Q: As an affiliate marketer, is there any way to sell to the same client more than once or is it a ‘one and done’ business?
What you need to look into are sales funnels and, primarily, email marketing.
Essentially, with a sales funnel, you have a front-end page that captures a visitor’s email address.
It’s usual to give something away for free as an enticement – a free report, ebook, video or some training.
After that front page (called a squeeze page), you have one or more pages in your funnel.
The first page is either a Thank You page where you thank your customer for their interest.
Or it can be what’s called a Bridge Page. This is where you introduce yourself to start building a relationship with your prospect. You can talk more about the product you’re promoting, mention unannounced bonuses you’re offering to buyers, show the product in action, and so on.
You’s also typically add a couple of buttons that link out to the product you’re promoting using your affiliate link.
There can be additional pages in a funnel as well.
These are normally used if you’re promoting additional products after the initial sale, making the most of people who are in a buying mood.
Since you’ve collected their email address, you can now start marketing to them repeatedly.
Remind them about what you’re promoting. Address anything that would seem to stop them from buying. Provide training, etc.
You can also offer your email subscribers additional products and services over time.
This is what allows you to sell additional products to the same person.
You can also add opt-in forms onto your blog or website pages to get people to sign up there as an alternative to sending them to the squeeze page.
Here’s what a sales funnel looks like:
You’ll find a lot more information on sales funnels at Sales Funnel Questions and more on email marketing at Email List Building Techniques.
All the top marketers and pretty much any online business worth its salt use sales funnels.
And they use email marketing too.
An email list is one of the few assets you own and control 100 percent. You’re not at the mercy of the next Google algorithm update, for example.
You can download all your leads from your autoresponder service (an online service that collects email addresses from your squeeze page and allows you to manage your subscribers and send emails to them). That way, it that service should ever go offline, you still have your list and can import it into another service.
It’s really only in the last couple of years that affiliate marketers have been building their own funnels, though most have been doing email marketing.
There’s some free training here that introduces you to sales funnels and how they can be used in affiliate marketing.
This is a question I was originally asked over on Quora.
All the best,
Gary Nugent
Check out my Instagram posts and reels here:
Follow me (@garynugentmentoring) on Instagram
P.S.: Don't forget, if you want to create an internet income of your own, here's one of my recommended ways to do that:
