How to Build an Affiliate Marketing Funnel in 5 Simple Steps

To run a successful affiliate marketing business, you must learn how to build a winning affiliate marketing funnel.

But why?

Because moving prospective buyers through the customer journey, from awareness to conversion, isn’t an easy task. But with a practical affiliate sales funnel, you can:

• Create awareness for your products or services.
• Lead website visitors down the customer journey successfully.
• Give them exactly what they want at each stage of the buyer’s journey.
• Earn trust of your customers and turn them into repeat customers.
• Increase your affiliate income and boost customer satisfaction.

So how do you build a solid affiliate marketing sales funnel?

That’s the challenge most affiliate marketers face.

But fret not, we’ve got you covered.

In this blog post, we’ll dissect the affiliate marketing sales funnel and then show you, step-by-step, how you can build an effective one for your business to market your products and increase conversions.

Let’s get started.

What is an Affiliate Marketing Funnel?

An affiliate marketing funnel is a sales funnel that helps affiliate marketers guide prospective buyers from the awareness stage to the conversion stage.

It shows all the steps that a potential buyer takes in their interactions with the brand.

Image via Crazy Eye Marketing

The main goal of this funnel is to create awareness about an affiliate product to drive greater lead generation and sales for it.

The best affiliate marketing funnel delivers customized value at each stage of the customer journey. We’ll talk about the stages of an effective funnel in a moment.

But before that…

What are the Benefits of an Affiliate Marketing Funnel?

Before diving into the reasons why you need to learn to create a high-converting affiliate funnel for your online marketing business, here are a few affiliate marketing statistics:

• According to a benchmark report by Influence Marketing Hub, the global affiliate industry is currently worth $13 billion and is projected to reach $15.7 billion by 2024.

Image via Influencer Marketing Hub

• Affiliate marketing is one of the top three sources of revenue for 31% of US publishers.

Image via Insider Intelligence

• Most affiliate marketers make around $20,000 per year or less.

As you can see, learning to make an effective sales funnel for your affiliate business can help you claim your share of the multi-billion-dollar industry.

And if you’re still not convinced, here are the benefits of an affiliate marketing sales funnel:

Increases Brand Trust and Authority

People do business with brands they like, know, and trust. With a working sales funnel in place, you can give value to your potential customers at every stage of the buyer’s journey, thus building their trust in your brand and establishing yourself as an authority in your industry.

Improves Your Conversion Rates

An affiliate funnel can also drive more conversions for you. That’s because you’d have the entire affiliate journey planned out for your potential customers. You’ll be providing them just the right content they need at every stage to move them further down your funnel towards conversion.

Attracts Repeat Customers

With an effective funnel, the customer journey doesn’t end when the customer makes a purchase. The funnel helps you build loyal customers who keep shopping using your affiliate links.

This way, you can keep your customers coming back to buy affiliate products you promote.

Types of Sales Funnels for Affiliate Marketing

There are different sales funnels out there for generating affiliate sales. In this section, we’re going to talk about the four basic ones you can create for your affiliate marketing campaign:

Let’s take a look at each type of sales funnel:

i. Lead Magnet Funnel

Also known as a lead generation funnel, a lead magnet funnel is a marketing funnel that uses gated content (lead magnet) as an incentive for your website visitors to provide their contact information.

A lead magnet funnel can help you generate more high-quality, targeted leads while avoiding leads that may never convert.

The lead magnet is usually in the form of exclusive digital content—case studies, ebooks, free webinars, checklists, how-to-guides, or any other type of content that helps your audience solve a problem.

The main goal of a lead magnet funnel is to convert website visitors into leads and eventually turn them into buyers.

The key reason to opt for this funnel is that you can generate loads of targeted leads and can then promote your affiliate products to them and drive your sales.

ii. Bridge Funnel

After website visitors have provided you with their contact information (by submitting the form on the opt-in page or landing page/squeeze page), they are directed to the bridge page.

Remember that since you (the affiliate marketer) don’t control the main product pages, the bridge page helps to close the gap between the prospect and the affiliate product.

Often, this type of sales funnel consists of three main parts as shown in the image below:

Image via Online Profit Cycle

• The squeeze page/landing page/opt-in page.
• Bridge page.
• Email sequence.

The bridge page can contain a specific copy or video that emotionally connects your audience to the product and pre-sells them before directing them to the sales process.

Most super affiliates use the bridge funnel to increase conversions and automate their marketing processes.

iii. Survey Funnel

As the name suggests, the survey funnel is a type of funnel that offers people short quizzes before asking them to sign up for the offer.

Image via ClickFunnels

It’s the best and most effective technique to sell your affiliate products because it allows you to determine the suitable products to send to your audience’s inbox based on the answers they provide in the short quiz.

Generally, the survey funnel helps with two things:

• To help you interact with your audience more since they have to answer questions before you direct them to the sign-up page.
• To enable you to determine who your audience is, and then send them different promotional messages based on the answers they provide.

The good thing about the survey funnel is that it enables you to create more personalized messages, thus increasing your chances of converting website visitors into customers.

iv. Membership Funnel

This is probably the most complex type of funnel to create, although very effective. In it, you need to provide valuable training for free and then promote your affiliate product on the Thank You page or as a resource on the membership page.

The membership funnel can have the following pages:

Image via Ian Bentley

• Video sales letter
• Order form
• Offer wall thank you page
• Member access page
• Member-only page

Often, this funnel consists of a series of pages, copies, and forms meant to make website visitors join a membership program or become members of your website before you start promoting affiliate products to them.

How Does an Affiliate Marketing Funnel Work?

A typical buyer’s journey consists of three main stages, and affiliate marketing funnels are based on these stages.

Image via ClickFunnels

To understand how funnels work, let’s take a look at the basic components of a simple funnel:

Traffic Source

This comprises the sources of traffic for the affiliate product you promote.
Your traffic can come from the following sources:

Image via Zeropark

• Organic: Organic traffic comes from search engines, social media, or other sources when people try to find answers or solutions to their problems.
  
  In this case, you’re going to use content marketing and search engine optimization to rank your blog posts (that contain affiliate links) higher in the SERPs so that you can drive greater traffic to those pages.

• Paid traffic: This is the type of traffic obtained from paid ads when users click on links you place in advertisements in paid media channels.
  
  Paid traffic can further be segmented into two types:
• Push traffic: You can push products to your target audience based on their online behavior or interests. In this case, you can use Facebook ads.
• Pull traffic: This is the opposite of push traffic. In this case, your audiences know what they want—people are interested in making a purchase and are searching for information about products or services online. Pull traffic comes from YouTube or Google ads.

Opt In Page

After going through your content, your visitor has two options:

• To click and follow the link or walk away never to come back again.
• Ignore the link and walk away

If the visitor follows the affiliate link and purchases the product, you get revenue from it. But if the visitor ignores the link, you can still try to convert them by regularly connecting with them through email marketing.

That’s where the opt-in page comes in.

The opt-in or squeeze page’s main goal is to get people to give you their contact details.

Thank You Page

The Thank You page is where you place the lead magnets that your readers can download. This page also enables you to build relationships with your email subscribers.

You can also convince your readers to purchase the products you promote immediately from this page.

You can also include your insights and thoughts about the product here to demonstrate how beneficial it is.

Remember to add a strategic call to action button that compels your readers to purchase the affiliate offer.

Ready to build a successful sales funnel for your business and convert more prospects?

Alright, let’s dive into the process:

How to Build Affiliate Marketing Funnels That Work

Here are the five simple steps to help you create a powerful affiliate funnel that generates more sales for your affiliate business.

1. Choose the Best Offer to Promote

No matter how effective your marketing funnel is, if the product you promote isn’t great, you’re just wasting your time and money. So, find a good affiliate program from your target niche.

Here are useful tips to help you choose great products to promote:

• Choose products you understand more about or you have actually used.
• Choose products that are relevant to your target audience.
• Check the reputation of the products on online review sites like Capterra, G2, and other online marketplaces.
• Find out how the product owner promotes the products to their potential customers.

Remember to choose a good affiliate program to join. Also, consider the commission percentage before going ahead.

2. Create a Bridge Page

It’s important to create a bridge page, as mentioned earlier. Most super affiliates add short videos of self-introduction, a few reviews, as well as some testimonials, and a call to action on this page. You could also include a freebie on your bridge page.

Include the following elements to make your bridge page highly effective:

• Attention-grabbing title
• Engaging video or written content
• Social proof
• CTA buttons
• Pop-ups

To build a high-converting bridge page, you can use software programs like ClickFunnels.

3. Build An Optimized Landing Page with an Opt-In Form

Building an effective landing page can help you in two ways.

First, it can help you collect email addresses using an opt-in form to warm up your prospects by sending educational emails about your affiliate offers.

Secondly, it can help you drive your website visitors to click and make a purchase.

Your visitors could come from social media, organic search, paid advertising and other traffic sources.

You can use a landing page builder software to build a landing page and integrate it with a sign-up form.

In fact, some landing page builders can help you build an effective affiliate funnel using ready-made funnel templates that require you to fill out with your content.

Here are practical tips to build a high-converting landing page:

• Include a compelling headline & hook.
• Link to your affiliate offer early in the content.
• Use appealing visuals and simple design.
• Make a bold promise that matches your audience.
• Craft a clear and concise copy.
• Add relevant social proof.
• Include a clear, direct CTA.
• Only give visitors one action to take.
• Include social proof
• List the standout features of the products.

4. Create a Thank You Page

After creating an optimized landing page, the next step is to create a Thank You page to connect with your subscribers after they join your email list.

Create a more personal connection with your subscribers and ask them to whitelist your emails so that they don’t miss out on any new things from you. Use this page to guide your subscribers to the next steps.

Here are Thank You Page best practices to follow:

• Deliver what you promised and set expectations.
• Show your site’s navigation menu.
• Provide additional content.
• Display social options.
• Move your prospects further down the affiliate marketing funnel by nurturing them.

5. Generate Traffic to Your Landing Page

Now that your funnel is ready, it’s time to start generating traffic.

To drive traffic to your landing page, you can use social media marketing, SEO, and paid marketing campaigns.

You can create social media posts related to the products you want to promote in the form of photos and videos and share them on platforms where your audience is active.

You can also use search engine optimization to help your landing page rank higher in the SERPs. Finally, you can use paid ads to drive targeted traffic to your landing page.

Here are practical tips to drive traffic to your affiliate landing page:

• Launch email newsletters.
• Optimize your landing page for SEO to drive organic traffic.
• Use social media marketing.
• Start conversations in online forums
• Use your thank you page.
• Create compelling referral content.
• Use search advertising.

FAQs

Q1. Which funnel is best for affiliate marketing?

A. The best funnel for affiliate marketing is the bridge funnel. It helps build a powerful connection between the prospects and the product and drives more sales for you.

Q2. What are the benefits of an affiliate marketing funnel?

A. An effective funnel can help you:

• Reach more potential customers.
• Increase brand recognition and authority.
• Improve your conversion rates.
• Improve customer loyalty.
• Attract repeat customers
• Track your digital marketing efforts

Q3. Do I need a funnel for affiliate marketing?

A. Yes. If you want to increase your affiliate marketing sales and revenue, you definitely need a funnel as it can help you plan out how to move prospects toward conversion.

Q4. How can I make a funnel for affiliate marketing for free?

A. To make a funnel for affiliate marketing for free, you can leverage a sales funnel development solution. It can help you design your funnel with ease.

Q5. How do I use ClickFunnels for affiliate marketing?

A. ClickFunnels is a software solution for building your affiliate landing page. You can also use it to develop your affiliate marketing sales funnel.

Ready to Build a High-Converting Affiliate Marketing Funnel?

The marketing technique you use to promote your affiliate business can determine whether you will make huge affiliate commissions or your efforts will go to waste.

That’s why we recommend setting up successful sales funnels that help you attract new customers, generate income, and build trust with your audience.

Now that you know everything about affiliate marketing funnels including how they work, the different types, and how to build an effective funnel for your affiliate business, start building yours now and make money online.

Do you want to optimize ROI for your digital business but you aren’t sure where to begin? If so then you can use Attrock’s professional affiliate marketing services.