Interested in creating reviews about a product? Affiliate marketing might be a great way for you to earn extra money while working on your 9 to 5 job. Affiliates are asked by businesses to sell or promote their product in exchange for a part of the profit. However, it’s not always easy to convince others to buy a certain product – certain strategies like affiliate marketing sales funnel are often employed to boost sales.

So what exactly is the affiliate marketing sales funnel for? The sales funnel is a useful tool in affiliate marketing that defines what steps a customer takes before making the purchase. It helps businesses narrow their focus on important things to create more sales. When used correctly, the sales funnel helps turn leads into customers.

What Does an Affiliate Marketing Sales Funnel Do?

Bloggers are often hired by different businesses to promote their products for a commission. It’s a great way for the business to gain more customers. It also allows affiliates to make money without having to worry about creating a unique product, testing it, or shipping it to the buyer.

Affiliate marketing is such a successful business model that around 81% of businesses rely on affiliate marketers to sell their products. But affiliate marketing isn’t as simple as posting a photo of the brand, writing a few good words about it, or uploading an unboxing video on the affiliate’s YouTube channel. Effective affiliate marketing involves careful planning and the use of different strategies like the sales funnel.

Affiliate marketing sales funnel maps the path that a customer takes when purchasing a product. This tool guides businesses to sell more products or attract more leads. With the sales funnel, businesses create more effective strategies and improve ROIs of advertisements and other promotional activities.

3 Important Reasons to Use Affiliate Marketing Sales Funnel

A sales funnel helps a business that produces its own product or service strategize, but it also helps affiliate marketers gain more sales. Here are important reasons to utilize a sales funnel for affiliate marketing:

• Building a Customer Base – Without a sales funnel, affiliate marketers tend to drop multiple affiliate links on their content and hope that someone clicks on it to buy the product. Encouraging readers to sign up for a mailing list is often included in a sales funnel strategy. This allows an affiliate to start a customer base to sell other affiliate products to.

• Tracking Your Success and Efforts – The sales funnel allows the affiliate to track the number of clicks that a link or page gets. Since every page is included in the funnel, affiliates become aware of which processes are effective and which ones need improvement.

• Preparing You for The Future – Once affiliates start creating and exploring sales funnels, they’ll eventually learn how to create one of their own. They may even use it for their own products in the future. If they still continue being an affiliate for a brand, they can utilize their skills in creating effective sales funnel to gain more revenue.

4 Components of Simple Affiliate Marketing Funnel

1. Content

Blogs are a great way to introduce affiliate products to a customer. People are constantly looking for the right solutions to their problems, so they should find the answers in your blog post. While they’re reading the post, they become acquainted with the product.

For example, the affiliate is commissioned to sell an anti-aging cream. They should produce a post that includes keywords, such as “how to reduce wrinkles” or other related and relevant words. Doing this helps them improve their SEO ranking, making it easier for readers to find the blog and other content.

One section of the post might talk about the affiliate stumbling across “a miracle treatment.” This is the perfect part to drop a link to the affiliate product to encourage readers to check it. Most contents have around 2-3 affiliate links embedded into the post seamlessly.

2. Opt-in Page

After reading the content posted on the blog or watching the video on the YouTube channel, the audience has two choices – follow the affiliate link or ignore the information and never return. If they end up buying the product, then that’s good news for both the business and affiliate. But if they decide to ignore the affiliate link, there’s still a way to keep them as a reader and sell to them later. This is by encouraging them to sign up on the mailing list.

Opt-in forms are an essential part of any business website. It’s the consent given by the site visitors that shows their interest in the product, brand, or service. It gives authority to the brand or the affiliate to contact them with further information or alert them about new affiliate products that are similar to what they were looking for. Opt-in pages may include a lead magnet that’s related to the content they just finished reading.

3. Thank You Page

This page is where the readers download the lead magnets, but it’s also a chance for the affiliate to convince them to buy the product immediately. Make the product desirable by listing down its benefits or offering them a special discount on the product.

It’s also crucial to make the readers trust the affiliate. Most affiliates include a photo or video of them using the product. This allows the readers to associate the product with a trusted affiliate, even if it’s not really their product.

Prospects that have already signed up for a mailing list shouldn’t feel that the products aren’t shoved to their faces. Even if the page encourages them to buy the product immediately, there should still be a way for them to back out of the deal. Include a button on the page that automatically takes them back to the homepage or the blogs on the website.

4. Presell Landing Page

This is the most important kind of landing page to have on the website. It should be an informative and detailed landing page that lists the benefits and features of the affiliate product. It’s also helpful to include the affiliate’s own insights and thoughts about the product. This gives the readers an expert opinion and a trusted review of how beneficial the product is. Reviews from other readers and celebrity endorsers should also be found on this page.

The presell landing page should also have the most encouraging call-to-action (CTA) because it’s where affiliates make actual money. This landing page should be compelling enough to make the customers buy the product immediately.

3 Types of Affiliate Marketing Funnel

After learning about how affiliate marketing sales funnel works, here are a few types to use for selling the affiliate product:

1. Course Funnel

This sales funnel starts when the affiliate offers a cheap course to get more people interested in the main affiliate product. This funnel is an effective conversion booster that encourages people to buy the main product by making them enroll in the supplementary course first.

Most students who enroll in the cheap course usually end up buying the affiliate product because it helps them implement whatever they learned in the short course. It’s also better to “drip-feed” the course at the right timing to prevent the students from binge-watching them.

2. Webinar Funnel

The webinar funnel is about hosting a free webinar for the target audience to lead them to a certain objective. The main goal may be to promote the product or provide them with valuable training.

Other affiliates maximize their earnings by hosting the webinars at low prices, instead of completely free. Aside from the little extra earnings that the affiliate earns from hosting the webinar, it also improves the quality and show-up rate of attendees. Low-priced webinars have up to 80% show-up rates, giving the affiliate better chances of encouraging buyers.

However, the affiliate should try their best to make the webinar interesting and informative for the people who paid to be there. The attendees should at least feel that they learned something from the webinar even if they won’t buy the product in the end.

3. Book Funnel

The book funnel is a successful technique that works best for affiliates with limited resources for customer acquisition. It’s about providing a freebie and only charging the customer for the shipping. As the affiliate offers a free book for the customer, it gets easier to upsell to them until they decide that they need the main affiliate product. A book funnel is a good way to build people’s interest in the product, the brand, and the affiliate.

3 Best Affiliate Marketing Sales Funnel Builders

When working online, it’s better to make use of automation so that you’ll spend less time on simpler tasks and focus more on the important ones. Here are three of the best programs that successfully help affiliates create their own funnels:

1. Systeme.io

This program is originally a big hit in France but has eventually expanded into the US. It’s a powerful program that provides all the solutions needed for online marketing. Companies can run almost all kinds of business functions using systeme.io.

With systeme.io, there’s no need to invest in other tools, effectively keeping the costs down. This program makes it easy for the affiliate to build funnels that help them gain more traffic for the affiliate offers or products. It only takes a few minutes for the affiliate to work on each step of the funnel.

2. Clickfunnels

Clickfunnels is the best-ranking sales funnel building software that’s used by some of the most successful entrepreneurs. This program guides users every step of the way and allows them to find leads, host webinars, sell products, and even send emails. It offers effective funnel building for affiliate marketers who want to boost their sales.

The software offers lots of templates that affiliates may use to build their funnels. For affiliates looking to improve their sales, it’s important to focus on creating a funnel that brings in many leads.

Clickfunnels also allows the affiliates to keep the customer’s information so they may attempt to follow up through email. This is another way to encourage the readers and try to convert them into customers. However, the funnel building feature of Clickfunnels might be a lot more complicated for beginners than systeme.io.

3. Unbounce

Unbounce is one of the oldest tools used for funnel building that’s still available in the market. It features an extensive page builder that allows affiliates to drag and drop elements onto the webpage. While the interface might look complicated, the program is actually beginner-friendly.

The program offers tons of customization options to choose from. However, the biggest downside of using Unbounce is that it doesn’t allow an affiliate to create blog posts. They’re usually limited to landing pages that are mashed together to create a funnel. While the funnel itself might look amazing, affiliates need to integrate other platforms to create blog posts or email campaigns.

Find the Right Sales Funnel For Your Project with Commence

Commence CRM is dedicated to helping all kinds of business owners and affiliate marketers earn more sales by helping them find the best solutions. Our program is designed to help users track leads and sales, automate marketing, manage tasks and resources, and track customer service.

Build the most effective sales funnel for your affiliate product and earn more with Commence CRM now. Visit our website now or call us at (877) 266 – 6362 to get a free test drive.