For Lead Generation & Marketing Tactics very few people, know about…
Whether you’re already running pay per lead campaigns or just dipping your toes into the water….
There’s something you need to know; Pay per sale is a staple for a lot of marketers.
It is a pay per lead model, where you earn a commission only when a sale is made (i.e., you only get paid when your client receives the money in their bank account)
It’s a daring game. But certainly not impossible.
To succeed in the world of PPS marketing, you need to master the art of presenting an irresistible offer to the right audience.
And this guide will help you do just that. We’ll walk you through the entire process of becoming a successful PPS marketer, whether you’re aiming for the highest ticket commission or volume.
But first… let’s start with the basics so we’re on the same page.
What is pay per sale marketing?
Pay Per Sale is more commonly known as Cost Per Sale. But for the purpose of this post, we’ll be using the term pay per sale only.
Pay-per-sale marketing is basically a type of performance based marketing.
For marketers, this means business owners will only pay for successful results.
And for your clients, this means low financial risk. They do not have to pay anything upfront, and they’ll get an R.O.I. for every penny spent.
This is why pay-per-sale is loved by business owners. But it’s not a go-to route for most marketers. They only make money IF and only IF they deliver results….
….which, of course, is a tough job. But you need not worry. We’ve enclosed a success magnet for PPS marketing in this very guide.
How does Pay Per Sale work?
When pay-per-sale is in action, two parties are involved:
- Advertiser (The client)
- Publisher (You)
The advertiser is the business owner or merchant who is selling a product or service. They are the ones who are willing to pay a commission per sale.
The publisher has an established audience or a platform they use to promote products/services. If their followers or readers make a purchase, they successfully make a sale. And consequently, earn a commission on the sold product/service.
Some examples of publishers include Google, bloggers, influencers, affiliate marketers, content creators, and media companies.
Pay Per Sale Example
Now, let’s go through a detailed illustration of pay per sale advertising and make things crystal clear.
Consider a solar panel installation company that aims to grow its sales and customer base.
To achieve this, they team up with a blogger who focuses on promoting green living, sustainability, and energy-efficient home solutions.
The blogger will develop and publish content centered on solar panels, covering topics like:
- Benefits of solar panels
- Installation tips for solar panels
- Best solar panel installation services
Within this context, the blogger will include hyperlinks that direct readers to the solar panel company’s website – where the readers learn more about their installation services.
Ideally, the link should lead to a sales page or offer. If the reader decides to purchase solar panel services, the blogger will receive a commission from the company.
This commission can either be a percentage of the total product/service price or a fixed fee that both parties can mutually settle beforehand. Business owners must also predefine what counts as a qualified sale.
Also, in this setting, the blogger is acting as an affiliate marketer while generating solar leads.
Does that mean pay-per-sale is a lead-generation model? And is there a difference between PPS marketing and affiliate marketing? Read below!
How much can you charge for pay-per-sale leads?
The pricing for pay-per-sale leads depends on the industry, lead quality, price of product/service, and the commission offered.
But for an idea, generally, you can charge anywhere between from few dollars per lead up to hundreds, depending on the niche.
Or you can charge a percentage of the total product/service cost. On average, PPS marketers charge 5% to 30% of the total sales.
Pay Per Lead VS Pay Per Sale
Pay per lead is a business model wherein you convert a prospect into a potential customer. This can be done by having the prospect perform a specific action that helps drive them deeper into the sales funnel.
On the contrary, pay-per-sale is a business model wherein you convert a prospect into a paying customer. This means they make a purchase right there and then.
You can say pay-per-sale leads are ripe leads, while leads from PPL campaigns are ready to ripe. They’ll take some work before they convert.
Since no buying decision is involved, prospects are likely to complete this action.
Once this action is completed, you pass these leads on to the business owner and earn your fees. But there is no guarantee whether the lead will convert or not.
As for pay per sale, leads are basically paying customers. Although they have a shorter sales cycle, they’re difficult to acquire. They demand a lot of commitment.
You’ll have to hone your targeting skills, reach out to the right audience, and craft irresistibly good marketing messages. You have to make them hit the buy now button to earn anything at all.
From a business owner’s perspective, pay-per-sale leads may take time to generate. But they bring you a guaranteed return on investment. PPL is quicker, but there’s a possibility of zero or minimal ROI.
So, if you’ve got the benefit of time, PPS is the way.
Payment Structure
In PPL, the publisher or lead generator is paid for every lead or potential customer. Explore what a ‘lead’ looks like here in our complete guide to Pay Per Lead Marketing.
In PPS, the publisher or lead generator is only paid for a converted lead. The advertiser does not pay the publisher until there’s a successful purchase.
The payment for pay-per-sale leads is usually commission-based. This could range from a few dollars to thousands of dollars per sale, depending on the product/service price.
Quality of Leads
The leads generated via PPS campaigns are better qualified as compared to PPL campaigns. This is because the intent of purchase is not as strong in PPL as in PPS.
Also, pay-per-lead is not as profitable as pay-per-sale for lead generators. So, they focus on maximizing the volume of leads they generate. This, in turn, depletes the quality of leads generated.
Pay Per Sale VS Affiliate Marketing
By definition, affiliate marketing is when someone promotes a company’s product or service on their platform. If anyone from their audience buys the promoted product or service (through their unique link or code), the affiliate earns a commission.
Now, how does this work? Let’s understand this with an example.
Say you run a blog about home improvement. On the basis of this blog, you can partner with pay-per-click or pay-per-sale affiliate programs, such as Amazon’s. You’ll earn a commission for each sale made via your unique affiliate link.
Once you’ve signed up for this affiliate program, you’ll start creating content to promote specific home improvement products listed on amazon.com. If your follower reads your content, clicks on the link for this product, and makes a purchase, you’ll successfully earn a commission.
There are, of course, other conditions for the Amazon Affiliate Program. But the idea of affiliate marketing is to push the prospect to a definite purchase.
With that said, pay-per-sale is only a compensation model for affiliate marketing. As an affiliate marketer, you could get paid for visitors following the link, signing up, or as mentioned above, a sale.
In the case of pay per sale affiliate marketing, it’s always a sale.
Best Niches for Pay Per Sale Marketing
The best niches for pay per sale marketing are as follows:
- Travel
- Fashion
- Food
- Education
- Gardening
- Health & Fitness
- Personal care
- Home Decor
- Finance
- Technology
- Gaming / Esports
- Beauty & cosmetics
- Pets
- Luxury items
Note that the best niches for any form of marketing are those that have a high potential for sales – which means they have a high demand.
If a niche is in high demand, it’s likely to be highly competitive as well. For that very reason, we recommend finding a profitable niche for affiliate marketing before you settle for any.
Also, here are some unpopular but high-potential niches that beginner pay-per-sale marketers can start with:
- Vacuum cleaners
- Travel car seats
- Hotels with jacuzzis
- Headphones
- Golf equipment
- Sustainable or zero-waste products
What Pay Per Sale Network is best for you?
One of the big benefits of the pay per sale business model is that your location does not hold you back from doing business.
You have the freedom to choose what type of ‘network’ best suits you.
This is why even though a typical pay-per-sale marketing company can generate PPS leads for two types:
- International businesses
- Local businesses
They will usually concentrate on the one that makes the most sense for them and their business.
It’s also important to know the mechanism of pay per sale marketing is similar for both, except when it comes to:
- Target audience
- Commission rate
- Payment method
Hence, affiliate programs that pay per sale are more suitable for international businesses, while pay per sale marketing can be best executed for local businesses via pay-per-call.
Let’s check out the differences between both in deeper detail.
Pay Per Sale Affiliate Programs
As mentioned earlier, pay per sale affiliate programs are suitable for international businesses. These may include online eCommerce stores, SaaS companies, digital product marketplaces, online education platforms, travel booking websites, or subscription-based websites.
Typically, these businesses have a global audience and hire a pay-per-sale marketer to expand their online reach and sales.
They do so by promoting the products via online channels, including:
- Email marketing
- Social media
- Paid advertising
- SEO
Using these, they are able to expand the customer base beyond the local market.
With that said, most products sold via affiliate programs are high-ticket. Hence, the commission offered in this pay per sale network is higher.
But the payment method may not be suitable for all. All affiliate programs have rules and regulations of their own on how and when the payment will be processed.
For example, affiliates earning via Amazon Associates Program receive their earned commissions after every 60 days via direct deposit or check.
So, make sure you consider the scope of business, your commission rate, and the payment method when choosing a pay per sale network.
Local Business Pay Per Sale Campaigns
Local businesses may include home improvement services, personal care services, restaurants, brick-and-mortar retail stores, gyms, etc. These businesses focus on serving customers in a specific geographic area. Hence, their audience is limited.
Pay per sale marketers for these businesses usually get lower commission rates, and the payment methods range from cash, check, bank transfer, or online payment systems like PayPal or Stripe.
What’s more, pay per sale marketers for local businesses are often inclined to secure sales via calls – merging pay-per-call with pay-per-sale. This is where pay per sale telemarketing comes into play.
Local business advertisers would be more willing to pay a commission per call, rather than a commission per ad or sale. They’d like you to find a high-quality lead and transfer it to them to close the deal.
Plus, local businesses count more on traditional marketing to generate leads.
Billboards, flyers, TV, and local newspapers may bring them better results as compared to online marketing.
How to start a pay per sale agency?
Let’s set up your pay per sale marketing agency now.
1. Research, Segmentation, Targeting, Positioning
As a pay per sale marketer, you’ve to do two types of research;
- To find your clients
- To find your clients’ clients (i.e., pay per sale leads)
The first type of research – you’ll have to do it only once and continue to improve it. The second type of research might be a new journey every time – until 2 to 5 years down the lane when you’ve got ample first-hand experience in most industries.
However, the process of both types of research is more or less the same.
1. Find a niche that:
- Resonates with you (either you’re passionate about it and you’re willing to do the required research or have enough work experience in the industry)
- Its numbers are promising enough. Use Google Trends, keyword research tools, industry news, and relevant social media platforms to assess the current demand and upcoming demand.
2. Research your customer by:
- Creating an inventory of interesting facts about your customers. Google terms like benefits of X, mistakes of X, why X, who should buy X, or who shouldn’t buy X. Replace X with your market/niche. This will give you solid insights about selling opportunities in your niche.
- Create a map of the customer journey, starting from first visit to purchase. It should include details as precise as visiting landing page X or receiving an email, or reacting to X’s social media post.
- Study your own product/service to find your unique selling points and how they are useful for the customer.
- Create a Customer Magnet. This is a set of data that represents your customer’s emotional needs and circumstances. It helps you figure out the job you have to perform. And it will become the basis of your marketing material.
You can find downloadable templates and a detailed step-by-step guide for each of these steps in: How to get a strategic marketing edge
3. Determine your positioning
Reuse the research done in the previous step to decide where you want to stand in one year’s time and ten years’ time.
Ideally, have realistic estimates for 365 days. Expect less from yourself. Marketing is all about experience. You’re going to fail a lot, and you’re going to improve a lot. And this is going to take time.
But we highly recommend setting up BIG GOALS for 10 years down the lane.
To give you an idea, As a pay per sale marketing company, you can aim to position your business as a PPS agency in X niche that generates 100 sales per day per client.
4. Create a funnel
Now, you need to create a funnel. For this, you will need to develop an offer that not only resonates with your target audience but also prompts them to take action. This means that your offer should be compelling enough to move potential customers from the awareness stage to the consideration stage of the funnel.
The offer here typically refers to your marketing message, which initiates the customer journey. It could be an email, landing page, social media copy, SMS, or any other media.
As a pay per sale marketer, it will most likely be a blog post, landing page, or ad copy. Regardless of the form, the magic of your offer lies in its ability to:
- Trigger interest in the customer
- Highlight a pain point
- Offer a solution
- Build emotional momentum and include a clear call-to-action (CTA)
By doing so, you can compel potential customers to take action, whether it’s signing up for a newsletter, scheduling a consultation, or making a purchase.
For example, if you’re a lead generator in the real estate niche, you can create an offer that highlights the pain point of not having enough leads to close a deal.
Then present your solution of generating high volumes of leads.
And finally, build emotional momentum by emphasizing how much money your clients can save by using your service. Your CTA could be to schedule a consultation or sign up for a free trial.
After crafting your offer, you need to target your customers based on your research. This means understanding your audience’s needs, preferences, and behaviors to effectively reach them. If your product or service solves a problem in more than one way, split-test your offers to see which one resonates better with your audience.
Split testing can help you optimize your funnel by identifying which offer is more effective, which audience segment responds best to which offer, and what changes you can make to improve the funnel’s performance.
5. Refine your audience
By this time, you will have ample data and a clear idea of what kind of customers you really want to come to you and stay.
Note that we do not have your business in full swing yet. We’re still doing the homework.
So, once you have that data and a clearer vision, segment your audience. Create sub-groups within your target audience. Clearly list what problems each group has and how exactly you solve their problems. Also, list the profitability of each group.
This will help you successfully personalize marketing campaigns on a 1:1 level for each customer that comes to you.
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