How to Create High-Converting Swipe Copy for Affiliates

Swipe copy isn’t just a vital component…it’s the backbone of a thriving affiliate program. However, many programs miss the mark when it comes to this crucial aspect. Join me as we dissect the art and science of creating swipe copy that empowers your affiliates to max out their sales and keep promoting over and over. Get ready to learn the secrets to crafting compelling swipe copy that drives results.

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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy

How to Create an Affiliate Program Agreement

What are the Legal Requirements for an Affiliate Program?

How to Build Great Relationships with Affiliates

How Do Affiliate Managers Spend Their Day?

How to Communicate Bad News to Your Affiliates

How to Triple Your Webinar Sales with Affiliates

How to Create High-Converting Swipe Copy for Affiliates

One of the single most important keys to a successful affiliate program is great Swipe copy. If you do it right, it’s a powerful tool that’s going to help your affiliate succeed. Yeah, I see so many affiliate programs get it wrong. Today I’ll share exactly how to provide great swipe copy for your affiliates.

So obviously one of the things that a lot of your affiliates are going to ask for is swipe copy. If you’re new to the world and you don’t know what swipe copy is, very simple explanation. The term comes from copywriters used to keep what they call swipe files, and I still have hundreds of these. In fact, we sell the ultimate affiliate swipe file where we actually give you all of our affiliate emails for a given year.

And you can literally go in and open this book and be like, I’m going to promote a webinar and oh, there’s some copy, you know, I’m going to use that. And you can see examples that we’ve used in our business, but this swipe file were examples of other copy to inspire your own copy. And then it evolved into with affiliate Swipe copy, it was like, for years it was like, well here, copy and paste this swipe copy and just send it to your list. There’s a big problem with that, of course, and that’s that a lot of people are on multiple lists now.

And in fact, we wrote an entire article on how to use Swipe copy as an affiliate, which we’ll put in the show notes. You can go to mattmcleams. com swipe tips.

And it’s like rule number one, don’t copy and paste the swipe copy. And so for us, that’s one of the services that we provide for our clients, is that we’ll help them craft this swipe copy. It’s meant as a guide for their affiliates. It’s meant to inspire them to give them ideas about the content that they could use.

So with swipe copy from an affiliate program perspective, there’s five mistakes that I see most often. So I’m gonna share those five mistakes, then I’m gonna share what to do instead, how to actually provide great swipe copy for your affiliates. Mistake number one is writing it yourself. Now this is if you’re the product owner or, you know, maybe you’re an employee of the company that’s been around for a while.

Either way, you are too close to the product to write Great Swipe copy. You have to remember that swipe copy, it’s a guide for your affiliates to use. So these are people who are not that close to the product in the sense of they didn’t create it, they don’t work for you. They’re not super close to the product.

They didn’t pour their blood, sweat and tears into the product. Right. So swipe copy should be written as though it’s from an outsider because that’s who’s going to use it, is the affiliates. So have somebody else write your swipe copy.

It’s one of the reasons why I love that we’re able to do it for our clients so often, because I’ll have our copywriter do it and our copywriter doesn’t know the product very well. That’s a great thing. They’re writing it from the perspective of what would attract me to click on this link and get them to come to your workshop or buy this product. So do not write the swipe copy yourself.

Number two, you don’t include images. All right? Most people don’t use images in their emails, but some people do. And when they do, often they can be very effective.

My company, I don’t know, we use an image maybe every four months. When we do our click through rates skyrocket, which is probably like a lesson to me there. But the point is, I think it’s because we rarely use them. So you need to offer your affiliates some images that they can use in their emails.

Number three, you only write one version. Only one version. So you got this big thing, and maybe it’s a workshop, maybe it’s a product, and you write one version of the copy. So frustrating, because it assumes that every affiliate has the exact same audience.

That doesn’t describe any product almost. That does not describe nearly any product. Most of the time, your product reaches different demographics, different avatars. Each group is at a different place in life.

They have different struggles, they have different needs, different desires. And so writing one version of the swipe copy is not a good idea. That doesn’t necessarily apply if you’re writing the final email, like the 02:00 in the morning when the cart closes at 03:00 in the morning eastern time, you know, midnight Pacific, that email, you may only need one version. There’s only so many ways to say you have 1 hour left to buy.

Click here. The gist of the message right so I’m not, you know, I’m not complaining about that, but most of the time that’s not gonna work. Number four, mistake. Every version of the swipe copy is the same length.

You know, you only write long, you only write short length emails. Again, like the third thing when I talked about that, you only write one version. It assumes that every affiliate wants the same kind of copy. Some affiliates prefer longer form copy.

Some of them prefer shorter form copy. Some of them prefer something in the middle. And we’ll talk about that. And then fifth talked about this earlier.

You expect them to copy, paste and actually even encourage them to copy and paste it. You just tell them like, no, just go ahead, just copy and paste it. No, no, please do not do that. We always tell our affiliates, do not copy and paste the swipe copy.

Go read the post that I mentioned. You know, Matt mcleans. com swipe tips, that is, from the affiliates perspective.

Feel free to share that post with your affiliates and say, hey, here’s swipe copy. Go read this post from Matt McWilliams. He tells you how to use it. We tell people, don’t copy the swipe copy.

It’s unoriginal. It doesn’t work. Sometimes it backfires. Sometimes if you send an email and another, just assume another affiliate is going to do it.

That’s the thing. You have to assume another affiliate is going to do it. So you send the same email as another affiliate, same subject line, same text. How does that come across?

You know, how does that make you as the affiliate look? Makes you look like an idiot. I’m just being blunt. It makes you look like an idiot.

Super lame. So what do you do instead? Five best practices. Believe it or not, these are going to address the five mistakes I just talked about, right?

These are the five must for creating killer swipe copy. Number one, hire somebody to write it. Unless you are a professional copywriter. Even if you are a professional copywriter, hire an outsider.

Hire an outsider, somebody that’s new to your team. Like if we were writing swipe copy for our products. Our copywriter is new enough that I think he’d do pretty good at writing swipe copy for our affiliates. In fact, I have had him write affiliate swipe copy because he doesn’t know our products super well.

Yet. Three years from now, I probably wouldn’t have him write it. I’ll probably hire somebody from the outside to write it. You are simply too close to the product to write.

Great swipe copy. All right. An outsider is going to be able to relate to your affiliates and write copy for them. An outsider is going to be able to say, if I were writing this for my business, how would I write it?

And that’s what you want. Number two, give your affiliates images. Just give them the option of some good images for their emails for us, you know, the ones that work best are like video screen captures. So we’re talking about, if they’re mailing about a video, then we find a screenshot from the video and typically we’ll go with like a goofy one.

You know, I think I said this in an episode a while back where I was talking about what works for us in email. I don’t know of a less crass way of saying this, but I typically it’s a screen grab where it looks like I smell the fart. And so we try to find, like a goofy one, and then we put a little play button over it. And so give that to them.

Right? Give them sale graphics. If you’re running a sale, give them some graphics. If you use stats, any statistics whatsoever, give them a screenshot of the stats that increases the validity and the believability of it.

Give them a stat word shows like, if you tell somebody, this helped us make $124,000, or we have this, or there’s some sort of a graph that shows something. Show them graphs. Show them numbers, you know, actual screenshots of numbers. Show them pie charts and bar charts and line graphs, the little dot graph thing.

Give them countdown timers. You know, we recommend using, we use motion mail personally, literally, I don’t have an affiliate link or anything. I think it’s just motionmailapp. com.

dot. There’s out a timer. There’s a bunch, but we recommend motion mail. They just seem to work best.

Give the affiliates the code to use in their emails. These countdown timers increase conversion rates by as much as 14% on cart close day. Don’t assume that they’re going to go create their own. Don’t make them go create their own.

The reality is they’re busy. They have a ton of things going on in their business. So give them the countdown timer code that they can just copy and paste and put in their emails. I know in the last promotion where we did this, it actually was the first time ever it flagged our account in motion mail because we had over 10 million impressions on our countdown timer in a week and we actually had to pay more money to motion mail.

That means there were more than 10 million opens. Now, an open doesn’t necessarily mean somebody opened it, just to be clear, but 10 million times that image fired. That image fired more than 10 million times. It’s a good thing we provided it to our affiliates. You know how many of those people that opened that email would have seen a countdown timer if we hadn’t provided it to our affiliates? I don’t know.

My guess is probably two to 3 million. So that means seven to 8 million more people saw this countdown timer and improve their conversions. So make sure you include these images. Like I said, the video screen captures sale graphics stat screenshots, countdown timers, images that show the product, images that show the product in use.

If it’s like, you know, a course thing where you got the spread right, where it shows the course itself, whatever it may be. Third, write different versions of the swipe copy for different audiences. All right. When we were working with Jeff Goins, we ran his book launch, the Art of Work.

It was the first book launch I’d ever ran. It was back in 2000. I think it’s like 2013 or 14. I was in the book, and he knew that I did affiliate management.

He’s like, hey, can you help me with this book launch? And. Sure. And I remember he said, I got to tell the publisher how many books I’m going to sell.

And I was like, I’m looking at the numbers and looking at what we can do and how we can help you. I was like, tell them 15,000. He’s like, I’m not telling him 15,000. I’m like, yeah, you are.

And he’s like, no, my last book sold 3000. I’m like, tell him 15,000. I can see the mathematic. I know what we can do and how we can help you.

It’s 15,000. He argued with me. I’m like, dude, you’re either gonna tell him 15,000 or I’m not working with you. We did 22,000 pre orders.

When we were doing that, for the swipe copy, we had four audiences, and we wrote copy for each of those audiences for his. I remember to this day, I remember it was entrepreneurs, dreamers, faith based group, and stay at home moms, stay at home parents. So we had the entrepreneurs. They were already established entrepreneurs.

We had the dreamers, basically wantrepreneurs. We had the faith based angle, and then we had the stay at home parents angle. So we wrote copy for each of those audiences. And affiliates loved it.

They knew that we had, I think we had seven emails times four audiences. We had 28 emails. They knew they could click on faith based. You know, I’m a christian blogger.

Boom, I clicked on that, I got my seven emails. Sometimes we have people who are like, well, my audience is faith based and they’re entrepreneurs. So they would take both and they would kind of combine them, like amalgamas or whatever the word is. They would combine them together.

We had others that said, well, I’ve got an audience of stay at home moms that want to be entrepreneurs, and they would take those and they would combine them. So provide different versions for different audiences. Come up with those four avatars or three. It might be three, it might be two.

Whatever it is, probably not five or more. I think four was pushing the limits with what we did. All right, number four, write different links of swipe copy. All right, so you’ve got to have different links.

Got to have a long and a short for each thing. Again, probably not like deadline emails. You just, you need just short for that. There’s only so many ways to say the webinar starts in 15 minutes.

You coming or not? You know, but I. Especially for your, if you’ve got to launch your core parts, you need different links. Different links of copy.

Your affiliates are going to love you for this. So typically what we’ll do is we’ll write the long version and it’s the two to 300 word version, and then we’ll just chop that down to like 100. And we tell them, like, they’re not different in the sense of if you look at both, you’re going to get different things. Like if you want short, just use the short, you know, and then tweak that.

But we provide different links just to give them, like those who just want kind of the quick hitter, they get the quick hitters, they want the longer version, they get the longer version. And then fifth, make it clear that swipe copy is a guide only. I said this earlier, make it clear. Encourage your affiliates to only use the swipe copy as a guide or for inspiration.

That’s the only purpose of it, right? You know, make their emails personal. Make them specific for their audience if you need to, like I said, share my post, you know. Matt mcwilliams.

com swipe tips how to use swipe copy as an affiliate. It shows them the best practices for using swipe copy. So make that clear to them.

Give them an example or two where somebody took swipe copy and tweaked it. I always shared the example. We were promoting a very specific affiliate promotion and they gave us swipe copy. And in that swipe copy, there was a little part.

It talked about a teacher, and I was like, well, that’s kind of cool. But I have a better example. I have my teacher and I’m pretty confident her name is Misses Terry. And then I had another teacher.

Miss Terry was my AP US history teacher my junior year of high school. That same year I had a civics teacher that was a complete moron name is Mister Calverthenne. So I’ve got these two contrasting teachers. One who is an amazing history teacher that taught me so much and give me a lifelong love of history, and the other who would sit at the front of the room putting staples into his forearm and considered teaching to be telling us what chapter to read in class.

And I remember that one of the subject lines that we used was don’t be a Calvert. So one of them was like, you know, my best teacher ever. And I used the intro to misses Terry. Here’s the deal.

There is nobody else in all likelihood promoting that one product that had a us history teacher named Misses Terry. So I got that going for there’s no way you can have that same email as I did. And there’s also probably not one that had a mister Calvert who was a complete disgrace to the entire teaching profession. And so what I did was I talked about those two teachers.

It totally set me apart. And so that’s the example that I share. By the way, you can see both of those emails in the ultimate affiliate swipe file. If you go to affiliateswipefiles.

com comma, we’ll put that link in the show notes. You can grab a copy of that and actually go through those emails, because personally I think they’re a great copy. I really do.

And I’m not saying that because I wrote them. I actually did not write either one of those emails, but I think they’re a great copy. And then the idea here is just tell them that it’s a guide and give them some direction. Like there might be parts in the swipe copy you put in brackets, like talk about such and such here, talk about your experience with this product, or talk about your favorite teacher here, if you put that in brackets, talk about your favorite teacher, then every affiliate is going to have a different story.

Unless you’ve got like twin brothers or sisters promoting this, or two people who just happen to be in the same elementary school at the same time, which is pretty unlikely to happen. Although there is an affiliate. Ironically, that is actually the very first affiliate that promoted me, made me any money from my business, and ironically we were born in the same hospital, grew up in the same small town in North Carolina and never knew each other. So I guess crazy things like that can happen.

I also found out one time when I was sending ten ninety nine s to our affiliates that I lived next door neighbors with one of our affiliates. This is back in 2009 and I thought that was weird. I was like, his address is this next to, oh my gosh, it’s that guy who is out on his deck sometimes in nothing but a speedo. And it’s really awkward.

And so I took his check to him. I knocked on his door and took his check to him. And anyway, things like that do happen, right? So that’s how you write great swipe copy.

Now, one quick bonus tip, don’t forget about social swipe. All right? This is one of the most overlooked pieces in affiliate programs. Don’t forget about social swipe.

We found that about twelve to 18% of all opt ins come from social media, so it’s kind of a big deal. So at least include versions for like Twitter and Facebook, whatever, some images that are sized for those platforms. So hopefully this helps you to write some great swipe copy for your affiliates. I’m telling you right now, like, the difference between bad Swipe copy and great Swipe copy could be 30, 40, 50% increase in sales.

It’s that important. That’s why I covered it in depth today. Make sure if you haven’t yet, you subscribe. You subscribe to the podcast so that you don’t miss the next episode.

Guys, it’s gonna be a good one. I talk about how to use TikTok for affiliate marketing. You don’t want to miss that. Make sure you hit that subscribe button.

If you haven’t yet, make sure you share this episode. If you know someone who could benefit from this episode, make sure you just hit the share button and share this with them. So I’ll see you in the next episode. We’re going to talk all about TikTok.

I’ll see you then.