Affiliate marketing has gotten harder and harder over the last few years. What once worked isn't working anymore, which results in us using more and more aggressive tactics. Ultimately that doesn't work out for us. But what is the alternative? Andrew Pincock and Nate Hall sit down to have a serious discussion about "the affiliate dilemma," and talk about what's wrong with affiliate marketing, and how to change it.
The Affiliate Dilemma - Video Transcription
ANDREW: Hi, welcome to Widgetly Wednesday. I'm Andrew Pincock.NATE: I'm Nathan Hall.ANDREW: And we are going to chat today about the affiliate dilemma and some of the problems we create for ourselves and the pain it causes, and kind of how we can emerge from that.
Affiliate Marketing vs. Advertising
NATE: So the problem with affiliate marketing is we still use that term marketing when really... are we marketing or are we marketers? It seems like nowadays it's really just that we've become like these copycat advertisers, and what I mean by that is we are so quick to just go to spy tools, rip whatever landing page we can that someone else is using, and then just start advertising it, right? So we're great advertisers, but as far as the marketing side of things, I don't really feel like we're true marketers anymore. We've almost like taken that side out of it because we're just so quick to just copy and paste. And then the problem comes. Obviously we're trying to increase our conversions, right? Like at the end of the day, we're trying to get clicks to the offer, we're trying to get more conversions; and so, where do you go from there?ANDREW: Yeah, I mean in that copycat game it becomes such a commoditization. Everything is the race to the bottom. And now you got pressure on your margins, you're all competing for similar advertising with the same pages, so you know, who's really converting any better than anybody else? And so then you know that kind of leads us to that pain point of starting to feel trapped.
The Problem with Aggressive Tactics
NATE: Oh, for sure. I mean, what options do you have? I mean you just all you're doing is now looking for more aggressive pages. You're looking for those celebrity angles, something that's more aggressive than what you're running right now, to hopefully be able to convert better. Like we've just kind of go down the rabbit hole where we kind of take black-hat and turn it blacker and blacker and blacker because we're just trying to get more aggressive with...ANDREW: Right, right. We're using those aggressive tactics to try to get that conversion. And so we end up, you know, negative side effects we're increasing the liability to our business and ourselves. Often we feel pretty crappy about it because where we feel like we're using more deceptive tactics. So you know, we start removing the mirrors from our houses, and taking extra showers, and hope that making all that money is going to make us feel better about it. So that's where it heads.
A Better Way
NATE: So verses, you know, I want you all to consider the possibility that there is a better way. And that is bringing back the marketer and an affiliate marketer. Really focus on and becoming marketers, and what that usually entails is focusing on the visitor coming in. Engaging them, understanding your audience, like where they are? Where can you direct them? That's what marketing really is; advertising is driving the traffic, marketing is the message and what you're doing to engage your audience.ANDREW: Right. Right yeah. Treating them more as an audience and not just clicks. And so really started to dig into what do they want. You know we obviously know what action we want them to take, which is that that primary offer we're funneling them to. But you know there's always going to be a high bounce rate. So what do we do about that?
Convert the Traffic You Are Already Getting
NATE: So what we've actually done a couple things over the years. Some of the best tactics that we used is when you've got all these users coming in, all this traffic coming into your presell page, and your presell is just so crucial, most of them are just bouncing right out. And like they're leaving right off the bat.
"Shot Gun" Approach
So what we actually did, is we started playing around with our exit popups and what we can do to kind of, you know, engage clients more.And we used to do a deal on a simple offer of, like a discounted percentage of the offer. Or focus on the fact that it is a seven-day free trial. But where we really shifted and pivoted and saw the best results, is on the presell page especially, is almost kind of like used a shotgun blanking, where we're throwing out all these different offers because they're leaving mainly because they probably don't have that, the interest isn't there in the product of that offer. So if that's the case, then hey, let's throw them a popup that, it's almost like a native ad popup, where it's got a bunch of different options. So, we start throwing on there all these different offers, all these different angles, and other ad campaigns that we had. And that immediately, we actually saw in some of our campaigns a boost up to as far as 40 percent of our revenue just from adding that sucker on there.
Building Trust
ANDREW: Right. Right. Yeah. So, so giving them that optionality, determining what other things they're interested in, might lead us to even build new funnels, new presells, around that for those traffic sources. Another other big thing that we saw that worked great was trying to build more trust with them. A lot of times now, there's a lot of social proof out there, and there are reviews people trust reviews, but as affiliates, you know, we didn't necessarily have access to all of that. But, you know, as we developed a notification style widget that would fire as you're on the page and be able to show visitors actual testimonials or experiences that people were having with the product, or that there are people purchasing this product, and starting to build that social proof and give them a little more trust, that OK this is a real offer, people are starting to have sucess with it.
They're not just showing up kind of to that empty room, but they're feeling like there's that crowd there that is taking action here. And with that social proof alone on those notification widgets, you know, we've seen seeing lifts coming from that as well and the 30% + range.NATE: Absolutely. Social proof is one of those things that just increased our conversions big time. Yeah. It's been huge. So, I mean obviously they're coming to your site. Sometimes they're interested in the offer, but they just need an extra push of trust to get them over. That's why all of us just scroll the bottom on Facebook or Amazon product pages to look at those reviews.So if we can give it to them, they're real-time on the page and get them over that hump, like, that's the key.
Ampry Can Help
So, one of the things we've done is we've taken all of these different widgets that we've used in our campaigns. These are just two of them actually. There's actually a bunch of different ones we're going to be sharing with you over the next little while as we do these different session. But what we've done is we've built this product called Ampry, which is basically taken all these different widgets, putting them into a platform that helps you to create and manage, but then also gives you all the reporting and functionality in split tasks that really help you be able to optimize your campaigns with these different widgets. So the notifications, the popups, whether you're doing just the single popup or the native ad popup. The capabilities are all there and they're extremely powerful. You're not going to be able to find anything like it or any other product out there.So I hope you check it out. Go to Ampry.com, check it out today, and make sure you stay tuned. Next week we're going to be really just breaking down the anatomy of a presell page. So I hope you've enjoyed this session and we'll talk with you next week.