Using Affiliate Marketing to Improve Online Sales
Based on the partnership between brands, people, and businesses, affiliate marketing certainly has the potential to drive sales and generate significant revenue.
More than that, it’s a highly cost-effective lead generation tactic, where you pay according to campaign performance.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is also known as performance based marketing.
In short, brands partner with multiple affiliates, who may be businesses or individuals, to promote its products or services on their personal channels, such as blogs, social networks, YouTube, etc.
When an affiliate’s promotions lead to a sale, the brand pays a commission to the affiliate, which may vary according to company determinations. You can pay your affiliates by sale, lead or click, for example.
You can partner with many affiliates to tap new audiences and grow your power of influence.
This is also a very effective way to feed your sales funnel with significant leads and conversions.
– How to create a sales funnel
For these reasons, more and more companies are taking advantage of this marketing tactic based on performance.
The use of affiliate marketing has been increasing in recent years and statistics related to this outreach strategy impress:
- 81% of brands use affiliate marketing to capture visitor attention, engage with existing customers and generate more sales.
- US affiliate marketing spending is expected to rise to over $ 6.82 billion by 2020, at a compound annual growth rate of 10 percent.
- 79% of marketers use affiliate marketing to drive conversions and increase purchases. 83% use to increase brand awareness and 79% use to engage existing customers.
However, using affiliate marketing to consolidate your brand and increase sales takes time, effort and well thought out strategies to generate the best results.
5 Affiliate Marketing Strategies
Many online businesses work with affiliate marketing to increase their sales. But not all of them use the same techniques to increase the visibility and demand of their products.
In fact, there are several different strategies you can take advantage of.
1. Choose the right affiliates
As we mentioned earlier, affiliate marketing lets you harness the power of influence to get people to buy your product / service.
If you want to influence consumer buying decisions, choose to work with someone who is related to your industry and has an engaged audience.
When choosing affiliates to help you with your product promotions, make sure:
- They have a good relationship with your target audience and build trust.
- The audience you reach has an interest in your products or services.
- They have a good following, rating, views, engagement, and authority.
All of this is important to ensure your efforts are not in vain.
For example, if you have an online alternative therapy course, choosing healthy lifestyle sites, like yoga, meditation, and more can make sense for your business.
But even if the site relates to your segment, pay attention to the requirements we cited above. Partnering with a blogger that receives only 10 unique visitors a day is unlikely to help you increase your sales funnel.
– How to Use Your Blog as a Marketing Tool
Therefore, you should choose your affiliates wisely to get the most conversions with the least effort.
2. Attract sales with coupons and promotions
Offering discount coupons is one of the best affiliate marketing strategies to increase sales.
Many consumers are looking to save money when making an online purchase by looking for opportunities on coupon sites.
– How to use discount coupons in your business
There are currently many sites that attract customers offering a significant discount such as Groupon and Offers.com. These are some of the sites you can use to drive traffic to your business and increase conversions.
Coupons work best in highly competitive markets like food, fashion, travel or gadgets. However, with the right strategy, you can use them to sell everything, including online courses.
To make the most of your coupon affiliate marketing strategies, choose to work with some high quality sites. See where their visitors come from. Do they rely heavily on search traffic or do they have their own user base?
It is also important to verify the authenticity of the site. Try to use the coupon codes it offers before closing any partnership, if they do not work, the red alert is on.
3. Use the power of influencer marketing
Influencer marketing has become much more than a buzzword in recent years and companies are continually learning to exploit this source of references effectively.
Many brands choose to work with a large number of social influencers and bloggers in their niches.
Influencers are constantly sharing thoughts and moments of their personal lives with their followers, ultimately creating a lasting relationship and establishing a high degree of convincing power over their audience.
They can effectively get people to trust your brand and convince them to use your products or services.
Influencers may not send you large amounts of traffic compared to coupon sites. But the audience they send is qualified and more likely to be interested in your product.
Thus, you can increase your conversion rates with effective influential affiliates.
While most influencers expect monetary compensation, many agree to work for free products or a commission on each sale they make.
However, for the best results, in addition to partnering with influencers relevant to your brand, you need to look at a number of metrics such as:
- engagement that they achieves
- demographics of their target audience
- growth over time
- alignment with values and niche of your brand
All these factors contribute to whether or not an influencer is right for your affiliate marketing program.
4. Create multiple promotion and conversion possibilities
Instead of focusing only on influencers working on the same type of platform, look for affiliates who make use of many different channels.
You can test various affiliate marketing strategies to see which audience responds best. Even affiliates themselves have many outreach tactics that they use to reach their audience, such as:
- Email marketing
- Social media
- Product review video
- Promotions
- Ads
– How to create an email marketing campaign
So do some research and find partners who dominate different media and can present your product / service in a variety of ways, such as the following:
- Blogs: An affiliate blog focused on product performance testing and feedback can help you promote your products efficiently. They are more likely to target customers who are really interested in making a purchase.
- Email Marketing: Affiliates with a huge list of email subscribers in your niche can help you drive more conversions.
- Webinars: Influencers who often stream live to talk about topics relevant to their niche are also an amazing source of qualified leads. With an audience that relies on their recommendations, they can increase your revenue considerably.
- YouTube Videos: Displaying your products with the help of a popular YouTuber is a great way to make instant sales. After all, 40% of millennials admit that their favorite YouTubers understand them better than their friends.
– How to Get More Views for Your Lessons on Youtube
Using multiple platforms can help you get the best results from your affiliate marketing strategies.
5. Optimize your product pages for conversions
You already know how to choose the best partners for your affiliate marketing campaign, but don’t think now is just sit back and wait for the results to appear.
Affiliate marketing can help you attract interested consumers to your site, but it’s your job to make sure they buy your product as soon as they get there.
If you want to drive more sales, you must provide a good customer shopping experience. Therefore, you need to optimize your product pages to increase conversions.
So let’s go back to the basics of developing a sales page. Make sure:
- Your site loads quickly and enables easy navigation.
- You provide enough information to help your customers buy the desired product.
- You display stunning, high quality photos that catch the eye of visitors.
- Your copywriting is well-crafted and attractive, talking about your brand and explaining why people should buy from you.
- Positive reviews and testimonials for your product / service appear on your website home to build trust.
All of this helps keep the visitors longer on your page, which also gives you more time to convince them to make a purchase.
Affiliate Marketing to Sell Online Courses
There is no doubt that affiliate marketing can help you attract new visitors and convert them into paying customers.
But that does not happen overnight. You need to choose the right affiliates, channels, and strategies to increase conversions.
Stay tuned for all the tips in this post, follow the results, adjust your campaign and then, get ready to see your online course sales increase.
Now you just need a good hosting platform to help your customers have the best online learning experience.
Complete eLearning platform, Coursify.me is the ideal solution for anyone who wants to create, sell and promote courses on the internet.
Serving businesses and professionals in more than 60 countries, the platform is a dynamic and customizable Learning Management System (LMS).
– Whats is a Learning Management System
That means you do not even need to invest in building your own website. The Coursify.me is ready for you to enter your course and create a completely customized sales page for your business.
We have three choices of plans for you to decide which best suits your needs, and the good news is that the Beginner Plan is free!
Visit our website, test the platform and start selling online courses right now.
