The promise of passive income brought people to affiliate marketing in the early days. These days, success in the world of affiliate selling looks much different. There’s still plenty of profit to be had, but the top sellers approach affiliate marketing like a job. They go beyond reviewing products and sharing their favorites on social media. They leverage the power of the internet — including social networks and search engines — to reach out to potential buyers rather than wait for buyers to come to them.
Taking an active approach to affiliate sales is almost required to have success in such a crowded market. Affiliate advertising is the new affiliate marketing. It works on the same model — independent sellers partnering with larger companies. However, sellers take on a much larger role. They target niche audiences with ads, build landing pages and even process sales on behalf of their partner companies. If you want to get in on this trend in the new year, here’s how to get started.
Affiliate marketers tend to create content that leads their audience to a seller’s landing page or store via a special affiliate link. Affiliate advertisers, on the other hand, work to bring audiences to their own landing pages or storefronts and then make the affiliate sale from there. This latter group goes beyond typical affiliate techniques to win buyers over. They actively court their audience with targeted and pay-per-click (PPC) ads on social media and search engines.
If you want more ROI on your affiliate efforts, advertising may help you achieve that goal. Once you find the right groups to target and the messaging that convinces them to buy, using paid media will help you expand your reach and, therefore, your audience.
Affiliate advertising also grants increased ownership. Rather than sending prospects straight to another company’s storefront, you’re bringing them to your own landing page. In doing so, you have a chance to gather valuable data to help you optimize your campaigns.
Affiliate advertisers incorporate paid ads into their traditional marketing strategies to widen their reach and convince potential customers to buy from their partner companies. Of course, with wider reach comes undecided audiences who simply saw an ad or searched for a related product.
To sell to this demographic, you’ll need to craft a multi-touch journey, warming them on the prospect of buying before you try to make the sale. That means investing in some tools most traditional affiliate marketers don’t use.
Selling ads and making sales requires you to set up a few accounts and tools so you have a robust web presence and a way to manage it. This means creating a Google Ads account and business pages on social media sites so you can buy ads on those platforms.
You'll also need a website to make your case, preferably one that allows you to quickly build and launch landing pages. This will allow you to segment your site to address many different demographics and pitch multiple unrelated products without muddying the waters. Look for a storefront (like BigCommerce) that provides templates to help you quickly build new landing pages or iterate on your existing ones.
You’ll also want a CRM and payment software so customers can buy straight from your site. The need for a feature-rich backend and agile frontend lead many affiliate advertisers to opt for a headless build that decouples the two. Look for tools like sticky.io that can work with any storefront, and you can turn a simple page builder into a professional ecommerce store.
Once you’ve set up your marketing campaigns across the web, you’ll want to know which ones are bringing in interested audiences. The most efficient way to compare each campaign’s performance is via a centralized platform. Our payments CRM allows you to sync all of your ad campaigns regardless of platform, so you don’t have to sign into multiple accounts to check their performance. Consolidating everything in one place makes it easier to compare your performance between platforms as well.
Bringing your ads into your CRM has the additional bonus of allowing you to understand more about consumer behavior once audiences reach their site. For instance, maybe an ad campaign that has a high click-through rate (CTR) brings people who bounce within the first few seconds, whereas a “lower-performing” campaign brings in more people who actually buy.
Once you have a live funnel, it’s time to dig into the data to see what resonates with your target audience. You may find it’s better to segment your audiences further, creating tailored ads and landing pages that appeal to niche groups.
With your ad accounts already linked to your CRM, it’s easy to test new messaging and new campaigns. Iterate on your highest-performing campaigns and the ads within those campaigns — you can test targeting techniques and messaging to determine what brings interested audiences to your landing page.
Even after you find an approach that works, it’s a good idea to keep testing. The messaging audiences respond to may change over time as consumer expectations shift.
Once your site is live, you don’t want to let it stagnate. Track your users’ engagement so you can continue optimizing each page. Especially because affiliate advertising calls for quick landing page launches, you should expect to update the page regularly after it goes live.
Tracking your ad campaigns’ success can help here: Whatever messaging is working to bring people to your site may also help sell them on your products. With a CRM (like sticky.io) or other tools (like Google Analytics or HotJar) that track onsite engagement, you can see which parts of your pages visitors are interacting with and where they’re bouncing.
Affiliate advertisers set themselves up for success when they find ways to extend the relationship beyond the original purchase. Switching to an ad-based affiliate model requires more upfront investment, both of time and resources. Counterbalance your spend by increasing buyers’ average order value or customer lifetime value.
Often, your target audience can be sold on related products that will enhance or complement the purchase they came to make. There are two main ways to increase order value during a one-time purchase. The first is via an upsell: Convince a buyer to upgrade to a deluxe edition of the product, and you’ve increased your commission. You can also pitch add-on products, which should complement the initial purchase. For example, shoppers who come to buy healthy snack foods may also spring for a detox tea or supplements.
You’ll want to be careful not to seem too pushy when making these recommendations; customers who feel like they’re being hit with a deluge of requests to spend more may simply leave without making any purchase. Work with a platform that allows in-cart and post-purchase upsells and add-ons for best results. You’ll be hitting consumers either when they’ve already committed to a product or after they’ve had the chance to try (and be impressed by) the product.
Once you’ve won over a customer, take ownership of that relationship to continue reaping profits. Affiliate advertisers who work with a CRM can easily track their entire customer base. With your customers’ information on hand, you can run retargeting campaigns to bring back customers who may be low on product.
Integrate text and email marketing services with your CRM to launch large-scale drip campaigns that keep you top-of-mind with buyers. With the right tools, you can also send abandoned cart reminders and coupons to win back reluctant customers. Finally, your CRM makes it easy to keep payment and shipping information on hand so customers can make a simple, one-click purchase.
Affiliate marketing changed forever with the era of social media and the influencer economy. It’s only logical that the market would shift into an ad-based model, especially when it’s so easy to create assets and target niche populations. The winners in the new affiliate system will be those who make the most of those tools to connect with potential buyers and close the sale.
Mastering these new tools is easiest when you can bring everything together with a centralized platform. A marketing and ecommerce CRM that integrates with popular advertising tools will boost your efforts. Taking an active role doesn’t have to mean bogging yourself down with extra busy work. Become an expert affiliate advertiser by investing in a tool that automates your operations so you can focus on what you do best: connecting audiences to the products they want to buy.
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