Collect Your Customers' Details
The #1 mistake I see almost all affiliate marketers make is not collecting their customers' names and email addresses.
It's essential to do this for two reasons:
1) It's much, much easier to sell to someone who has already bought from you.
2) You need to have control of your own business, not leave it in someone else's hands. When you own your own email list, you own a real business asset.
Here's how most affiliate marketers operate:
They have a website in a particular genre, such as health and fitness, coffee products, cameras, golf, jewelry, children's clothing etc.
They find appropriate vendors with an affiliate program and get approved as an affiliate. The vendor supplies them with links to their products.
The affiliate marketer promotes the products through blog posts, direct email or paid advertising.
Each product promotion contains the vendor link for that product. When a customer clicks on the link, they are taken to the vendor's website. If they purchase the product, the affiliate marketer is automatically paid the commission.
In the process of making the sale, the vendor collects the customer's details.
In order for you, the affiliate marketer, to collect the customer's details, you have to make a couple of changes to this process.
To do this, there are a couple of things you need to have.
The first is something to give away (known as an opt-in). It doesn't have to be massive and if fact short can be better, typically a short report in PDF form or even a video. The important thing is that it's related to the affiliate product/s that you're promoting. For example, if your affiliate product is a weight-loss program, your opt-in could be The No Situps Abs Workout.
You can produce the opt-in yourself or modify a suitable PLR or get someone on Fiverr or Upwork to do it for you at a very low cost.
The second thing you need to have is an autoresponder. You can get started with MailChimp for free. Personally, I use Active Campaign..
Then you need to create 3 landing pages. I find it useful to call them (for example) The No Situps Abs Workout 1: Opt-in, The No Situps Abs Workout 2: Confirmation and The No Situps Abs Workout 3: Delivery. Here's what you put in each:
The No Situps Abs Workout 1: Opt-in
This landing page promotes your opt-in product. It will include an image of the product (such as a book or magazine cover) and promotional text covering why the prospect needs it. To get the product, they must enter their name and email address. As soon as they do, they are taken to:
The No Situps Abs Workout 2: Confirmation
This landing page thanks the prospect for ordering the opt-in and tells them to check their email's inbox for the download link. But before they do, they should check out... here you have some promotional details of your affiliate offer, together with the affiliate link that you got from your vendor.
The No Situps Abs Workout 3: Delivery
This landing page simply contains another thank-you and the link to download the opt-in product.
In the background, the opt-in page also connects to your autoresponder, adds the prospect to your mailing list and sends the delivery email with the download link.
So, at the end of this process...
1) You have a new prospect/customer on your mailing list (this is the most important outcome).
2) This prospect/customer has received a gift from you (this engages the psychological state called reciprocity).
3) They may have also purchased the affiliate product (but even if they haven't, you now have more chances to sell them in the future).
Following this process helps to future-proof your business.
Recent Comments
1
Thanks for sharing!
Mel