How can you ensure that your company offers all customers the best possible experience? How do you reduce drop-off points and communicate your message clearly at all points? And what role does affiliate marketing play in the marketing mix to develop new target groups and ultimately turn them into loyal customers?
In this guide, we look at the customer journey from the first click to closing the sale and show you what to look out for when working with affiliates and how to create a lean sales funnel that really appeals to users.
What role does the customer journey play in affiliate marketing?
Working with affiliates immediately sounds appealing to many marketing teams. After all, companies can use an already existing reach as leverage and present their product to a wide audience. In addition, there is the organic effect of carefully selected affiliates, so that in the best case, credible brand ambassadors stand in front of the camera or write about you in their blog articles.
However, this also places special demands on marketing, as this approach can only work really well with detailed knowledge of the target group. If you manage to create one or more personas, you have already laid an important foundation. And yet you should not underestimate the commitment that affiliate marketing requires.
Because, by definition, your campaign is not necessarily fed by interest in your product or the curiosity that your advertising has aroused, but comes from third parties - and this has a very clear impact on the customer journey. The indirect approach to your product often means that we are dealing with a much more indirect customer journey and a little more effort is required to actually lead prospective customers to you, but this has two advantages for you: With the right awareness and intensive analysis, you can select the really suitable affiliates. Many competitors are not prepared to invest in this work and simply give up when quick results fail to materialize. This means more room for your company to develop in cooperation with affiliates.
The sales funnel in affiliate marketing - an overview of the four stages
Awareness
The first step is for potential customers to develop an awareness of your company or brand. Affiliate marketing is ideal for this, because if you and your affiliates already share a target group, you will be addressing exactly the right users with your message.
If you want to create more awareness for your company, the quality of the content is the most important factor.
Exploration
In the second phase, users are already familiar with your company and come into closer contact. This can take place via social media, via your website or via links in blogs. In this phase, future customers gather more information about your products and services and find out more about details that may have been neglected in the affiliate campaigns.
Action
For many customers, the purchase takes place at this point in the customer journey. They often find an offer on the website or receive a discount code from affiliates, which they use at checkout. It is not uncommon for customers to even actively search for voucher codes with the well-known affiliates.
Reactivation
In some cases, the shopping cart was abandoned before the transaction, sometimes the website was closed or no further transactions followed after an initial purchase. Now it's time for targeted retargeting. You can often entice customers back with voucher codes or promotions for new products. In this step, you need a precise analysis of the pain points and incentives to make your retargeting as efficient as possible.
.How to analyze and understand affiliate marketing correctly
The important thing about the sales funnel in the context of affiliate marketing is that you abandon the concept of a linear customer experience. Believing that the four stages of the sales funnel relate to a relationship between your company, a single customer and an affiliate would be a fallacy.
Instead, your affiliate concept should be set up in such a way that you use the right affiliates in each phase. The needs of awareness and exploration, for example, are best served by affiliates who can provide you with high-quality content: Influencers, vloggers or authors on specialist blogs. This step is not necessarily about discount codes, but about brand awareness and arousing curiosity.
If some affiliates generate conversions faster than others, these collaborations are not necessarily better, they often only take place at the end of the customer journey. This often makes it difficult to monetize affiliates and you should never consider the use of discount codes as the only metric of a successful affiliate. Content creators who promote your brand at an early stage with excellent content with a high reach are by no means less valuable for your marketing than discount vouchers at the end of the sales funnel.
Affiliates are also often divided into three categories accordingly:
- Introducer - first contact
- Influencer - extended contact
- Closer - Last contact before conversion
For the exploration phase, you should rely specifically on social media, where users typically use videos and posts to find out more about products and brands and get authentic reviews. When future customers are actually about to make a purchase, the best price is often the only decisive factor. This means that you should establish a presence on discount or voucher sites, especially with comparatively older target groups. Well-indexed video descriptions and social media posts or regular collaborations with podcasts are more relevant for younger users.
In order to draw better conclusions from your data, you should track your affiliate campaigns across all channels and, above all, rely on consistent messaging.
Understanding the customer journey in detail to attract better affiliates
Companies are still relying on the "last cookie wins" strategy to remunerate affiliates. However, this is not only based on the misunderstanding of a completely weakened customer journey, but also on a linear model from brand contact to conversion.
The fact that a customer journey rarely takes place in this way in reality in the oversupply of the web and the possibilities of online marketing and retargeting should actually be clear.
If you understand that diversified affiliate marketing can pick up and engage your customers at every step of the customer journey, your brand will benefit. In addition, you can find the right affiliates for every step of the sales funnel and are not only interesting for closers. This makes your affiliate marketing more informative and sustainable and does not put conversions before brand awareness.
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