The success of your affiliate marketing efforts depends largely on your affiliate marketing sales funnel and how you respond to the buyer’s journey. As an affiliate marketer, your job is to find great offers and products that people are eager to have, apply as an affiliate to promote those products, and then devise a strategy to draw visitors to your website and move them through the funnel to make a purchase.

However, as easy as it sounds, the process of persuading people to buy your product is not that simple. Moving customers through the sales process requires proper strategy and planning to promote your product to the right audience and lead them from one stage to the next in order to close the sale. Developing an affiliate marketing sales funnel for your business helps you generate more sales of your products.

In this article, we’ll look at what a sales funnel is, why you need one, and then explain how to build an affiliate marketing sales funnel that will drive your website visitors and other prospects to the merchant’s product page.

First, let’s start by knowing what a sales funnel is in affiliate marketing.

What Is an Affiliate Marketing Sales Funnel?

An affiliate marketing sales funnel can be described like the steps by which a customer goes from being a prospect to a buyer. In other words, it is the set of events that take place before a customer purchases the desired product or service.

Its purpose is often to sell a product or service, but it can also be used to entice prospects to sign up for an email campaign. It includes different steps for potential customers so that they can easily move towards the purchase of the main product and thus generate your sales.

The vast majority of sales funnels follow a four-step process which is as follows:

1. Awareness:

The awareness level describes the top of the funnel, which is broad and more general than the rest of the steps. At this stage, you need to create informative content as an affiliate to introduce the product/service to be promoted and introduce your target audience to your solutions or how to solve their problem with a clear CTA to help generate conversions. 

Since people at the awareness stage are not ready to buy, you need to offer them informative content like free training, spreadsheet, video, diagram or webinar are the best offers they can receive in exchange for their contact information. This is called a lead magnet. This way, you can build your email affiliate list and then push people further down the sales funnel.

2. Interest:

Consumers in the interest stage have learned about your products and services, are potentially interested in solving a problem, and may be open to purchasing a product to solve that problem. But they may need to know more about your offerings as well as all the other alternatives to make the best choice.

At this stage to get your prospects interested in what you offer, you can target them with more specific content than the awareness phase and explain why your type of product/service is the best choice.

3. Desire:

The desire or consideration stage is the stage that you need to convince your audience that you are the best alternative and that opting for your solutions will help your customers overcome the obstacle they are facing.

4. Action:

The last stage of the sales funnel is the action or decision stage, which is closing the sale. Your users in this stage are looking for a solution, either advice on a specific product and may even be ready to make a decision but are unsure of what product they want to buy.

Your goal in this stage is to encourage your prospects to take action and turn them into customers by encouraging them to make a purchase or sign up for your newsletter. Review and buying guide content can target people who are in the decision and action stage.

Why Do You Need a Sales Funnel for Affiliate Marketing?

Let’s look at a few reasons why you need to go through the process of creating an affiliate marketing sales funnel instead of just adding your links in your blog posts, or setting up ads and selling to cold prospects.

• Reach more prospects

An affiliate marketing sales funnel is a defined path that a consumer takes before purchasing a product or service. Sales funnels when implemented correctly can help you drive traffic to your website to turn prospects into customers and generate more sales.

• Visualize the sales process

An affiliate marketing sales funnel, allows you to track each part of your funnel and better visualize the sales process so you can better address your audience and easily spot and correct problems in your process. By viewing every step your prospects take to purchase an affiliate product from your link, you can learn which areas have the most impact on your affiliate conversions, so you can focus on them and optimize your funnel.

• Increase your conversion rates

  An effective affiliate marketing sales funnel that allows you to define each step of the customer decision process and plan effective strategies to improve specific steps will have a direct impact on your business’ conversion rate.

• Chain Repeat Sales

One of the best reasons to build an affiliate marketing sales funnel instead of simply adding links to a blog post or directing ad traffic directly to a sales page is the ability to build your own list of buyers that you can contact to sell other products later.

How to Build an Effective Affiliate Marketing Sales Funnel in 6 Steps?

Now that you have a basic understanding of sales funnels, it’s time to take a closer look at the steps needed to set up your affiliate marketing sales funnel for your website.

Step 1. Choose Your Affiliate Offers

As an affiliate marketer, you need to be able to find affiliate offers that fit your niche and are beneficial to your audience. By discovering the common problems and challenges that your audience faces, you will have the ability to find appropriate affiliate offers to address them. To find appropriate affiliate offers, you can do product searches on Google, which will help you find a variety of offers for all niches.

 There are many affiliate networks that you can use as sources for great affiliate offers but stick to the largest and most established affiliate networks. Some of the more well-known affiliate networks include Amazon, ShareASale, CJ Affiliate, eBay Enterprise, etc.

In general, setting up an affiliate network involves an application and acceptance process. Because affiliate networks act as third parties, they offer benefits to both affiliates and advertisers.

The main benefits of choosing affiliate networks include:

– Access to a wide range of affiliate offers, making it easy to find the right offers for your audience. You’ll find that with the larger networks, you can search for offers based on categories, keywords, seasons, etc.

– They offer an easy way to consolidate payments and track a large number of affiliate programs.

Here are the basic considerations when choosing an affiliate program

You should consider and evaluate the overall quality of each advertiser, including:

-The return per click (RPC)

-Average order value

– Average commission

 – The tracking gap (the longer the cookie lasts, the better)

– Order cancellation rate.

– Banners or display ads that match the overall look of your website?

Despite the benefits of using an affiliate network, some companies decide to run their own affiliate program. While this is not common, you should always be more careful when dealing with small or independent affiliate programs.

If your audience trusts your expertise, you probably have several products or services that you rely on every day, since affiliate marketing relies on your ability to build trust with your visitors.

Step 2. Write High-Quality Content

Once you have chosen the right offer in your niche, you need to create high-quality content to not only draw your visitors’ attention to the services or products you promote but also to show them that you are an expert in your field, which will increase the chances of getting more people to buy via your affiliate links. You need to reach people who are looking for a solution online and offer them a blog post that contains the relevant information they are looking for.

You should have a website to place all the information about the products/services you are promoting and combine all other marketing activities, such as social media advertising, to increase traffic to your website. Content creation is an effective way to organically drive traffic to your website using search engine optimization (SEO), as nearly 89 % of people begin their buying process with a search engine.

You can also get traffic using social media channels and Google ads for search and even create video content on YouTube targeting your audience to educate and guide them to the first step in your funnel. The great thing about social media is that it allows you to be heard quickly on different social media platforms and helps you build your brand.

Step 3. Create a Bridge Page

It’s actually not enough to create blog posts and add affiliate links. You need a bridge page before you send them to the sales page.

The bridge page gives you the opportunity to stay in touch with your audience and promote other related affiliate products in your niche. It is essential to build your email list to create a specific community and reach new people and remind potential customers about the latest company offers through email marketing.

This not only gives you the opportunity to send emails to your existing and potential customers to inform them about upcoming promotions but also to spread awareness about your brand. When the prospect signs up on your bridge page, they are directed to the affiliate marketing sale page where they must submit their email address.

Keep your bridge page as simple as possible by including a headline, an image or video, and a sign-up form.

Step 4. Build Your Opt-in and Set Up Your Email Automation

The next step is to engage your audience by developing incentives that build interest in your website visitors. The most common way for affiliate marketers is to create Opt-ins. Opt-ins usually include actions such as newsletter subscription, registration, or promotional offers that visitors can take advantage of.

The goal is to offer your prospects incredible value through a sufficiently compelling and valuable lead magnet in the form of a solution to the problems they face in exchange for their email address such as eBooks, free reports, videos, Checklist, Cheatsheets, Case Study, etc.

 Creating lead magnets like an ebook about specific research explaining a common problem your target audience is facing helps you build your email list, newsletter subscribers. You can also promote products and services in your lead magnet that will bring your readers to a targeted landing page and thus generate traffic.

High traffic pages are perfect for opt-ins, as they are a great way to capture the interest of visitors who are interested in your products/services. To set up an opt-in form to capture prospects and create a series of emails that guide them towards purchasing your affiliate product you need to choose an email provider and create an email list in that provider.

Step 5. Create a Landing Page and Thank You Pages

Once you’ve set up an opt-in and a series of emails, it’s time for the final step in the sales funnel, which is to get a prospect to take the desired action. Your landing page should build trust and increase your brand credibility to entice visitors to take the final step and make a purchase.

Try to use images or videos that are great for grabbing your prospects’ attention and clear, visible calls to action to facilitate conversions. You can also list relevant benefits, highlight some of the unique features that best meet your prospects’ needs, or add an FAQ section to your landing page to increase your prospects’ knowledge about your affiliate product or service before making a purchase.

To create your landing page, there are many landing page builders to choose from, including Clickfunnels and Leadpages. A visitor may come to your landing page through a search engine, a social media post, a link on a blog to look for a product or a solution to a problem they are facing.

The Thank You Page

Once you’ve set up an optimized landing page, you should also create a thank you page to begin communicating with new subscribers as soon as they join your list. This is the perfect place to highlight your unique brand, establish yourself as an authority and build relationships with these prospects before sending them to an affiliate product.

Step 6. Optimize Your Affiliate Sales Funnel

After designing an affiliate marketing funnel, if you want to get the most out of it, you should not stop there but continuously monitor and analyze its effectiveness and impact. To optimize and improve the performance of your affiliate marketing sales funnel, you first need to make sure that it is getting sufficient leads. 

You can achieve this by making your brand known to your target audience by optimizing your website and putting in search engine optimization (SEO) to rank higher in the SERPs and drive traffic to your free offers.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

SEO is the process of optimizing the content of your website so that it is more visible in search engines.  Most of the time, this means creating blog posts that guide your readers through the buying cycle by targeting buyer intent keywords.

For a completely white hat strategy, you’ll need to:

– Conduct keyword research that your audience is looking for, so you can provide them with the information they need.

– Use on-page optimization: This includes developing an internal linking strategy and creating meta descriptions containing keywords.

-create backlinks to your site to improve your SERP rankings, while increasing your brand awareness.

Use social media marketing

As mentioned above, sharing your free offers on social media is a popular way to drive traffic to your website. Make it a point to offer value by sharing posts that teach, encourage, and inspire instead of just spamming affiliate links without sharing anything else.

To successfully get results with social media marketing you need to choose the right platform where your target audience hangs out most often. You can take advantage of Google Analytics to find your visitor data and see where your audience is coming from.

Keep your users engaged

An affiliate marketing sales funnel provides an actionable framework through which you can easily monitor and analyze your visitors’ journey and identify areas that need improvement.  Having an in-depth understanding of the steps customers take before completing a purchase, helps you ensure that your funnel is designed to keep your users engaged.

You’ll also have the ability to identify the leaky spots in your sales funnel and improve them. Your main goal should be to integrate all the stages of the sales funnel, get the buyer’s attention and move them to the affiliate page to buy.

Give your customers what they need For your funnel to be effective, your affiliate product must offer a solution to a problem shared by your customers, website visitors, followers, or network members.

As an affiliate, you are adding an extra step to the product sales funnel.

So you need to make it add value by giving the prospect a reason to click on your affiliate link. To maximize the number of leads, choose the ones that are most in demand by your audience, developing an in-depth knowledge of the products you have tested yourself to become a trusted voice in your niche. You can also try to stand out by focusing on aspects of the product that others have not covered.

Conclusion

I hope this article has helped you understand what an affiliate marketing sales funnel is, why it’s important, and how to build one to take your prospects step by step through the conversion process on your website. Developing an affiliate marketing sales funnel that converts are your main task as an affiliate marketer.

Understanding the rules for building a simple and effective affiliate marketing sales funnel is the key to increasing conversion rates and will make it easier to communicate with your customers. Understanding the stages of the funnel will determine how you should capture the attention of your target audience and motivate them to make a sale.

It’s as simple as choosing the right offer, writing quality content that showcases your expertise, creating relevant opt-ins and setting up email automation, and creating landing pages that you can direct traffic to. Don’t forget to optimize your website to rank well in search engines. Then understand the buyer’s journey to improve your sales strategies and sales funnel to get your prospects to buy as often as possible.

Start putting this into practice and create your own affiliate marketing sales funnel.