What is a Sales Funnel ? Why do I need a sales Funnel for my affiliate marketing business?
Introduction
Affiliate marketing is not all about writing contents in a blog about product, description, images or videos and placing an affiliate link to pray god for visitors to click the link to buy something and you earn some commissions. There is little or no possibility that some unknown visitor can buy something without understanding basic customer behavior if you are an affiliate marketer. There is a proven system that is a step by step method and it involves asking them to make informed decisions with a few steps before buying something. This system allows your visitor to complete certain steps before he or she becomes your lead or customer. To track the path of visitors to your opt-in page or landing page using a particular system is used by affiliate marketers to collect more leads or customers or email list. This helps to grow your customer base and promoting your affiliate products to your list is the best way to get more sales conversion and eventually earn commissions. You need to create this system which is niche specific and allows only the target audience as your contact list and you can be sure of making a good amount of commissions if you send promotional mails using marketing automation services. This is called the sales funnel system.
Sales funnel functions
You need to be aware of what are the steps customers are taking before making a purchase decision. It is kind of mapping the customers steps before eventually they purchase something. Sales funnels help affiliate marketers to convert leads into customers. Building a customer base is the paramount task of affiliate marketers to be able to sell products by sending mails to their list.
These days most of the companies rely on affiliate marketers to sell their products and affiliate marketers should be able to adopt many strategies to promote the products like blogging, social media marketing, public forum posting, using free ads forums, guest posting, testimonials, social media book marking and finally email marketing where they can send product promotional mails to their customer base to make more conversions and commissions. To have a list of loyal customers or customer base is the ultimate success of affiliate marketing and the sales funnel does this exactly to grow your customer base.
If you are an affiliate marketer you can start blogging or create a website having content about the product you are promoting with affiliate links. Also create an opt-in page for the visitors (who did not buy anything through your affiliate links placed on the content page) to have a choice of joining your mailing list. Once they opt in you can drive them to your thank you page where you can put a short description about the product or services you are promoting to lure them to buy the product.
A presell landing page where you can list the benefits of the products and your own experience of using the product along with testimonials of other users of the product with description, images and videos of the product. It also includes the most important feature known as the CTA ( call to action) button to make your customer buy your product. Though there are different types of funnels used for sales, membership, webinar etc., as an affiliate marketer your sales funnel steps are a content page, an opt in page, a thank you page and a presell landing page.
Types of funnels
There are seven types of funnels available those are
1. Opt-In Funnels
2. Sales Funnels
3. Membership Funnels
4. Webinar Funnels
5. Application Funnels
6. Marketing Basics
7. Summit Funnels
Normally opt-in funnels and sales funnels are associated with affiliate marketing and other funnels used for CPA marketing and digital marketing for promotional purposes and events.
What is the landing page of affiliated marketing? How do I use it step-by-step?
Landing pages are used by online marketers to get prospective leads for their business. Unlike your blog pages or site pages, a landing page is a standalone page designed with the sole purpose of making your visitors sign up or perform other specific activities by supplying their email in exchange for some free product or report or free trial or service. Landing pages are designed to capture emails allowing marketers to send follow up emails or leading to thank you pages with download links.
Affiliate marketing landing pages should convince the visitors to perform CTA ( call to action) by using buttons like sign up or learn more or get me access or download. Landing page contains only the CTA button, not other links for further navigation away from the landing page.
Visitors end up at your landing page through external links and you need to construct a landing page with relevant images, a short description or video explaining benefits of your product or service, testimonials and CTA button. If you want to know more please visit this Quora Space and in the details section get your own free landing page builder for your business.
Which is better for affiliate marketing, a funnel or a website? Why?
It depends on how you are going to promote affiliate products like selling a physical product or selling software or services or memberships or cost per action ( CPA) type of affiliate marketing. Blogs or websites are the best ones for promoting physical products or digital products by reviewing the products' features, adding your experiences of using the products or services and comparing the same with competitors’ products or services to make a conclusion and drive your readers to make a purchase of the product. Here you are connecting with your readers and giving comfort and assurance of buying the product.
But driving traffic, particularly organic traffic requires a lot of technical aspects like on-page SEO, off-page SEO, social media networks indicators to make your site rank higher on search engines. E-commerce giants like Amazon will approve affiliates with a website or blog. The same is the case with ClickBank, ShareASale, or Digistore 24.
Funnels require carefully constructed steps to create interest among your niche audience, be aware of your products or services, and make informed decisions about buying the products. You need to create a landing page or lead magnet to attract the audience to sign up for your opt-in, sales, membership, application, marketing, summit, or webinar funnels depending on your niche of promotion. This is called list building.
Here you have less connection with your audience who have signed up through the squeeze page or landing page. Some leads may turn out to be fake if you subject mails for email validation. Here you need to spend some money to promote your funnels and send emails using paid email services, (unlike your blog or website with good organic traffic) to get sizable leads as you know sales conversion is normally productive if the conversion is anything between 3% to 7%. (for example, sending mails to 10000 leads with affiliate links will only have yield at max 700 sales conversion at min 300 sales conversion or less than that), this may vary from product to product along with the list and you need to follow up regularly with email sequences to keep your list interested and make them buy something through your affiliate links.
