Why Sales Funnels Are Next in Affiliate Marketing

The term “sales funnelIt may be new to you. It’s a marketing technique that has been around for decades in the offline world. It’s also a technique that has been routinely used by online product sellers.

It is a way for a seller to earn more money from the people who visit their site.

What’s new is that affiliate marketers are now also starting to use sales funnels to increase their own earnings.

There are two general types of sales funnel:

1. The multi-product funnel

There is the funnel that is always used at JVZoo, Warrior Plus, and sometimes ClickBank.

This is where you buy an initial low-priced product and are then subject to a variety of up-sells and one-time offers that are designed to part you with more of your money.

The goal of this type of funnel is to sell you multiple products in quick succession before you really have time to consider your options.

Offers often have timers that show how little time you have left to make a decision or tell you that limited quantities are available.

2. The single product funnel

The second type of funnel is geared towards selling you a single product.

The purpose of the funnel is to repeatedly expose you to the product and explain why it will be useful, if not essential, to you or your business.

This is often accomplished by enticing a visitor to sign up for a free product and then sending them a series of emails outlining the benefits of the product you are trying to sell them.

A less common tactic is to provide free training and information to prospects, regardless of whether or not they end up buying.

Sales funnels in use

If you’ve ever bought anything in the Make Money Online niche, you’ve already been exposed to the multi-product sales funnel.

They can often leave a bad taste in your mouth and you end up feeling like you’ve been bullied into spending a lot more money than you intended. That can create some resentment in you.

If you recognize that sentiment, is it something you’d like to highlight in your own customers?

Don’t forget that those who look at your offers are real people, not credit cards with legs.

Treat your prospects as you would like to be treated by a salesperson.

That’s why I prefer the second type of funnel.

There is no hard sell involved. You are giving your prospects something free to entice them in the door.

From there, start introducing them to your offer and why it might be a good fit for them.

You are trying to persuade them that what you are offering will make their lives easier or solve a problem.

If they buy, then they have made the decision to buy.

You haven’t forced them to make the decision by using bogus scarcity tactics like a countdown timer or by saying there are only a limited number of copies available.

Because a potential customer has made the decision to buy on their own terms, they will feel much better about their purchase decision.

You will have earned their trust and can use it to further develop your relationship with them so that you can more successfully market other offers to them in the future.

So how does this relate to affiliate marketing?

In general, affiliate marketers have access to affiliate links and resources, such as image ads and emails that they can send.

These are used to drive traffic to an offer.

However, when a prospect buys or signs up on a capture page, they enter the sellers’ email list, not the affiliate’s.

That means the affiliate has lost access to that prospect forever and it’s up to the marketer to market to that customer over and over again.

The best affiliate networks will also pay affiliates for products that are in a seller’s sales funnel.

So yes, you can earn commissions on multiple products.

But what you, as an affiliate, don’t know is if the seller is offering products that aren’t in the “public” sales funnel to people on your list.

Therefore, you could be losing commissions as a result.

Typically, a sales funnel starts with a low-priced product, offers higher-priced products down the funnel, and culminates in one or more high-priced products at the bottom of the funnel.

This tends to be where sellers get most of their money. It is much easier to sell one expensive product than dozens of cheap products.

The seller has every right to market products for which he will not earn a commission.

After all, they own the email list that buyers are now subscribed to.

So to counter this, affiliate marketers have been creating their own sales funnels.

They select the entry product, the upsells, and any high-priced products to promote.

These can all be from different vendors. But you, the affiliate, may think that some products complement each other better than the products in the seller’s own funnel.

Yes, the lead will be exposed to each seller’s funnel as well as the affiliate’s.

But the affiliate knows that the sale of any product in his own funnel will earn him a commission.

That said, I still think the single product funnel is the best approach from a customer relationship standpoint.

If a prospect ultimately doesn’t buy your offer, you still have them on your email list. And now is the time to promote a different offer for them.

You can market to these prospects as often as you like since they are on your email list.

So the biggest advantages of building your own sales funnels are:

1. You can add leads to your own email list

2. Your email list is a business asset that you own in its entirety. Its usefulness does not depend on the whims or algorithm changes of Google, Facebook or whoever.

3. Email marketing is still the best way to make money online.

4. You can market to your subscribers as often as you like.

5. You can create your own unique sales funnels, combining products from a variety of sellers

As an affiliate marketer, you should never send people directly to an offer. Basically, you’re giving that person exclusive access to the seller.

You should always send people to a landing page first, one that your own, and only after they sign up there will you send them to your affiliate offer.

In this way, you have captured their email address and now they are part of its 100% owned business asset: your email list.

How to build a sales funnel?

If you use WordPress, there are plugins that will create squeeze (opt) pages and other funnel page types for you.

But creating a real sales funnel is not the easiest thing. These plugins are great for creating individual pages instead of an entire funnel. It can be done, but you have to be very organized and keep track of how each page relates to another.

Another approach is to use a service like Clickfunnels that is designed exclusively for creating sales funnels. There is a link to a review in my bio below if you want to know more.

With a service like this, you don’t even need your own website. The tool can do everything for you.

I hope you now see the benefits of creating your own sales funnels, regardless of which tool you end up using to create them.