How To Increase Affiliate Marketing Conversions (27 Hacks & Tactics)
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How To Increase Affiliate Marketing Conversions (27 Hacks & Tactics)
Want to know how to increase affiliate marketing conversions?
Fortunately, there’s lots you can do to get higher conversion rates with affiliate marketing.
In this article, I cover 27 tactics you can use to generate more sales from the traffic you already have.
Before we get into the 27 affiliate sales tips, let’s take a quick look at what we mean by affiliate sales conversions so we’re on the same page.
What Does ‘Conversion’ Mean In Affiliate Marketing?
A conversion in affiliate marketing is basically when you get a visitor to complete an action. This can include things like making a purchase, filling out a form, or submitting an email, for example.
Often, people think of affiliate marketing conversions in terms of making more sales. But it’s actually a broader term that refers to any measurable activity where you are trying to get your audience to do something.
For example, in relation to building your email list, ‘conversions’ refer to how many people are subscribing to your newsletter.
When looking at affiliate sales, ‘conversions’ refer to the number of people that actually made a purchase through your affiliate links.
What Is a Good Affiliate Marketing Conversion Rate?
If you’re new to this concept, then the other term you might have heard of is ‘conversion rate’.
So, what is conversion rate in affiliate marketing?
Conversion rate is the number of visitors you have received to your website, landing page, sales funnel, etc, that actually completed an action out of the total number of visitors. This is measured as a percentage.
The conversion rate is easy to work out. Basically, you divide the number of conversions by the total number of visitors, then times by 100%.
Here’s an easy formula to follow:
conversions ÷ total visitors x 100%
So, what is a good affiliate marketing conversion rate?
According to Awin, one of the biggest affiliate networks, an average conversion rate for affiliate marketing is 0.5% – 1%.
Sounds pretty low, right?
That’s because there are a lot of affiliates out there who don’t make much money. But with practice and consistency, any affiliate should be able to improve their average conversion rate with the right tactics (see below).
So, what is a good conversion rate for affiliate marketing? A good conversion rate for experienced affiliates is 10% – 15%. This refers to the number of visitors you can get to actually make sales through your affiliate link.
If you’re using a video platform like YouTube for affiliate marketing, then you may also be wondering what is a good conversion rate per views for affiliate marketing?
A good conversion rate per YouTube video for affiliate marketing is between 2% and 5%, according to this article. However depending on the product, you’re promoting and your experience level, this can be as high as 8%.
How To Increase Affiliate Marketing Conversions
Now onto the meat and potatoes of this article – how to increase affiliate marketing conversions.
There are basically two ways to increase your affiliate conversion rate:
Increase the number of clicks you get to your affiliate links
Send more traffic to your funnels and landing pages
This list of 27 affiliate conversion tactics mostly focuses on how to get more clicks to your referral links. It should go without saying, the more clicks you can get to your affiliate links, the more you can increase your affiliate conversion rate.
However, I have also included a few tips to increase traffic, although I think those tactics should mostly be saved for another blog post.
The following affiliate hacks and tactics are all great ways how to improve affiliate marketing conversions. I recommend you do as many of them as you can.
Knowing your audience is one of the most important things you can do in your business. If you don’t really understand your audience, it will be very difficult to sell to them.
If you understand the niche and your target demographic well, then you will know what’s important to them, how they think, what motivates them, what their common pain points are, and how to build rapport with them.
Many niches also have jargon and slang that are commonly used. If you don’t know the lingo then you’re not going to be speaking their language. Using words that don’t resonate with your audience is a fast way to break rapport and lose trust.
Use Tables and Visuals To Quickly Convey Your Message
Online, people have a very short attention span. You need to be able to grab their attention in the first few seconds they see your content.
Using visuals like tables, charts, infographics, and product images will help you to hold their attention and quickly convey your message. Once you have their attention, you can draw them to a call to action.
Actually Have Experience With the Product
If you actually use a product yourself, have used it, or have at least tested it then you’ll be able to give a more detailed, honest opinion of the product.
Being able to talk about your personal experiences with a product rather than just listing the features and benefits will have a far bigger impact and lead to higher conversions.
Don’t Make Product Reviews Long For The Sake of Content
It’s a myth that the longer your content the higher Google will rank it. While this was kind of true a few years ago, it’s no longer the case.
The same goes for overly long YouTube videos. If someone’s searching to watch a product review on the latest iPhone, they’re more likely to watch a video that’s 8 minutes long over one that’s gonna take 30 minutes to get through.
Nowadays, people want information quickly. The shorter and to the point you can make your content, the better your conversions will be.
This doesn’t mean all your content needs to be short. But keep in mind to make your content only as long as is necessary to tell people what they need to know.
Keep Listicles Short And To The Point
Similar to product reviews, keep your content short, and to the point.
If you’re creating a listicle, for example, ‘The 10 Best Hooks For Fly Fishing’, you only need to give a short overview of each one in the listicle.
If they want more detailed info on any of the products you can link them over to your in-depth product review, or directly to the merchant’s sales page via your affiliate link.
Create Product Tutorials And ‘How To’ Guides
Tutorials and ‘how to’ guides are a great way to engage your audience, build trust and sell affiliate products.
In most niches, there are a lot of products that might need a bit of explaining on how to use them. If you can make it as easy as possible for someone to use a product they’re thinking of buying, then you’re in a great position to get them to click your referral link and buy.
Another great way this type of content can work really well is when the product you’re selling has multiple use cases.
For example, if you’re promoting the ClickFunnels marketing software tool, then you can create lots of different content pieces on all the ways you can use Clickfunnels. This tactic is even more powerful if you can combine the product with getting your audience a specific result. For example, ‘How To Make $100,000 using ClickFunnels for affiliate marketing.
Give Your Honest Opinion About The Product
If you’ve used or tested the product yourself, then giving your honest opinion can help to increase conversions.
Rather than only talking about the features, if you can honestly convey your opinion about the product, say what you like about it as well as what you don’t like or how it can be improved, then this can often help to increase your conversion rate.
People are turned off by sales language.
When creating your content adopt the mindset of the ‘reporter’ rather than the ‘salesperson.’ Don’t be pushy, but instead ‘report’ on the facts about the product as well as your own experiences with it if you’ve used it yourself.
Learn At Least The Basics Of Good Copywriting
Copywriting is one of the high-income skills that can make a huge difference to your bottom line.
Don’t worry, you don’t need to become a professional copywriter in order to make sales online. However, if you understand at least the basics of sales copy including storytelling, you can increase your sales considerably by applying a few important principles.
This goes for any type of content you are creating online including sales pages, videos, email newsletters, ads, and blog posts.
Make Your Affiliate Links Stand Out
Make your links stand out so people are clear exactly which link you want them to click.
If you’re promoting via a WordPress website then choose a global default color for your links that strongly contrasts with the background of your site. I also see a lot of affiliates bolding their links which does also help to make them pop.
If you’re promoting via YouTube or a social media platform, you can use bold letters and emojis to help your links stand out.
Regardless of how you’re driving traffic online, use clear calls to action when directing people to click your links.
Add Affiliate Links To Your Images
Surprisingly, images get clicked a lot online. If you’re writing blog posts to promote affiliate products, add your referral link to the product image.
Once the visitor clicks your image, they’ll be redirected to the affiliate offer and cookies with your tracking ID. Make sure you set the link to open in a new window.
In this way, a few simple image links can help to make you make more sales.
Use Clear Call To Actions
Direct linking to a product a few times from your blog posts might not be enough to make sales.
Be liberal with your affiliate links and include them whenever you mention the product name.
Use clear CTAs like ‘click here to get a 14-day trial of product name‘, or ‘you can open a free product name account here’.
Of course, be sensible here, if you’ve mentioned the product name 5 times in a paragraph, then adding your link 5 times from that one paragraph is probably gonna be overkill.
A great tactic a lot of successful affiliates use is to also add your link to words that describe product features. Often, people will click the link to find out more about that feature.
The best practice here is to also create a deep link to the actual page on the merchants’ website that describes that feature in more detail. This will also increase conversions.
Good affiliate programs will give you the ability to create deep links with your affiliate link so you’ll get credited with the sale. If not, then you just send visitors to the merchants’ homepage so they can find out more.
Call to action (CTA) buttons can also be really effective to get people to click after key sections in your blog posts.
If you really want to draw people’s attention to your links, then using CTA boxes is a great way to do it.
Make Your Content Visually Appealing
Using visuals in your content helps to engage your audience, keep them consuming your content, and increase sales.
There are a number of ways you can use visuals in your content to engage your audience. These include infographics, product images, instructional images, and videos.
Studies have shown that simply using an image of a product in action can increase conversion rates by as much as 67%.
Track Your Affiliate Sales
Tracking your affiliate sales is one of the most important things you can do as an affiliate marketer. If you don’t know where your sales are coming from, then there’s very little you can do to increase affiliate commissions.
The best practice is to use a link tracker like ClickMagick. ClickMagick will give you in-depth analytics on your clicks, telling you exactly where your sales are coming from. It also has a link rotator so you can automatically test different products to see which one converts best for your audience.
There are a whole host of reasons to use ClickMagick including protection against click fraud. Pricing starts low at $37 per month, which is a snip compared to the amount of extra money it can help you make once you start tracking your links properly.
If ClickMagick is in your budget then you can get a free 14-day trial here.
If ClickMagick is out of your budget then most good affiliate networks like Commission Junction and ClickBank have some kind of basic tracking built into their dashboard. However, it is very basic and often unreliable, so I recommend investing in a dedicated link tracker as soon as you can.
If you are sending enough traffic to your offers, then it’s time to set up A/B testing.
In a nutshell, all you need to do is create a duplicate of your affiliate landing page, make one tweak to one of the pages, send an equal amount of traffic to both pages, and monitor which page converts the best over time.
When testing, it’s important to change only one element at a time, otherwise, you won’t know which tweak is responsible for the increased affiliate sales.
Good elements to test colors, buttons, button text, headlines, subheadings, calls to action, bullet points, amount of content, font, font size, font color, and layout.
If your affiliate landing page also uses video, then you might also want to test your video script as well as background music, etc to see if that makes a difference for you.
Use Pop-ups Where Appropriate
Love them or hate them, pop-ups can have a positive impact on conversions by as much as 40%.
there are several kinds of pop-ups you can use, but some of the most popular include exit-intent pop-ups, slide-in pop-ups, timed pop-ups, and scroll to activate pop-ups.
Often people use popups to collect emails and build their lists. However, you can also use them to directly sell affiliate products.
I have a few sites where I use pop-ups in this way. This affiliate marketing strategy is so effective it has increased my affiliate revenue considerably.
The pop-up tool I use for this is called ThriveLeads. Their templates look good, it’s super-easy to use, it integrates nicely with WordPress, and it works well for me.
I also recommend to use ThriveLeads for pop-ups because you can create all kinds of pop-ups using this tool, you can run A/B testing, and you can use it to either build an email list, directly sell affiliate offers, or both.
If you haven’t used pop-ups I strongly encourage you to do so.
Use Call To Action Buttons
Call to action buttons are great to use in a product review or listicle-type articles in particular.
Buttons stand out, draw a person’s eye and entice people to click.
If you’re using the Guttenburg editor in WordPress then you’ll see they include a basic CTA button. But if you want something with a little more customization then I recommend using the free MaxButtons WordPress plugin to create a custom CTA button.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a strategy to increase organic traffic, not conversions, right?
Well, yes, but if you increase the number of visitors you send to your landing pages you’ll increase your conversions too.
Working on your SEO will help increase your search engine rankings, bring more traffic, and, therefore, make more sales providing your content is already well-optimized with the other tactics I share in this article.
Widen Your Traffic Sources
This next top on how to increase affiliate marketing conversions relies on widening your traffic sources.
Relying on one traffic source is not recommended, even if it’s working really well for you. But, what if it suddenly stops being a good traffic source for you?
Many people who rely on just an SEO strategy have felt the pain of a Google update that obliterated all their traffic overnight.
Tens of thousands of marketers have felt the sting of a Facebook policy change, or any other social media platform for that matter.
The solution is to diversify your traffic sources. Not only is this a safer strategy, you should also increase conversions too from all the extra visitors you’ll be getting.
If you’re not yet building an email list, you’re leaving a ton of cash on the table!
Email marketing is one of, if not the most important strategy for online marketers, and the most effective channel for generating revenue.
According to a study by Litmus, in 2020 email marketing brought an average ROI of $42 for every $1 spent on advertising.
If you’re doing it right, then you can get great conversions with email marketing.
Use An Automated Email Sequence
Most modern email marketing platforms will give you some way of setting up automated emailing.
Using an autoresponder to mail out helpful info to your subscribers will help you to build trust and rapport. Of course, you’ll also include some emails that promote an offer, which your audience will be much more likely to take you up once you’ve built rapport with them.
Using an email autoresponder will help you to boost your conversions with email marketing and earn passive income.
Use Email Personalization
Getting personal with your audience is an effective way to build trust and rapport with your subscribers.
CampaignMonitor found that just using email personalization in the subject line will increase open rates by as much as 26%!
Of course, you’ll need to be collecting people’s first names on your sign-up forms in order to do this. Although studies show you’ll generally get a few fewer emails by doing this, you’ll by far make up for it with an increase in sales.
After all, you don’t want tire kickers on your list who just want your freebies and are never going to buy anything. The more info a lead is prepared to give you at the point of sign-up, the higher quality leads they are.
Having said that, don’t ask for their inside leg measurement if it’s not absolutely necessary!
All in all, personalization is a great way to increase conversions with email marketing.
Only Work With Good Quality Offers And Merchants
While there are tons of affiliate marketing products out there to choose from, not all of them are good products. In fact, quite a few of them are terrible.
Make sure you’re only promoting good-quality products that people actually want to buy.
Before jumping in, check out some product reviews to see what other people are saying. If the reviews check out, then take a look at the product landing page to get an idea of how well it might convert.
Does the company use good copy to sell their product? Does it entice you to buy? Do they make it clear what people need to do to make a purchase?
The company should also list other helpful info on their affiliate program sign-up page such as earnings per click (EPC), cookie life, and the commission rate you’ll earn for promoting them.
Lastly, it’s also helpful to get an idea of what the company is like to work with. Some affiliates have had problems with merchants not paying out commissions, although this is rare, especially if you’re working with a legit company. If you hear other affiliates are saying bad things about the company then think twice about working with them.
Use An Affiliate Bridge Funnel
An affiliate bridge funnel is a very effective strategy to collect emails and promote a product at the same time. If you set up your funnel correctly you should easily be able to get higher conversion rates in affiliate marketing.
This simple two-page funnel collects an email address on the first page (usually in exchange for a free offer), then diverts the new lead to the second page where you can pre-frame them for an affiliate product.
Probably the most effective way to pre-frame your new lead is by using a short video to introduce the product on the bridge page.
One of the most effective and easy-to-use tools in the industry for this is ClickFunnels. Many affiliates have built 6 and 7-figure affiliate businesses using ClickFunnels sales funnels and swear by it in their business.
Offer Incentives And Bonuses
Offering bonuses for people who make purchases through your affiliate link is a super-effective strategy if done correctly.
This tactic works better in some niches than others. So, if you get a lot of people in your space who shop around for the best deal then this strategy can potentially work well for you.
When offering bonuses, it’s not usually the number of bonuses offered, but the quality and relevance of your bonuses that make the difference.
So, if you’re going to use this method, make sure your bonuses complement the affiliate product you’re trying to sell.
Promo codes are another great online marketing strategy to increase affiliate sales conversions in some niches. Ask our affiliate manager if they can provide you with a unique discount code for your audience.
Some affiliate managers will offer this to you as a standard practice. Others will only offer it to affiliates that can generate a decent amount of traffic or those that are already making sales. Either way, it doesn’t hurt to ask!
If you’re running a WordPress affiliate blog, I recommend using the WP Coupons and Deals plugin. It has a free version, but if coupons are common in your niche then the premium version will be a no-brainer for you.
Cultivate Good Relationships With Affiliate Managers
A proactive affiliate manager is a great sign you’re working with a good company. The manager is there to help you so use this resource to get the inside info on how you can promote their products more effectively.
Relationships with good affiliate managers are worth nurturing. You can ask them things like what are the most effective ways other affiliates are promoting their products, detailed info on customer demographics, and additional resources like product images, swipe files, coupon codes, and funnel templates.
You can also ask your affiliate manager for free product samples to help you better review their items for your audience. Often, affiliate managers will oblige, especially if they can see you’re already generating a good amount of their target traffic.
Most importantly, you can also ask your affiliate manager for a commission bump. They may say ‘yes’, they may say ‘no’. If they say ‘yes’ then they’ll probably ask you for something in exchange such as extra exposure on your website, priority placements in round-up reviews, periodic email promotions, or your list for example.
Basically, the affiliate manager is there to help you, and good ones should be able to help you increase affiliate conversions and boost your revenue.
Final Thoughts – How To Increase Affiliate Sales
There you have it, 27 hacks on how to improve affiliate marketing conversions!
If you’re not making much money yet as an affiliate, applying the above tactics should help to boost your sales and increase your affiliate income.
