How to optimise affiliate links
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Utilising Affiliate Marketing is a great way of combining all areas of the funnel to reach new audiences, provide information and inspiration in the messy middle, as well as incentivise and reward purchases at the bottom. To run and measure a successful affiliate marketing campaign, you need to ensure your tracking links are set up correctly and fully optimised. Ensuring your tracking is robust is crucial for all parties involved, it means that publishers are fairly rewarded for their role played in generating sales/traffic, and it also means that the advertiser can effectively report on performance.
What are Affiliate Links?
With any promotion or campaign, an affiliate is given a unique tracking link, containing their publisher ID, the advertiser’s programme ID, the product/landing page URL and any (optional) click parameters the advertiser may want to set. This link is then embedded through different promotional methods, for example a text ad, a CTA, a banner etc.
How to Increase Click-Through Rate of Affiliate Links
Strong Call to Action
To encourage customers to engage with an affiliate link, the Call-to-Action needs to be appealing. This could look different depending on the Affiliate type, for example, a strong CTA for a voucher partner would be ‘25% Off – Get Code Now’ whereas with a content partner a more subtle approach would be taken to hook the customer, for example ‘Shop the New Collection – Out Now’.
Target the Right Audience
There’s one thing getting the messaging right, but if you’re targeting the wrong audience, your links are redundant. Ensuring you understand the audience of the partner you are working with is crucial when deciding which approach to take in terms of product focus, messaging and discount.
A/B Testing
Testing different CTA’s with the same partner/audience is is an effective way of establishing what works well and will help to inform your strategy. For example, run two campaigns with the same partner, linking to the same landing page, 1 CTA offering a Stretch and Save discount and the other offering Free Delivery.
How to Increase Conversion Rate of Affiliate Links
Relevancy
The messaging in the CTA must be relevant to the page they land on to ensure the customer stays onsite & goes on to purchase. Often, customers will be linked straight through to a site’s homepage, so that they can navigate their own way around the site, however, with Fashion brands for example, it works well to lead customers straight to ‘New In’.
Product Availability
If linking to a specific product or category, you must ensure the product isn’t out of stock and has plenty of availability. Linking to an out-of-stock item will not only damage CTR but also make the customer more likely to shop elsewhere with a competitor.
Customer Experience
If all of the above is taken care of, the customer will have had a good experience so far, however, ensuring your website is fully optimised and working at a good speed when they click through, is crucial to closing the customer and furthermore, encouraging them to return.
Conclusion
Ensuring you understand your customer personas and match-making your brand to partners that have like-minded audiences is key. Once you have established your core partners, test and trial different CTAs, creative, landing pages etc to gain a strong understanding of what works well, and where. Once you’ve cracked the above, your Affiliate links will be fully optimised and in a great position to generate strong sales.
To hear more about how Embryo can help with your Affiliate Marketing, get in touch.
