How to Improve an Affiliate Program Using Promotions and Special Offers

Affiliate marketing is a great way to cooperate to make more profit. As a business owner, you get a constant stream of leads. As a website owner, you get a source of income. In some cases, this income can be big enough to become your main revenue stream.

However, affiliate marketing campaigns don’t always go as planned. You connect with a group of affiliates at Post Affiliate Pro, but only 10% of the whole bunch generates significant traffic. As an affiliate, it sucks to be in the bottom 90%.

Does this mean affiliate marketing is not the panacea everyone says it is? Not exactly. If you step up your game, you can start earning much more.

Some of the most profitable things to use in your affiliate marketing campaign are special offers. Spice up the campaign with promotions, discounts, and gifts, and the engagement rates are going to start growing.
Here are the best practices of using promotions in affiliate marketing both as a marketer and an affiliate.

How To Use Promotions and Special Offers in Affiliate Marketing as a Business Owner

Often, business owners who want to partner up with affiliates for online marketing forget about their fair share. No affiliate can help your website if you don’t put in enough work or develop new ideas for your promotional campaign.

The whole idea behind promotions and discounts in affiliate marketing is giving up some of the profits for long-term goals. If you don’t want to sacrifice that, the CTR of your banners can disappoint you big time. Here’s what you have to do to help your affiliates generate a decent amount of traffic.

Cashback in affiliate marketing

Cashback has become a staple of web marketing. The idea behind it is as simple as it gets. You pay for a product, you get a bit of the sum back. Offer cashback as one of your business’s features, and the CTR on affiliate websites will go up. Here are a couple of ways you can go about it.

Integrate with a cashback service

Dozens of programs offer cashback. For starters, you can check whether the payment methods you already accept have cashback. If they do, you just can’t miss this marketing opportunity. Edit a banner to say visitors can get cashback if they use Visa or another payment option. If the conversion rate goes up, you know you’ve hit the right audience.

Another way of offering cashback is partnering up with an app or a website that does that for you. You can strike a deal with Ebates or any other platform of a sort. However, you will have to pay them a cut, so calculate possible profits before you make the decision.

If you sell on Amazon, it’s even easier. There are loads of websites that work with Amazon cashback exclusively. Some companies offer payment methods with Amazon cashback as well. Slap a “Pay with Discover and get a 5% cashback” on all your banners in December 2019. The company’s deal with Amazon starts in this month, and it’s a great excuse to market to people with Discover cards.

Build a cashback on your website

Now, this option is way harder. If you think this is the way you want to go, you’ll have to hire IT specialists to integrate a cashback system to your website.

It’s not rocket science but you’ll have to invest some funds in this. If you do, you’ll be able to both market your website better and retain more customers. If a person has bonus funds from cashback on your platform, they’re more likely to return. If they don’t you didn’t lose anything, right?

The integration can be a lot easier if your website runs on an eCommerce platform like Shopify as there are dedicated Cashback apps available through the Shopify App Store. However, you may have to pay an IT team for seamless integration either way.

How to use discounts in affiliate marketing

Discounts seem like an obvious choice for online marketing, but they’re trickier to use than you think.

The reason why discounts work is uniqueness. When a person sees that there’s a hot deal that is going to end soon, they’re more likely to make a purchase. This 2006 study names deal evaluation, anticipated regret, and urgency as the main factors that move people towards a purchase.

While you can’t sell a customer what he doesn’t need, you can help them make a decision faster. However, if all you have to offer is a discount, you devalue your products. Soon enough, you’ll find no one wants to buy your stuff for the regular price.

What do you do? You use discounts strategically. Here are 5 golden rules of using discounts in an affiliate marketing campaign:

• Use them as a campaign with a defined timeframe.
• Use them at affiliate websites that perform poorly.
• Only offer discounts on cheaper products.
• If it’s a native ad, mention the full price before the customer sees a discount.
• Work on customer retention after a purchase.

How to use coupons in affiliate marketing

Coupons are another form of discount that you can use to leverage affiliate marketing sales. You can create a coupon at Post Affiliate Pro, but what do you do next? You can’t just hand out coupons to everyone. Otherwise, you risk devaluing what your website offers. Here are two strategic ways of using coupons for affiliate traffic.

Use coupon codes in native advertising instead of banners. Ask your affiliates to add coupon codes to their articles promoting your product. This way, it seems more spontaneous and unique. More readers will feel they’ve found a bargain and go to your website.

The other way of using coupons is by working with the email subscriber base. The odds are you have a couple of affiliates who own a huge email list. All of these people who subscribed to their newsletter are waiting for new hot deals. Your coupon code can be the next deal they click on.

Ask your affiliates to focus specifically on those customers who didn’t engage with the emails for quite a while. They may need a slight push to start buying your products again. The five rules of using discounts apply here as well.

How to use special offers in affiliate marketing

Lowering your price is not the only thing you can do to increase affiliate marketing traffic. Here are 5 special deals you can incorporate in your marketing campaign to make it successful. Use ad retargeting. It can be a nasty thing for some users, but retargeting converts well. Start a campaign, and people who already saw products on your website will get a reminder.

Offer free access. If your products are digital, you can offer a free-trial. Making a decision to try your product costs customers literally nothing, so more of them come around. Ask your affiliate marketers to mention that and create new banners for free access goodies. Give a referral bonus. The customer gets a discount, you get two leads at the price of one. Seems like a perfect deal.

Give a gift. You don’t always have to slash prices to appeal to your customers. Offer a gift instead. Make it small and appealing, and you will get people to buy more products than the gift costs. Give money to charity. Does your target audience care about the environment? Promise to give a part of the profits to help save the whales! They’ll enjoy mixing shopping and supporting wildlife.

Using Promotions and Special Offers in Affiliate Marketing as an Affiliate

Using promotions to increase affiliate traffic doesn’t end on the business owner’s side. You as a marketer can take some easy steps to ensure people are clicking. If you’re using CPA commission model, clicks are your bread and butter. Here’s how you earn it. 

How to use banners in affiliate marketing

Even the best promotion by your partner will fail if your visitors don’t see it. This InfoLinks study shows that 86% of people are banner blind. It’s not a disease, and people who are banner blind are not suffering. They’re skipping the ads on your website without even turning AdBlocker on. They got so used to seeing ads in particular places that they don’t even look there.

Here’s how you have to work around that to present your partner’s promotion banner. Place your banners strategically. Choose the top of the page to engage more viewers.

Another place to put your ads is next to the right scroll bar. According to WebReference, they generate 228% more CTR. Use visual effects to attract attention. Have you ever seen a bright and animated ad that made you look at it instantly? That’s the thing. Here at Post Affiliate Pro, you can get many banner effects that will get people’s attention. Give peel banners a look for starters.

Optimize for mobile. The number of people who go online from their mobile phones is growing larger and larger. You can’t miss them by showing them a desktop version of your site! Most platforms for website creation let you create a mobile version. Make sure to test it and make the banners smaller for mobile.

Use native ads to push promotions

Do you know what part of your website is viewed more than the top? The text!

It makes perfect sense. People visit a page to find information, so it’s no wonder they ignore everything else. No matter how many views do you attract with good SEO and copywriting, the conversion rate of banner ads will remain small.

Native ads, however, are viewed 47% faster, InfoLinks reports. 451% more people notice them. That’s quite a rise for a simple link. One of the biggest media holdings in the US, Verizon, believes native advertising is the future.

Here’s how you can use leverage in-text affiliate links to make promotions and special offers convert even more. Curated lists are the easiest way to place affiliate links. Unlike with a banner ad, your readers actually want to see this content. Take a look at how Buzzfeed reviews products in curated lists.

The formula is as simple as it gets. Comment on a product, and give your readers a place to buy it. It’s a great way to place dozens of affiliate links at once, but you can use to focus on one product as well.

Mention the discount or a special deal the company offers and provide a timeframe. People will choose the product with a discount more on average. If a curated list doesn’t cut it for the product you promote, go for the sponsored content format. Even The Atlantic is doing it.

The Atlantic article talks about the perks of having a connected home and then showcases the affiliate products. Copy their strategy, and your ad revenue is going to grow. Create a piece of evergreen content that always attracts new visitors. Make it relevant to the product you’re promoting, lengthy, and helpful. Got it? Great. Now, you have two ways of using promotions and special offers to increase CTR.

The first one is putting a constant affiliate link that gives your readers a discount or a hot deal if they buy the product. It’s a great way to leveraging the psychology behind discounts because it comes off as a unique offer customers won’t find elsewhere.

The other method is offering discounts or deals only sometimes. Edit the article when your affiliate manager starts another promotional campaign. Add information about the timeframe to make people clicking. While the discount is valid, promote the content and the discount via email marketing, and place a link to it on the homepage. This way you may not be getting such a high number of clicks all the time, but CTR figures will grow significantly during the promotion.

How to use email marketing to drive promotions

As an affiliate, the email list is your most powerful weapon. If you’re not a spammy person, that is. Here’s how to maximize the impact of your email marketing. Start with building a subscriber base. Place a subscription form on the bottom of a blog post page, on the top of your website, and on the right corner. Offering freebies in exchange for an email address is another great way of getting subscribers. You can also get users’ emails via our helpdesk app.

Don’t spam with emails. There’s only this much each person can buy each month. Experiment with the amount of content and discounts you send people and see what works best. Use emails strategically. They’re not evergreen like some forms of content are. Checking your email takes only a couple of seconds of your reader’s life. Make this an opportunity for a spontaneous purchase. Craft the message to leverage the psychology behind discounts. There’s a hot deal, and it ends today, so you’d better check it out fast.

The secret of using promotions and special offers in affiliate marketing

Whether you’re an affiliate manager or an affiliate, there is no easy way of making sales. Even these tips are general, and you’ll have to figure out how do they work best for you. What connects all of them? Knowledge. Post Affiliate Pro has a huge affiliate marketing database, but it will only work for you if you implement it and experiment with it.

Now that you know the secret, go on and change your affiliate campaign for the better.