How to Use Prelanders for Different Affiliate Verticals

In affiliate marketing, you may think that most of the work is done after generating high-quality leads. In reality, though, there’s a much bigger hurdle to cross: you must convince these people to take action.

A prelander, you can warm up prospects and improve conversion rates. Let’s dive into the basics of prelander affiliation and learn how to boost sales with it.

Key Takeaways:

• A prelander is a versatile, strategic web page used to engage and qualify users before they see the main offer. It builds excitement about your main offer and increases the likelihood of a conversion.
• Pre-landing pages are posted between the ad and the landing page and can take many forms depending on the campaign’s goals and audience (including surveys, games, product showcases).
• Prelanders can be handy for improving credibility, especially if they include expert endorsements, testimonials, certificates, and so on.
• You can also create a pre-landing page if you want to comply with the policies of certain advertising platforms by adding softer messaging and avoiding direct claims.
• However, omit prelanders for generic products, warm audiences, or popular brands that need no introduction.

What Is a Prelander?

A pre-landing page, or prelander, is a web page shown to users before directing them to the main offer. It sits somewhere between an advertisement and the main landing page with the core offer.

A prelander’s main function is to warm up the audience and make them desire the promoted services or products. It aims to build interest, engagement, and trust prior to showing the main conversion point or presenting the sales pitch. This approach is commonly applied in affiliate marketing as it helps filter qualified leads and maximize conversions.

Let’s say you create an ad, your audience interacts with it, and then clicks a call-to-action (CTA) button. But, instead of landing them on the product page and trying to sell to them right away, you build a connection with them through a prelander, introducing your offering as the solution to their problem. A prelander could be a strategic step in the marketing funnel that may give context, address objectives, or even entertain the potential customer, urging them to proceed to the landing page or product offer page.

Where do you post prelanders? And how do they work? Pre-landing pages are typically created on the affiliate marketer’s main domain or campaign domain. In turn, ads link to this prelander, which redirects the user to the product or landing page of the merchant or advertiser.

What are the key elements of a prelander? Effective ones typically feature the following:

• a catchy headline that grabs attention;
• persuasive messaging and tone in usually concise and brief copy;
• a highlighted discount, offer, or incentive;
• a bold and clear call to action button;
• attractive visuals (photos, GIFs, animations, videos, etc.);
• could have engaging and interactive elements (like games, quizzes, and so on);
• possibly social proof (reviews, testimonials, ratings, user comments, etc.).

Don’t mistake it for a pre order landing page, though. Also referred to as a pre sale landing page, it also creates hype around a new product or service, but gets visitors to place orders even though it’s not available for purchase yet.

What Does a Prelander Do?

For most affiliate marketing campaigns, a prelander is a ticket to more conversions. But how exactly does it help you achieve this? Let’s consider four ways:

• Filters your audience — you can filter out unqualified leads and direct interested users to the main landing page (for example, a prelander in the dating vertical can sift through users who didn’t select their gender, ensuring only those who show genuine interest proceed).
• Builds anticipation — images and expert copy make the audience excited to learn more about your offer.
• Establishes trust — you can demonstrate product value and build credibility through user-generated content (UGC), customer success stories, and other methods for credibility.
• Provides context — provides sufficient space to prime the audience, hammer on customer pain points, introduce your products as a solution, and tell prospects the kind of results to expect.

How Are Prelanders Used in Affiliate Marketing?

As an affiliate marketer, you can create a pre-landing page for different industries and niches, and there are lots of examples you can encounter across various verticals. It’s especially valuable in verticals with compliance challenges or where direct-to-offer approaches may be less effective or restricted altogether. Here are a few of the possible use cases.

• E-commerce — often include product demos and in-depth reviews to highlight features from different perspectives.
• Health and Wellness — typically have images and videos of users who have improved their health using such offerings.
• Beauty — show before-and-afters of satisfied buyers who have achieved great results using the beauty products you’re marketing.
• Finance — may explain complex finance or insurance products and how they work using visual aids (e.g., graphs, charts, and infographics) to drive engagement.
• Dating — usually utilize user reviews and success stories as tools to build excitement in the audience and make them sign up for matchmaking platforms or relationship coaching services.
• Gambling and Casinos — show off juicy bonuses and life-changing reviews of users who won lots of money playing their favorite games, and such prelanders usually focus on intriguing visitors enough to make them register and deposit.
• Technology and Software — affiliate marketing for SaaS drives the most conversions with video walk-throughs, falling back on the idea that prospects shouldn’t have to commit financially to see how a tool works, just let them see it in action.

When Not to Use Pre-Landing Pages

While pre landing pages are great tools for affiliate marketers, there are instances where you can do without them.

For example, when you’re targeting a warm audience (people who have already shown interest in the product or service you’re promoting), prelanders could be excessive. They could be your social media followers, website visitors, or perhaps email subscribers. They may just be looking to compare your offers with competitors and make a final decision. To keep them engaged, quickly serve up the information they need without a pre lander.

Similarly, if you’re advertising a well-established brand, there’s no reason to create a prelander. The brand’s reputation precedes it, and your audience already trusts its products. That’s less work for you, since prospects are more likely to convert.

Also, you can omit a prelander when marketing generic or unbranded products, such as everyday essentials, groceries, and household items. These products have no unique features that could foster customer loyalty. In such scenarios, it’s best to skip this additional step of the buyer’s journey.

Types of Pre-Landing Pages

What does a prelander look like? And which forms can it take? There are plenty of formats available, which allow you to select the style that best aligns with your offerings and appeals to your audience.

Bonuses and discounts — Entice prospects with exclusive offers and promo codes they can’t say no to. These are best paired with limited-time countdowns to create a fear of missing out (FOMO), driving users to act quickly before the time elapses.

Gamification — Games are exciting. Why not create a fun atmosphere that makes visitors stay? Such prelanders engage the audience through bonus boxes, spinning wheels, roulettes, and other minigames that create a sense of luck and drive action (like claiming a prize by visiting the main page).

Before and afters — Instead of writing about product benefits, show them. Before-and-after comparisons highlight product effectiveness and encourage sales, especially in the beauty and fitness industries.

Surveys or quizes — Another interactive approach that offers users who click on an ad to answer a few short questions. Afterward, they can qualify for a special offer based on their replies by visiting the main page.

Sign-up incentives — This pre-lander type works well in SaaS marketing, where you can give new users a discount code or provide free access for a specific period.

Interviews and testimonials — An interview-style prelander features satisfied users and their “success stories”. When potential customers see that others have had pleasant experiences with the advertised products, they’ll most likely click through to the main offer.

Storytelling — Prelanders of this kind are used to build an emotional connection. They’re similar to blog articles or news pieces that share a personal story of how the product or service solved a problem but not through an interview.

Expert opinions — This type of prelander shares the opinions of thought leaders in an industry. The credibility of these experts is thus leveraged to build your own reputation.

Product benefits — Unveiling product benefits generates interest among the audience, showing users what’s in it for them. It frequently features product demos, walkthroughs, and other persuasive content.

Comparisons — This type is used for promoting software or financial products. It highlights unique advantages that differentiate the offer from competitors by placing solutions or products side-by-side.

Catalogs or product recommendations — Often applied in the e-commerce vertical, this method showcases a curated product selection or the best-sellers that can nudge users to visit the shop or product page.

Fear triggers — Fear is a strong motivator, especially in purchase decisions. Some pre-landing pages take advantage of this emotion by warning potential customers about the consequences of not taking a specific action, for example, what can happen if you don’t safeguard your personal data or don’t secure your files without specialized solutions.

Gender selection screens — Include a screen where users can select their gender to personalize content for a particular gender. This allows for targeted marketing and helps understand user demographics, not only for dating verticals.

Pros and Cons of Pre-Landing Pages

In an era where internet users are becoming desensitized to ads, a recent study found that 19.5% of affiliate marketers struggle to convert traffic into sales. While prelanders offer a lot of benefits, there are also some drawbacks you should know. Let’s look at both closely.

Advantages of Prelanders

• More conversions — Prelanders help put out targeted content that appeals to potential customers. When a prospect sees something that hits right on their pain points, they’re more likely to convert.
• Improved engagement — With quizzes, surveys, and minigames included in the prelander, more people engage with the content.
• Audience filtering — Prelanders act as a filter when you share relevant content that caters to a specific audience. Only interested people will want to click through to the landing page, so you reduce wasted ad spend and improve conversion rates.
• Traffic segmentation — They act as a filter to weed out unqualified or uninterested users, not letting them proceed further in the funnel. This helps reduce irrelevant or meaningless traffic from reaching the main offer page.
• Regulatory compliance — Advertising platforms like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Outbrain have strict policies against gambling, betting, drugs, and sexually explicit content. Prelanders can help comply with these regulations and redirect the traffic elsewhere.
• Lets you run A/B tests — They’re also a great tool for testing out various hooks, messages, content, and approaches that can help convince users to take an action or make a purchase.

Disadvantages of Prelanders

• Increased costs — Think about the cost of creating, testing, and optimizing your pre-landing page. This can take up a large chunk of your marketing budget, especially if you outsource to writers and designers.
• Complexity — Pre landers create the need for specialized software such as A/B testing tools. And, even if you have prior writing skills, creating copy that converts can be time-consuming.
• Ad fatigue — Your target audience has already seen lots of pre landing pages and may start to pay less attention to them. This overexposure erodes interest and can increase bounce rates.

How to Create Prelanders for Affiliate Marketing

Whether you’re a beginner in affiliate marketing or you have some level of experience, you can learn how to make a prelander in six simple steps.

1. Craft a Captivating Headline

Increasing conversions starts with creating a captivating headline that makes visitors eager to keep reading. With the right headline, you just might see a 307% increase in conversions, probably even more.

Granted, there’s no exact formula for writing great headlines. But affiliate marketers see the most conversions when they:

• highlight their audiences’ pain points;
• speak to readers in a language they understand;
• drive action with strong verbs;
• use vivid words that trigger emotions such as fear, curiosity, or excitement;
• keep it between 6-12 words.

2. Align Your Content with the Ad

When visitors engage with your ad, they expect to see consistent messaging, tone, and visuals throughout their journey. Also, aligning your content with your ad ensures that users see information that resonates with them.

Remember: they clicked your ad because it was relevant to them. So, you must deliver on the promise you made in the ad. Here’s how to align your prelander with the ad:

• add similar keywords you used in the ad;
• stick to a color scheme;
• use a consistent tone;
• apply ad trackers to make the most of your data.

3. Create Visual Appeal

People percieve information from visual elements very well. So it’s worth including them in prelanders to make your content more engaging and easy to consume. Whatever visual elements you choose, ensure they resonate with your audience, fit the context, and align with your brand’s voice:

• images;
• photos;
• illustrations;
• infographics;
• charts and graphs;
• animations;
• memes (if your audience appreciates some humor).

4. Write a Clear, Compelling CTA

If you don’t tell visitors what to do next, chances are they’ll leave once they’re done reading your prelander. This would defeat the purpose of creating a prelander in the first place.

Create a clear message that asks readers to take a specific action. As a best practice, stick with one CTA so you don’t end up confusing readers instead of converting them. These are the key elements of a good CTA:

• specific — tell readers the action you want them to take;
• concise — convey your message in just a few words;
• bold — use a prominent design that makes your CTA stand out;
• actionable — drive action with vivid verbs.

5. Optimize for Mobile Devices

The majority of users give preference to browsing the web from their smartphones. So, optimizing your prelander for mobile devices is a smart move. Here are some best practices to implement:

• create a responsive pre-landing page that looks good on any screen size;
• ensure your web page loads in three seconds or less;
• choose fonts that are easy to read on small screens;
• ensure easy navigation on mobile devices.

6. Test and Refine

Even after you’re done creating your prelander, don’t forget to run an A/B test. This helps you spot areas to improve, and then you can refine your content for optimal results. Maybe the images and colors you used didn’t really impress your audience.

Maybe your CTA or headline wasn’t compelling enough. Or your fonts were hard on the eyes. It’s also a great idea to experiment with different value propositions, prelander types, and copy styles to find what works best.

Conclusion on Prelanders in Affiliate Marketing

Success in affiliate marketing starts with a strategic foundation. Begin by choosing a reputable affiliate marketing program. Next, you’ll need to make a catchy ad that drives traffic to your website. If the products or services you’re promoting can benefit from a prelander, use the best practices to create a compelling one that’ll catch attention and resonate with the target audience. Use interactive elements and share educational content and testimonials to establish trust, and do what you can to increase interest and motivation to take action.

Although a prelander isn’t ideal for every use case, it’s a solid choice if you want to build credibility, filter your audience, and comply with the policies of advertising platforms. How else can you maximize the efficiency of your campaigns and make the most of your marketing budget? Consider using an ad tracking and automation solution like RedTrack. It’ll allow you to monitor clicks, conversions, and ROI in real time, identify your top-performing affiliates and creatives, as well as measure and optimize your ad campaigns across multiple platforms. Don’t be shy to book a demo to see how RedTrack can maximize your ROI.