Automate Your Affiliate Marketing Business In 6 Simple Ways

Help somebody! Share the knowledge!

Affiliate Marketing includes content creation, lead generation, marketing, analysis, sales, customer interaction, etc. All of these activities – when done manually – take a lot of time, and if you want to grow your business, time will be your most valuable asset.

It becomes a challenge to focus on building relationships and nurturing them when you are overburdened with all the activities in running your business. So to help you create more time for focusing on the business part of your Affiliate Marketing business, I have created a list of the six ways you can automate and scale your Affiliate Marketing business.

Table of Contents

Why Should You Automate Your Affiliate Marketing Business?

Automation not only gives you more time to focus on the crucial aspects of the business but also gives you more flexibility. Through some of the tools that I will share below, you can make smart decisions to improve your strategy and customer retention.

Thanks to automation, you would eliminate assumptions and guesswork from many aspects of your Affiliate Marketing business. It will also make it easier to focus on generating more leads, sales, and conversions.

Automation helps you track and monitor your performance in real-time and enables you to match the popular products with the right audience, run ad campaigns at the most profitable times, and modify things that do not work as expected.

There are many benefits of automating your Affiliate Marketing business of which below are the most remarkable ones:

The tools will do the repetitive tasks that consume most of your time.
The tools can research keywords so you can create SEO-optimised content.
You can focus on generating leads and sales.
The tools improve the effectiveness of ad campaigns and generate better results.

Lead Automation

Every successful Affiliate Marketer has automated their lead generation through email autoresponders.

The email autoresponders work as follows:

You create a lead form and an email list in the email autoresponder.
You link the form to the email list.
You create an automation sequence that will trigger when people submit the lead form (and are added to the email list).
Once people enter the automation, you can send unlimited emails sharing information, knowledge resources, blog posts, webinar invitations, tools, software, products, services, etc.

I know people do not fill up lead forms blindly. So to encourage them to enter their names and emails, you could give them something for free. The thing you give to your audience for free is called Lead Magnet.

The lead magnet can be any or more of the below:

Free webinar
Free ebook
Free PDF
Free mini-course
Free reports
Free one-on-one call
Free consultation
Free swipe files
Free templates
Free resources

You can use tools like ConvertKit, Aweber, ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, and Moosend to automate your leads. To help you out, I have published a video on my YouTube channel regarding the same. You can watch it here:

In addition to email autoresponders, you can automate leads on other channels such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook groups, and SMS.

For instance, when someone visits my website, I request them to join my Telegram channel. Once they join my channel, I send them reminders about my webinars, events, calls, etc. You can follow the same approach on Facebook, WhatsApp, Discord, and other communication channels.

Some email autoresponders provide the ability to automate SMSs. In addition to the names and emails, you can collect people’s mobile numbers and send them reminders. The advantage of SMS automation is that the SMS open rate is higher than any other medium.

So, in a nutshell, to automate your leads, you can use email autoresponders, SMS automation, and social media groups.

Chatbot Automation

A chatbot works like Facebook messenger. It is an instant messaging text-chat-only tool that you can add to your website or courses and answer queries on the fly.

Super Affiliates implemented chatbots on their platforms and it has saved them a lot of time! To utilise chatbots for your Affiliate Marketing business, you can go to ManyChat.

Once you have the chatbot implemented, you can preload 2-3 hundred frequently asked questions with the corresponding answers. In some cases, you can also point your audience to resources on your website or YouTube channel.

A chatbot will help you reduce the time that went into answering the same questions repeatedly.

You can use a chatbot to automate the following areas of your Affiliate Marketing business:

Answering the same questions.
Collect names and emails to feed into the email autoresponder.
Provide resources to solve the audience’s problems.
Direct your audience to your blog posts or YouTube videos.
etc.

Ad Automation

Ad automation is one of the most powerful automation that you can add to your Affiliate Marketing business to improve leads and sales.

If you run ads on Facebook, you can create different ad sets under ad campaigns. And each ad set can have different ad units. For example, if you run a Facebook ad to generate leads for your webinar, you can create several ad units composed of videos, images, or free PDFs.

The aim of creating several ad units is to target a different audience and distribute the budget to each one of them.

Now, coming to the rules, you can set a rule for each ad that you run. For example, if the cost per lead exceeds a particular amount, the ad should stop running automatically. This rule-setting will decrease your cost and increase your efficiency manifold.

Although what I shared above is a powerful strategy, only a few Affiliate Marketers implement it. However, those who implement it, generate between 3x to 10x return on ad spending (ROAS).

Sales Automation

Sales automation is the process of automating your sales funnel so your audience goes through the funnel and purchases your products without manual intervention.

One of the most popular methods by which Super Affiliates automate their sales is automated webinars. Through automated webinars, you can generate sales without having to be manually present during the webinar.

I have implemented sales automation and set an offer that appears towards the end of my automated webinars. Through this strategy, I successfully generate sales every day – even when I am not working!

The second method of sales automation is user segmentation and tagging. I have implemented this as follows:

When people sign up for the automated webinars, they get tagged as “email sign up.”
When people sign up but do not attend my webinar, they are labelled as “email sign up – did not attend.”
When people sign up and attend my webinar, they are labelled as “email sign up – attended.”
When people click the webinar offer, they are labelled as “email sign up – attended – offer clicked.”
When people do not click the webinar offer, they are labelled as “email sign up – attended – offer not clicked.”
When people sign up, attend, and leave during the webinar, they are labelled as “email sign up – attended – left.”
When people sign up, attend, and buy my product during the webinar, they are labelled as “email sign up – attended – offer clicked – purchased.”

For every user behaviour, I have created segments beforehand. So if people do not buy during the webinar, I follow up with email sequences set through an email autoresponder and, sometimes, I convert them into sales.

So based on the segment where one falls in, they receive a different set of follow-up notifications.

I know sales automation might sound complicated, but it is simple once you identify the different segmentations.

Data Segmentation

Data segmentation is similar to sales automation. What differentiates the two is that, in sales segmentation, you create segments for webinars or sales calls, okay? And in data segmentation, you divide your overall audience into separate buckets, alright?

I learned Data Segmentation from my mentor and he explained it in simple words. He said, “Data Aggregation is the process of segmenting your audience in such a way that you can send different messages based on the different stages that they are in.”

As I shared in the previous point, I have an entire data segmentation sequence for my automated webinars. On my website, however, I have set a different segmentation process.

When someone fills up a form, they are added to an email list. Upon adding them to an email list, they receive automated emails. If they click the link(s) within the automated emails, they get labelled as someone who wants to take action, okay?

People who do not open my email for 15 days in a row, get deleted automatically from my email list. I do not keep dead zombies in my system. I have a strict rule on who I work with.

I have a different segmentation for my paid customers. I delved deeper and divided the customers into two segments:

Level 1 customers
Level 2 customers

So if anybody purchases my membership, they get labelled as “Level 1 Customer.” When they buy my second-level implementation membership, they are relabelled as “Level 2 Customer.”

The best part about this segmentation is that I have set everything before launching my product and, now, everything happens automatically in God mode.

So data segmentation is segmenting your leads into different buckets and running different automation sequences, okay?

Reporting Automation

Before taking up Affiliate Marketing full-time, I worked as a web analyst and I loved reporting the most. To automate my business’ performance, I have imported everything – webinar data, Google ads data, Facebook ads data, sales data, website performance, etc. – into Google Sheets and exported it to Google Data Studio.

In Google Data Studio, I have created a dashboard which gives me the crucial information on the first page.

So when people buy my memberships, the data goes into Google Sheets and then into Google Data Studio. It presents the total revenue, the lead-to-conversion ratio, the level 1 to level 2 conversion ratio, and so on.

Everything gets updated daily and when you can see your business performance on a single page, you can dig deeper, and find insights. And, once you see your data with such detail, you will get control and insights like never before.

The dashboard will help you make decisions quickly. You will know exactly how much your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is, how much your revenue is, how many have upgraded, and so on.

And, there is so much more to this game that you don’t know. But, if you could master this, it’s going to open a whole new dimension to running, building and scaling your Affiliate Marketing business, okay?