Success
Your affiliates help get people to your brand, now it’s your job to convert them into customers. The content people see once they click on an affiliate link will determine whether or not they continue interacting or go somewhere else.
Create Valuable and Targeted Content
Make sure you’re offering valuable content to the viewer. Clearly explain the benefits of your product tailored to their specific demographic. For instance, let’s say you know an affiliate has an audience demographic of the following:
- 40+ age
- female
- enjoys spirits
You would tailor the content linked to that affiliate to speak in their tone and voice. Love Your Liver does this well with their partners, highlighting how De-liver-ance can reduce hangover symptoms and how the nutrients in the bottle effects helps.
How to Write Product Reviews That Convert
First things first, if you don’t have any product reviews yet, you need to get some!
Ask your customers to write you an honest review so that you can include it in the content targeting new clients. Then, these reviews will be organized according to what the specific target market will want to hear. Make sure that the first reviews people see are powerful and drive action.
Your ultimate goal here is to show the consumer that this product works for others.
Using Tutorials and How-To Guides Effectively
Tutorials and how-to guides are great for a few reasons – they help your business rank well in search engines for keyword terms, they present your brand to consumers as an expert in the industry, and they provide valuable information that may help a consumer make a purchase.
You can use tutorials and how-to guides in the content for affiliate link pages to give the viewer something in return for their interest. It’s also a great way to earn their trust quickly and encourage them to interact with your brand. Check out some tips for writing an effective how-to guide for your consumers.
Harnessing Technology and Tools
A successful affiliate marketing program is data-driven. Understanding how to increase your affiliate conversions starts with understanding your data.
Tracking and Analyzing Affiliate Performance
What are the key metrics to track for affiliate conversions? The most important metrics to monitor are click-through rate, conversion rate, affiliate revenue, earnings per click, return on investment, traffic sources, and overall affiliate link performance.
- Click-through rate – This measures the percentage of people who clicked on your affiliate link compared to the total number of people who saw the link. A low click-through rate may indicate you’re not targeting the right audience. A high click-through rate is good but must be compared to the conversion rate to see if these clicks convert.
- Conversion rate – Measures the percentage of people who completed a specific action after clicking on your affiliate link. A low conversion rate suggests something is wrong with your website or content. People are interested in your brand and click on the link, but something is deterring them from interacting.
- Affiliate revenue measures how much money you make from your affiliate links. This shows the direct benefits of your affiliate marketing efforts to your business.
- Earnings per click – Measures the average amount of money your business makes per click on affiliate links. With this, you can compare earnings to other marketing efforts.
- Return on investment – This measures the profitability of your affiliate marketing campaign. Affiliate marketing has different costs associated with it, such as commissions to affiliates, and it’s important to determine if the revenue you’re making from links is higher than the costs associated with getting those customers.
- Traffic sources – Measures where your traffic is coming from. Are your customers coming from social media sites, blogs, emails, or elsewhere? This can help your marketing team understand the most effective channels of communication for your business.
- Overall affiliate link performance – This measures the overall performance of each affiliate link in terms of clicks and conversions. It identifies which specific links, products, or pages perform best so you can duplicate their success elsewhere.
Look at the Inflektion brand dashboard, which can be seen below. Clients pick and choose the columns they find valuable in the partner overview. More detailed reports are available, but Inflektion’s clean dashboard gives affiliate managers the stats they need to quickly review the metrics they find valuable.
Automating Processes with Affiliate Marketing Tools
Measuring and monitoring data can be a difficult task if done manually. It’s also easy to make mistakes and miss key data points if you’re monitoring a large data source by yourself. Affiliate marketing tools help to organize data and create key measurements that help you make decisions to improve your strategy. Read my blog post about My Top 7 Best Influencer Marketing Platforms to find a platform that works for you.
Using A/B Testing to Optimize Marketing Campaigns
One of the best ways to improve your campaigns is to test different ideas. By taking your top two versions of something such as a headline, call-to-action, or layout, and testing them both for a period of time, you can make a data-driven decision about which one to stick with. Using real data to make decisions reduces the guesswork and optimizes your campaigns to get more clicks and conversions.
Advanced Techniques for Higher Affiliate Conversions
Are you ready for some advanced techniques to get more conversions on your affiliate links? Here are some high-level tips for optimizing affiliate campaigns.
Retargeting Strategies to Capture Missed Opportunities
What do you do with people who engage with your business but don’t make a purchase? Are you finding ways to re-engage them or let them go and never return? Someone who engaged with your business (i.e., clicked on your affiliate link) but didn’t convert is still a potential customer! Retargeting them helps to remind them about your business and is more cost-effective than seeking new visitors.
An easy way to retarget an opportunity is to send them personalized emails. These can be automatically set up using your marketing platform to email people when they abandon their cart, don’t finish a sign-up, or miss out on a different conversion opportunity. You can also set up dynamic product ads to show users the products they previously viewed on your site and remind them of your business.
Your affiliates will appreciate the fact that their traffic is not wasted.
Specialized Offers and Bundles with Affiliate Links
People who visit your site via an affiliate link should feel they are receiving a personalized experience. Giving a special offer to people who visit via the link is a great way to encourage them to convert. Special discounts only available for a certain amount of time encourage customers to act quickly and convert. You can also bundle various products or services to target your affiliate’s audience specifically.
Giving your top-of-the-funnel influencer partners a closing coupon will reduce the chances of the consumer searching the rest of the internet for a coupon code that may or may not exist.
Email Marketing Tips for Affiliate Success
Depending on your industry, email marketing can be a great way to communicate with potential customers. Every email marketing program has to start with a high-quality email list. The people who visit your site from an affiliate link are more than likely people who are interested in your product or service, so it’s important to encourage them to join your email list!
Offering an ebook, template, or discount for signing up is a great way to motivate people to give you their email. Once you have your list, create a consistent schedule for sending compelling emails. Plan how many emails you want to send weekly or monthly, then brainstorm short, compelling topics to capture their attention. Mix in some promotional emails with discount codes and informational emails to keep your audience engaged.
Wrapping Up On How to Increase Affiliate Conversions
Creating an affiliate marketing program that converts well is not easy, especially if you’re working alone. Working with someone with experience in creating effective marketing programs can help you see results faster.
Consider working with an affiliate marketing consultant who can provide you with expert knowledge, dedicated campaign management, strategic planning, and optimization to drive growth. You should also consider a tracking platform that bakes in all the above goodies. Inflektion can help your brand take influencer and affiliate marketing to the next level. Sign up for a demo of our platform and see firsthand what an affiliate program should look like.
