How to Optimize Your Affiliate Marketing Conversion Rates
We wanted to provide a simple guide to increasing your affiliate marketing conversion rates. This is one of the best ways to build a large network of affiliates quickly.
Don’t fall for the gimmicks that other affiliate networks try, which include low yield and low retention practices like job fairs and fliers. Until you reach critical mass, your focus should be entirely digital.
We’re going to discuss the two factors that will drive your affiliate marketing conversion rates, and then give you detailed tips on how to make the most of your online presence, and start getting that cash flow rolling in.
How Does Website Traffic Influence Your Affiliate Market Conversion Rates?
The two factors that you need to keep in mind when building an affiliate network are:
Website Traffic: This is the flow of people coming to your site. Sources might be traffic from paid ads, social media, word of mouth, or traffic flow from search engines.
Conversion Rate: This is the percentage of people who actually join your affiliate program, based on the total number of unique visitors. So if 100 people visit and 1 person joins, that’s a 1% affiliate market conversion rate.
But website traffic needs to be ‘shaped’ in order to hit the right cross section of people that will join your affiliate program. In other words, you can’t just hire a firm to pump traffic through to your site and expect results. You need well targeted, curated visitors, not just raw volume.
Optimizing the Website Traffic
There are three main ways to make sure that most of the people visiting your site are actually interested in affiliate marketing:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Find the key phrases that are most likely to attract your ideal affiliate, and incorporate them in the titles, description, and ALT image attributes of your website. You can find key phrases via SemRush, check for SEO errors at SEObility, and link into your Google Search Console to fine tune the site. Or hire a professional to get the job done right.
- Demographics: For your paid search and ads, make sure you’re using demographics to narrow down who your ad is displayed to. If you know people in certain areas, with certain hobbies or interests, or living certain lifestyles have a much higher chance of becoming a successful affiliate, filter your ad displays using those factors.
- Clear Message: Don’t mess around or try to trick people into visiting. You’ll get higher traffic, but lousy conversion rates. Be honest, straightforward, and don’t use hyperbole. Anything else will dilute your numbers, and you’ll be paying for nonsense leads.
Optimizing the Affiliate Market Conversion Rate
Once people are visiting your site, you need to make the process as easy and simple as possible. That is the primary key to a good affiliate marketing conversion rate.
There are five main methods for enticing the best affiliates to your program:
1. Competitive Rates: Don’t bother with any payout percentages lower than the industry average. You’ll accidentally be selecting for inexperienced affiliates, filtering out the good and productive ones. Offer the average percentages or slightly better, or you’re literally filtering out the people who will cause you to be successful. Take advantage of flexible commission rates to offer bonus commission rates for certain types of products, user roles, or specific affiliates.
2. Offer Easy, Attractive Custom Creatives: If you can show the potential affiliate how incredibly easy it is for your system to generate beautiful, customized banners and graphics, you’ve made their jobs ten times easier. Experienced affiliates will be all over this. Coupon Affiliates dynamic creatives are a great example of the power of the system, allowing you to automatically generate unique creatives dynamically for your affiliates, automatically adding content onto the banners such as their coupon code, discount amount, QR code and more. When they can get tremendous results instantly on their dashboard, they’ll understand the power of your system.
3. Give Multiple Ways to Reach Out: Rather than just offering a simple affiliate registration form for affiliates to fill out, you should also consider offering email, chatbot, and social instant messaging options in addition to the registration form. This is critical. The reason is to cover edge cases, and everyone thinks they’re an edge case! You may have spelled it out in text on your site, but with just a little bit of handholding, you can land the bigger players in the field because you took the time to answer a couple questions personally.
4. Present a Support System: People don’t want to sign up to an affiliate program if they’re just going to be left in the dark afterwards. You want to be plugged into a system. You need to lay out exactly how you will communicate with them, provide detailed reports and guidance, a powerful affiliate dashboard, and shepherd them towards success. Make sure that you make it clear that they can opt in or opt out of email notifications at any time, allowing them to customize their level of interaction with you. Make use of Coupon Affiliates automation features to save you time, and improve the overall experience for your affiliates more efficient.
5. Testimonials: The best way to attract success is to display success. If you’re early in the process and don’t have your own testimonials, you could promote the success of the framework you’re using instead. You can borrow their success until you see some of your own. When potential affiliates see a well tuned machine churning in the background, they’re far more likely to join up.
Putting It All Together
Once you’ve gotten your SEO, paid advertising demographics, and messaging fine tuned, the traffic will start coming in.
Once you set competitive rates, offer awesome custom creatives, open your lines of communication, outline your support system, and provide testimonials, your affiliate marketing conversion rate will skyrocket.
Now you need to retain your affiliates by following through on your promises. Churn out helpful guidance on a regular basis. Tweak your creatives and support according to market interest. Touch base with all of your affiliates using automation, and your best affiliates personally. Continue to share new features from your affiliate plugin with your entire network.
A high retention rate also doubles as a sub-affiliate magnet. So make sure that you offer your current affiliates ways to benefit from building a sales network of their own. You’ll collect an override from them with almost no effort on your part. But make sure to offer some amount of sub-affiliate support to your biggest affiliates, even if it’s just offering to let them rebrand some of your old newsletters and touch-bases. Small gestures go a long way.
Grow Your Affiliate Program With the Right Tool
Now that you know how to optimise your affiliate marketing conversion rates, you should ensure you are using the best possible platform for creating a WooCommerce affiliate program.
Coupon Affiliates is a unique plugin for WooCommerce that allows you to build a powerful coupon-based affiliate program, with all the tools and features you will need to launch a successful campaign.
Try Coupon Affiliates today, with a free 7 day trial.
Bill Ricardi is a former Silicon Valley sysadmin, and uTest’s 2010 Performance Tester of the Year. He was test manager for Deloitte before becoming a full time author in 2017, and is also a regular contributor to the Coupon Affiliates blog.
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