By Relebohile Kobeli – Digital Campaign Specialist
When it comes to affiliate marketing, a conversion rate is considered one of the most sought after and closely guarded, secrets. Websites or landing pages need to be optimized in various ways to achieve a reasonable conversion rate, which will ultimately save costs and increase the profitability of your business. Every affiliate marketer should know the conversion rate of their webpages and databases and do everything possible to improve it.
In this week’s article, we’ll talk through the basic principles of conversion rate optimization (CRO) and guide you on how you can boost conversions.
Terminology check
Conversion: A conversion is considered as the completion of a specific action taken by a visitor to your digital channel, a website, social page even newsletters. The specific action could be purchasing a product or filling out an online form.
Conversion rate: A conversion rate is the percentage of users who take the desired action. For example, if you have a 10% conversion rate on an eCommerce campaign, that means that 10 out of every 100 people who visit your website or viewed your newsletters convert into paying customers.
- Conversion rate = (conversions ÷ total visits) x 100%
There are numerous tips published that strive to teach you how to approach conversion rate optimization. They are all equally important but ultimately, you need to refine your affiliate marketing strategy by adopting a data-driven approach. This will help you uncover what works best for your business and market.
Here are a few tips we have learned along the way.
Tip #1: Understand your users and learn more about their needs
Let’s face it – consumers needs have grown to be more complex with the passing of time and increase in the number of innovations. Understanding them is not a simple task. I am sure you can think of a few startups or launches that failed because they developed products to answer exciting questions rather than servicing consumer needs. That is why with the changing methodologies in marketing, understanding your market remains the first step.
Here are a few fail-proof best practices to help you avoid that outcome and make your affiliate marketing business successful:
Gather information about your audiences past purchasing habits and campaign preferences from your internal data management systems (e.g. CRM) and web analytics service.
Your audience knows what it wants. Conduct surveys and get feedback from them. You can do this through multiple channels like email, live chat support, on-site feedback forms, and online surveys.
Develop buyer personas of your ideal target audience. Pay special attention to their interests, demographics, and lifestyles.
Be on the lookout for emerging consumer trends. Google trends allows you to see topics that are popular or unpopular in real-time, allowing you to develop your content strategy to keep your audience captivated and looking to you to tell them what the next big thing is.
Haven’t you heard, ‘stranger danger’? Your audience is likely to complete the desired action on your campaigns if you provide a personalized experience. Build and constantly improve your relationship with your audience. Use their names in marketing campaigns and automate birthday wishes newsletters to make them feel extra special and appreciated.
Tip #2: Don’t ever stop testing
In life you can never reach ultimate perfection, it simply doesn’t exist, the same applies in digital marketing. To get a breakthrough you need to be open to making a few errors so you can have enough data to base your business decisions on.
In this regard, A/B testing is your best bet. A/B testing is a user experience research methodology; it is a method of comparing two versions of a webpage, newsletter or any other ad campaign against each other to determine which one performs better.
A little goes a long way, among other things you can A/B test:
- Colours and fonts used in banner ads and CTA buttons
- Copywriting used in campaign headlines, subheadlines and promotions
- Grouping or highlighting of key information
- Removing the navigation and links from your landing pages
- Exploring different landing page/email design layouts
Tip #3: Hunches don’t always make for good investments
We have all made this mistake, it comes in many forms, and isn’t always effective in your conversion rate optimization process.
- Hunches, assumptions, and gut feelings
- Blindly replicating your competitors’ strategies
- Executing changes based on your preferences and opinions
The common thing in the examples above is that they are not informed by data and are as good as thumb sucking. Spending time on gathering and analyzing data can save you a lifetime of making bad detrimental business decisions.
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