Affiliate Marketing
How to Use Co-Branded Landing Pages with Affiliates
Affiliate Marketing
If you’re looking for ways to increase your affiliate sales, you should consider co-branded landing pages with your top affiliates.
If done correctly, co-branded landing pages can be a cost-effective way of taking your affiliate revenue to the next level.
It’s no secret that affiliate revenue follows the Pareto law — 20% of your affiliate channels likely generate 80% of your affiliate revenue.
Imagine what would happen if you were to provide your top affiliates with highly converting co-branded landing pages. You would end up significantly boosting your revenue for a minimal incremental cost.
This article will discuss setting up co-branded landing pages with your top affiliates and making the most out of them. You’ll also learn some tips on how to improve your conversion rates on those landing pages.
Co-branded partner landing pages are custom-designed pages to maximize conversions by your most influential affiliates.
You can create these individual landing pages for something long-term or campaign-specific (for a limited time). What you do will depend on your business needs and experimenting with what converts better.
Creating and updating landing pages for individual campaigns might feel like a waste of time, (although this can be sped up with the use of AI writing tools), but it’s essential for other brands to succeed.
Since these influencers have large target audiences and their word carries weight, co-branding allows you to extend their voice into your marketing.
Exclusive landing pages are landing pages on your website combined with content from your affiliate. The landing page URL is personalized to your affiliate or their website and can increase conversions for your brand.
For example, a personalized landing page usually includes the name and company logo of the affiliate and any special incentives for people not found anywhere else on your site (for example, additional discounts, free credits, or coupons).
Tip: If you are an ecommerce store, visitors should be able to navigate to the rest of your site using this landing page so that you get sales from the traffic that lands here.
So, why should you use co-branded pages? Below are several compelling reasons why you should consider them as part of your marketing mix:
Increasing brand awareness is critical for businesses that want to grow. Having co-branded affiliate landing pages builds trust with people.
Why? Because they already trust the affiliate enough to click on a link. If the affiliate’s name and logo are there, they will feel like you are trustworthy, especially if you’re an unknown brand to them. The more advertising partnerships you have with your referral partners (and co-branded landing pages), the more your brand will be recognized.
When the look and feel of your co-branded affiliate landing page are inconsistent, visitors can become confused by the appearance and may leave the page.
By creating a personalized landing page and URL, you’re giving people social proof. What is social proof? It’s when people buy something because other people buy it.
Because an affiliate recommends your brand to their audience, it is reassuring when a visitor lands on a landing page URL that includes the affiliate’s branding and name.
It gives the visitor all of the social proof they need to go on to purchase. It is effectively saying that an affiliate endorses your company. Combined with the exclusive offers or discounts you offer them, it is enough to convince people to buy.
Co-branding allows you to develop consistent messaging throughout, which creates a positive impression of your product and company, increasing your conversion rates.
Creating co-branded affiliate landing pages is a great way to nurture a beneficial partnership between your brand and your affiliates. You’re two separate brands, but referral partners know that personalized co-branded landing pages convert better than generic landing pages. It’s a win-win for both you and the affiliate. They get commissions, and you get sales.
The benefits of working together with your top affiliates to create co-branded landing pages include:
When you are looking for new affiliates and referral partners to start promoting your products, being able to offer co-branded landing pages to them is a significant selling point. Simply put, affiliates know that they convert better than a generic landing page, which means more earnings and revenue for them. That’s why it’s worth mentioning when you are recruiting a high-traffic affiliate.
Below are a few essential tips that you need to follow to set up effective landing pages that produce strong results:
You don’t need to jump on the advertising bandwagon and create co-branded landing pages with all your affiliates. That would be time-consuming and counter-productive.
Only choose top-tier affiliates who are a good fit for your product and come to the table with a large built-in target audience that trusts them.
Setting up customized co-branded landing pages takes time and effort, so invest your energy and resources in experienced affiliates driving sales to your business.
Affiliate marketing is not just about driving traffic to your website – it’s about generating sales from that traffic. Some affiliates target their audiences poorly, sending you plenty of traffic with weak commercial intent. On the other hand, the pros know how to target their audiences better and drive sales to your business.
Don’t take overall design decisions by yourself. Once you identify the affiliates you want to work with, take the time to become familiar with their website, overall style, and messaging.
Co-branded landing pages need to be co-created. Make sure you work together to incorporate relevant content from both sites with common branding and graphics that tell prospects a coherent story. For example, you could include a video tutorial of your product from the affiliate or social media links to the affiliate’s pages.
Ensure that the links between your co-branded pages and your affiliate’s sites include branding elements from your company and the affiliate site.
For example, set up your co-branded links to include the brand of your affiliate in the affiliate link URLs (e.g., their name or the name of their site).
This simple detail reassures their leads that they’re still dealing with the affiliate when they get transferred to your site. If a lead looks at the URL on your landing page and there’s no mention of the referring domain, they may get spooked and back out of the page.
Tip: For microsite & landing page management, you can keep track of your campaigns using a project management tool like Asana or a simple excel sheet.
To make the most of your co-branded landing pages, you should keep the following tips in mind:
A shared call to action can effectively persuade customers to purchase a product or service, so incorporate your affiliate’s voice in your call to action.
A recommendation from an influential affiliate beats a generic call to action because the affiliate has taken the time to build trust with prospects before sending them over to your site.
Graphics and branding congruence are crucial to helping convince affiliate prospects to purchase your product.
As much as you want to make your branding front and center, remember that the prospect’s journey originated at the affiliate’s site rather than yours.
Always make sure that the graphics and branding on your landing page are consistent with those on your affiliate’s site.
Testimonials from satisfied customers are always an excellent way to improve conversions. A better way to improve them is to use a testimonial where the affiliate themselves vouches for your product.
Here are a few things that you can do to improve conversion rates on co-branded pages:
If the customer has difficulty finding what they’re looking for on your landing page, they’re more likely to leave without making a purchase.
Make sure that all of the relevant information is easy to find, and include navigation links so that an affiliate can easily go elsewhere on your website if the landing page doesn’t have specifically what they are looking for, especially if you are an ecommerce website.
Remember, your top-tier affiliate has put in a tremendous amount of work to pre-sell your products or services on their website or social media.
Tip: If you only sell one product or service, then you can remove the navigation to different pages of your site and focus on selling your product there. In the example below, navigation links have been removed because they only sell one product.
An FAQ section can be a great way to answer common questions about your products or services.
You can go a long way to eliminate sales barriers by anticipating and addressing the most common objections from prospects to make the conversion process as smooth as possible.
Video is an effective tool for increasing conversion rates on landing pages.
What if the affiliate themselves records the video? In that case, you’re not only giving potential customers a better understanding of what your product or service is about but also granting them the opportunity to hear it directly from the horse’s mouth.
Never underestimate the pull that an influencer has over their target audience. In most cases, they’ve spent years developing a reputation of trust through a well-crafted content marketing strategy — so use their videos to extend this goodwill to your brand.
Co-branded landing pages are a great way to increase conversion rates. By setting them up properly, you can ensure that you’re extending the target audience’s connection to the affiliate to your product and your brand, making visitors that much more likely to buy from you.
Try out these tips to get the most out of your co-branded landing pages, and see how much of a difference they make in your sales numbers!
Mark Ankucic
Mark Ankucic is the content strategist at Sked Social, the world’s best Instagram social media scheduler. You’ll often find him tinkering with SEO, tweaking copy for conversion, and scrolling social to find the latest news in the world of content.
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