An affiliate program is nothing without good affiliates. Getting top-performing affiliates can be challenging but it’s a whole lot easier with a good affiliate landing page.
These 9+ pro tips will help you boost conversions and sign up the best affiliates in your industry.
Why is an Affiliate Landing Page Important?
Before you can sit back and watch affiliate sales come in, you’ve got to make sure the right affiliates are signing up for your program. This isn’t as simple as putting up a form somewhere on your site and waiting for people to take action.
You’ve got to actively market your affiliate program, otherwise, it’s going to get forgotten.
Just as you create a landing page to sell your products, you need a dedicated affiliate program page (or multiple pages) to help “sell” your affiliate program. Effective landing pages are an art, and they’re something you constantly need to optimize and tweak to get maximum performance.
Small details can have a big impact on your conversion rate, so think about whether these tips can help improve your affiliate program.
How Can You Improve Conversions on Your Affiliate Program Landing Page?
Digital marketing is all about optimization. We’re always tweaking our processes to get more out of what we do, and your affiliate landing page should be no different.
1. Optimize Your Theme
Too many affiliate landing pages are simply an afterthought. They’re not aesthetically pleasing, and they don’t present information in an engaging way.
If you were creating a product landing page, then you’d make it look amazing, so what’s the difference with an affiliate program landing page?
Your affiliates market your products for you, but they rely on you to make the sale. This means they’re likely to judge you on your ability to sell them on your affiliate program. Your ability to convert will naturally factor into their thought process of whether you’re able to make sales and help them bring in revenue.
Your page doesn’t have to be complicated to do this, it simply has to be conversion-oriented.
The easiest way to achieve this is with SeedProd’s page builder which offers perfectly optimized templates to give you a head start. Simply activate the template of your choice and start filling it out with your affiliate program details.
Want to make an affiliate marketing landing page in just a few minutes? Check out this easy tutorial on how to create an affiliate landing page, no coding needed.
Bonus tip: You might want to think about limiting the options in your navbar for your affiliate landing page. Keep people focused on the action you want them to take by not distracting them with too many options.
2. Clearly State the Benefits of Your Program
Affiliates are going to be eager to find out what commission you offer (which we will get to in the next point), but an affiliate program is much more than that.
Your affiliates have to believe that you give them the tools they need to make referrals. If this isn’t the case, then they risk putting effort into marketing your products for no reward.
Benefits above and beyond commission are important, so make sure you showcase them.
For example, if you’re using AffiliateWP, you might highlight all the great features your program offers:
- Customized affiliate portal
- Direct link tracking
- Lifetime commissions
- Tiered affiliate rates
- Vanity coupon codes
Affiliates have a lot of choices about the programs they join, so you need to point out what sets yours apart. Highlighting your superior affiliate software is a great way to improve your affiliate landing page.
3. Highlight Your Commission
As we mentioned in the last point, one of the first things affiliates are going to be looking for is your commission rate.
Don’t beat around the bush with this, just give it to them upfront and straight.
It’s tempting to think that by saving it for the end people are going to read the entire page looking for it, but this isn’t the case. People scan until they find what they’re looking for; the only way to get people to engage is with quality content and a great layout.
4. Testimonials are Key
We hardly do anything in the modern world without first checking reviews.
In fact, the average customer reads 10 reviews before making a purchase decision.
We want to know that people have followed the same path we’re about to take and had success, or enjoyed the experience. You can promise all kinds of things on your affiliate program landing page, but how do potential affiliates know you’re going to follow through?
Testimonials from your affiliates give other people looking to sign up to your program confidence. They show that there’s value in your program and what you’re promising in your landing page is achievable.
Bonus Tip: TrustPulse is a great WP plugin to help with social proof. You can set it up to track registrations so that when someone signs up to become an affiliate, a notification is shown on your landing page.
5. Keep Your Form Simple
Sign-up forms for your affiliate landing page are a bit of a balancing act.
On the one hand, you don’t want to scare people away by making your form overly complicated. On the other hand, you want information to help you verify the affiliate and make sure they have good intentions.
This makes your forms extremely important.
If you look at many of the biggest affiliate programs on the internet, they air on the side of brevity. It’s about making that initial point of contact and getting contact details. From here, you can expand the conversation and ask for any additional information you might need.
Conversational forms like this one from WPForms are also an excellent way to decrease abandonment and boost conversions.
Your form needs to capitalize on that moment when people say “okay, I’m going to do this,” if it’s too long and complicated, then it will do the opposite.
6. Remember the Importance of Calls to Action
You can write great copy and think it concisely sums up your points and tells people what action to take. However, studies show that without a call to action (CTA), people simply don’t take action.
It’s a weird psychological phenomenon that we need to be told what to do!
Either way, it’s something you need to capitalize on. Ultimately, you’re like a tour guide for your website, you take people where you want them to go.
In the case of an affiliate landing page, your goals are very limited. All you really want people to do is sign up, so every CTA should be geared towards this. Don’t confuse people with lots of different calls to action sending them to different pages, channel people to where you want them to go: your sign-up form.
Calls to action are another little detail where there’s lots of room for optimization, so make sure you’re crafting the perfect CTA.
7. Show How Simple the Process Is
One thing you’ll find on all successful affiliate program pages is that they show how simple it is to sign up and get started.
When you’ve just convinced someone that your affiliate program is amazing and they can make all this money from it, one of the first things they want to know is how quickly they can get started.
Let’s face it, we’re all prone to procrastinating and putting decisions off, and your affiliates are no different. They will (subconsciously) look for reasons to put off signing up, and the thought that the process might be complicated is the easiest reason.
You can overcome this challenge before it arises by demonstrating how simple it is to sign-up and start.
8. Link to Your Affiliate Terms and Conditions
When you partner with an affiliate, you’re giving up a level of control over how your brand is portrayed. Unfortunately, not everybody out there is looking to get into affiliate marketing for the right reasons.
It’s vitally important that you set out the terms and conditions for your new affiliate relationships tand protect your brand.
Linking to your affiliate terms and conditions will allow you to set rules, and establish your expectations for what you’re looking for in your affiliate relationships. You’ll still want to manually approve each sign-up, but at least your terms and conditions can set expectations, and create an enforceable contract between you and affiliates.
9. Showcase Customer Feedback
Good affiliates have reputations to uphold. It’s no good for them if they’re sending their loyal followers to your website only to buy a sub-standard product or service.
The most successful affiliates will have a relationship with their audience that’s based on trust. This means that when the affiliate puts your referral link in their content, the reader feels confident about trusting your business.
You want to demonstrate to the affiliate that you’re worthy of this trust, and a good way to do this is with customer feedback. Show what your product does, and the impact it has for your customers.
A good option to showcase customer feedback on your affiliate program landing page is Smash Balloon’s Custom Twitter Feeds Pro. It’s a quick and easy way to demonstrate the buzz your products create and that your customers love them.
Affiliates might be able to make money selling sub-standard products, but it’s much easier for them if you’ve got a product people love.
10. Answer Frequently Asked Questions
People are naturally going to have questions about your affiliate program. A great way to get ahead of these questions is by putting an FAQs section on your affiliate program landing page.
Again, this is about preempting those little things that make potential affiliates delay their decisions. If you’ve got answers to their most pressing questions, then it gives them every reason to fill out the form and sign up.
A landing page is there to persuade, and one of the best ways to do this is by answering people’s questions. An FAQ section is a simple, elegant way to do this.
Give Your Affiliate Landing Page Something to Talk About
What do affiliates want?
They want convenience, they want to make affiliate referrals, and they want to earn a good commission.
The key to much of this is good affiliate software.
If you’re going to offer the benefits and tools affiliates are looking for, then you need great software like AffiliateWP. It’s hard to sell an affiliate program that does nothing to help facilitate sales, and you’re going to be fighting a losing battle with your affiliate landing pages.
Instead, invest in your capabilities through AffiliateWP and give yourself something to talk about on your landing page.
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