9 Proven Ways to Increase Your Affiliate Sales

Looking to boost your affiliate sales?

Increasing affiliate sales is like a team game where both the affiliate program manager and the affiliates must play their part. Think of it like passing a ball back and forth – it’s all about working together.

Want to know how to make this team effort work and score more sales? You don’t need to worry about complex strategies or technical jargon.

In this guide, we’ll share some simple and proven ways to help you and your affiliates generate more sales, leading to a successful affiliate program.

What is Affiliate Marketing

Before we jump into the exciting ways to increase affiliate sales, let’s briefly understand what affiliate marketing is all about.

Imagine telling your friend about a great product you just bought. If they buy it too, thanks to your recommendation, you get a little thank-you gift from the store. That’s affiliate marketing in a nutshell!

It’s a way for companies to sell more products by teaming up with people (called affiliates) who promote their stuff. In return, these affiliates get a piece of the money from every sale they help make.

So why does this matter to you? If you have a product to sell, teaming up with affiliates can help you reach more people and make more sales. And if you want to become an affiliate, you can earn extra cash by sharing products you love.

Sounds simple, right? So why does increasing affiliate sales often feel so hard?

• Lack of Knowledge: Many people jump into affiliate marketing without understanding how it works. This can make things feel more complex than they need to be.
• Wrong Products: Choosing the wrong products to promote can lead to disappointing results. Sales might be sluggish if the products aren’t exciting or relevant to your audience.
• Poor Communication: If companies and affiliates aren’t working together and communicating well, it can create confusion and missed opportunities.

But here’s the good news: Increasing affiliate sales is not as hard as it may seem!

Let’s check out some of the best ways to help your business drive more affiliate sales.

Proven Ways to Increase Your Affiliate Sales

Imagine if you increased your affiliate sales by 10x this year, or perhaps even more. It’s possible with affiliate marketing, but it does take some work.

Below, we’ve outlined some simple and effective ways to make your affiliate marketing successful. These strategies are easy to understand and can be implemented immediately.

Here’s what we’re going to look at:

• Install the best affiliate software
• Create a process for attracting top affiliates
• Upgrade your creatives
• Start an affiliate newsletter
• Create tiered affiliate rates
• Create a sense of competition
• Embrace customizability
• Level up your communication
• Improve your conversion rate

Let’s dive in!

1. Install the Best Affiliate Software

You probably use many marketing tools to help grow your sales, so you have to ask yourself the same question about your affiliate sales.

Does your affiliate software offer everything you need to make sales?

The best way to ensure you and your affiliates have all the tools you need is by installing AffiliateWP. AffiliateWP is the best affiliate management plugin for WordPress, and it will help transform your affiliate sales.

It’s straightforward to set up and has a huge focus on conversions. Its advanced growth tools, such as Vanity Coupon Codes and Direct Link Tracking, are proven affiliate sales boosters, and they can immediately impact your business.

If you want more affiliate sales, you need to start with the right software, and if your website runs on WordPress, that’s AffiliateWP.

Check out AffiliateWP’s pricing!

2. Attract Top Affiliates

A key element of any affiliate program is the affiliates themselves.

If you want to increase affiliate sales, you must have a clear idea of the kind of affiliates who can help you. 80% of your affiliate sales tend to come from 20% of your affiliates, so it is about focusing on quality.

If you want to increase affiliate sales, a great place to start is by checking out our guide on getting affiliates. This will show you how to ensure you have a consistent stream of high-quality affiliates coming into your program.

3. Upgrade Your Creatives 

Getting online sales isn’t easy. You’ve got some advantages over a physical store but also some big disadvantages. 

One of the biggest disadvantages is that people can’t see your products with their own eyes and feel them in their hands. Even if you’re selling services, you don’t have the luxury of looking someone in the eye and shaking their hand. 

To try and negate this, you rely on good creatives:

• Images 
• Videos
• Webinars
• Podcasts
• Infographics

These aren’t just essential elements for making more sales. They’re essential elements for marketing in general. 

If your affiliates don’t have access to high-quality creatives, it’s much more difficult to convince their audience that they should buy your products. Words only go so far, so one of the best ways to get more affiliate sales for your affiliate program is by upgrading your creatives. 

Luckily, when you run your affiliate program on AffiliateWP, you get unlimited storage for creatives!

4. Start an Affiliate Newsletter

When creating your online store, you likely researched how to optimize your site, create engaging content, and maximize your traffic. 

When it comes to selling your products, there’s no better expert than you, right?

If you’re good at what you do, then this is true: you’re the expert. 

So, when your affiliates are looking for ways to make more referrals, the chances are you’ve got some great insights to share. You can put documents together and put them in your affiliate portal, or you can create an engaging affiliate newsletter that gives your affiliates regular tips and advice. 

Your newsletter can easily be automated, so once you’ve put a series together, there’s no additional work to do. 

Knowledge and understanding are key to sales, so sharing your hard-earned insights can help you get more sales for your affiliate program.

5. Create Tiered Affiliate Rates

Incentives form the basis of affiliate marketing. People send you website visitors (and hopefully sales) in return for a commission on any sale.

It’s as simple as that!

There is, however, a lot of scope to be innovative with those incentives. With the right affiliate marketing software, you can tailor your incentives to match your affiliates’ needs. 

For instance, you might:

• Offer a sign-up bonus
• Have a flat commission on all sales
• Have a percentage commission on all sales
• Offer store credit
• Offer lifetime commissions (the affiliate receives a commission on every order the customer makes)
• Offer recurring commissions (the affiliate receives a commission every time the customer renews a subscription)

All of these options are possible with AffiliateWP’s pro and free add-ons.

That’s not it though!

You can also reward commitment and success by creating tiered affiliate rates. For example:

• First 25 sales: 20% commission
• Sales 26-50: 22% commission
• Sales 51-100: 25% commission
• Sales 100+: 28% commission

This is a huge incentive for your affiliates to get more sales for your affiliate program. The more your affiliates sell, the more they win, and the more you win!

6. Get Your Affiliate’s Competitive Juices Going

Affiliate marketers love getting sales and watching the money come in. 

You’ll also find that many of them are competitive beings! 

It’s the same as with salespeople, they all want to be top dogs, and the extra competition pushes them on to bigger and better things. One of the ways you can tap into this is with affiliate leaderboards. 

Our free leaderboard add-on allows you to show live leaderboards on any WordPress page, ranking your affiliates by number of sales, total earnings, and number of visits.

Not only is this a great way to motivate your affiliates to get more sales for your affiliate program, but it’s also a good recruiting tool. 

When people come to your affiliate program landing page and see how well your top affiliates are doing, they have a good incentive to sign up and get in on the action. 

7. Embrace Customizability 

Every affiliate is unique. They’ll have slightly different marketing methods, branding, and expectations from your affiliate program. With AffiliateWP, you can meet these expectations thanks to our customizable affiliate portals.

You can help them get the most out of your program by embracing customizability. 

Again, this comes down to having the right affiliate software, and AffiliateWP is pretty hard to beat for this. We make it simple for you to tailor your affiliate program to meet your affiliates’ needs. 

For example, one of the challenges affiliates face is growing their brand while passing traffic on to you to make the sale. Little things like vanity coupon codes allow affiliates to build their brand while growing your sales. 

This enables affiliates to choose their affiliate coupon codes; for instance, at AffiliateWP, we might recommend you use OptinMonster.

Instead of a coupon code, we can give you a custom one, such as “OptinMonsterIsBetterWithAffiliateWP.”

We’re building our brand while facilitating sales for OptinMonster; it’s a win-win. 

8. Level Up Your Communication 

No matter how experienced you are as an affiliate marketer, seeing sales is always exciting.

That excitement is a brilliant tool to keep your affiliates engaged and increase sales for your affiliate program. 

The easiest way to let affiliates know they’ve made a sale is through push notifications!

Once the referral is made, affiliates get a discreet pop-up on their phone or tablet, informing them of the sale. This provides instant motivation every time the affiliate makes a sale. 

Of course, this option isn’t for everyone, but it’s a popular feature for affiliates who like to know exactly what’s going on with their business. It keeps affiliates in the loop and helps you to keep engagement high. 

9. Improve Your Conversion Rate

This seems like it’s too obvious to include in the article but it’s not!

It’s easy to get caught up in what your affiliates are doing and the little details of your program, overlooking the most important part. Your website needs to be set up to make sales; if its conversion rate is low, it will be hard to get more sales for your affiliate program (here are some tips to help fix this). 

Affiliate marketing isn’t a magic wand that can fix your sales. It’s a marketing option that can quickly increase your reach and allow you to engage with your target audience. 

The selling part still comes down to you, so make sure you’re split-testing your landing pages, optimizing your checkout process, and creating more touchpoints with things like abandoned cart emails. 

Sometimes what’s holding you back from making more affiliate sales isn’t your affiliate program, so ensure you’re testing every element of the process. 

Next, Make Your Affiliate Payouts Easy

Everyone wants to increase affiliate sales, but your affiliate program must also be easy to manage.

It’s no good if you’re making tons of affiliate sales but lack the tools to track affiliate commissions. You need something that makes affiliate payouts effortless, and AffiliateWP has the perfect solution.

The Integrated Payouts Service means you can pay affiliates directly to their bank accounts without ever leaving your WordPress admin. It syncs perfectly with your AffiliateWP analytics and means you spend less time managing your affiliate program.

If you want to keep top affiliates in your program, you need to make sure you’re paying them on time, and the Integrated Payouts Service can ensure this.

The Key to Increasing Affiliate Sales

To increase sales, you must ensure you have the right software and processes in place.

Start by looking at your affiliate marketing software and ask yourself if you have the right base to work from.

You can then begin optimizing your processes and putting strategies in place to increase affiliate sales.

And we’ve got even more resources to help you do just this:

• How to Set Up Affiliate Marketing for Online Courses (WordPress Guide)
• 9+ Best Software to Set Up Affiliate Marketing for Online Merchants
• How to Pay Affiliates in Store Credit (Step by Step)
• How to Create an Affiliate Program with PayPal (Guide)

Now there’s only one thing left to do.

Get AffiliateWP and increase affiliate sales today!