Did you know that for every $1 you spend on emails, you are likely to earn $36? If you are in the affiliate marketing business, it’s therefore essential to use affiliate marketing emails. If you aren’t already employing them, you are missing out on huge potential profits. However, you can become a successful affiliate marketer today by adopting certain tips for email marketing and applying a few proven tactics.
What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is simple and is one of the main segments of digital marketing. People interested in affiliate marketing sign-up as partners or affiliates in an affiliate marketing program. People use email marketing, blogs, affiliate websites, and/or social media channels to promote their chosen affiliate links.
As an affiliate, you are essentially a marketing lead generator for another brand. Your job is to send potential customers to the company’s website, prompting them to visit it with a code or link.
The best part is that you earn a share in the profit or affiliate income without investing any money into the affiliate business. Companies or brands follow one of these methods to payout to the affiliate partners based on the pre-agreed terms.
- Pay-per-click (PPC): In this payment model, affiliates earn income when people visit the merchant website using the tracking link.
- Pay-per-sale (PPS): In this one, affiliates get paid when the customers you elicit purchase something on the merchant’s site.
- Pay-per-lead (PPL): In this payment model, affiliates receive an affiliate commission when visitors to the merchant’s website.
The Amazon associate program, for example, is one of the world’s most popular affiliate marketing programs.
Email marketing and affiliate marketing
One of the best ways to generate profits in affiliate marketing is to use email marketing to promote affiliate products to potential customers. While there are many tips for email marketing online, not all of them will work well for everyone. Did you know, for instance, that 33% of marketers use email marketing to reach their potential customers every month? And that 26% of marketers send affiliate emails multiple times a month?
There are many approaches to email marketing, so finding the right one for you will take time. Nevertheless, it’s best to begin your enterprise by partnering with an email service provider that will suit your needs. After you’ve gotten to grips with their email marketing software, your next step should be finding the best marketing strategies and tools for your business. Email marketing strategy is crucial to success in affiliate email marketing, so spending time working out the best approach will pay dividends.
This article will give you 15 tips for email marketing to generate better and optimal results for your affiliate company and yourself.
1. Reach your subscriber’s inbox
Your effort to create email content should not go in vain. You want your recipients to read your email. You should consider three aspects if you want to have a high inbox rate.
Email Domain: First, you need to ensure that the domain you plan to use to send emails is not on the blacklist. There are different tools for email marketing, such as MxToolBox, that you can check.
Platform: Take your time to identify the best email marketing services to help you send emails. They not only safeguard you from spammy behavior, but since they have IPs, the email deliverability rate will also be high.
Email content: Ensure that you do not stuff your email with too many affiliate links. Otherwise, your emails will be flagged as spam. More importantly, avoid trigger words such as ‘free money,’ ‘casino,’ and other such phrases in your email content.
If you take care of the three points above, your email will reach your target audience’s inbox.
2. Build trust
If you want to become a successful affiliate marketer, you need to do everything to build trust and authority. When getting started, sending a sales email as soon as you collect some email addresses is often tempting. However, doing so will only scare your subscribers, driving them away from your email list.
Instead, you should focus on sending useful and valuable information that addresses how your audience can solve potential problems. You want your subscribers to see value in following you.
Building authority in the domain where you plan to sell affiliate products is crucial. People hate marketing emails, and they may not open your email if yours appears to be one. Instead, employ subtle marketing techniques.
3. Understand the sales funnel
When preparing your email sequence, plan your sales funnel too. Create a roadmap to decide what your email sequence will look like before taking the next steps. Ensure you have your email content ready for at least a week or two before you send the email.
When you prepare the sequence, you should also decide when and where you will do the sales pitch. Planning this will help you become a successful affiliate marketer.
4. Personalize emails
People love personalized emails. When people opt-in for emails, make sure to collect their names along with their email addresses. Many marketers do not go beyond email addresses. Also, you need to avoid asking them for too much personal information. Otherwise, your opt-in rate will decrease.
By using the right tools for email marketing, you can customize emails as you send them to your email subscribers. Personalization is not just about starting the email by greeting people with their first names. It is also about reaching customers at the right time. For example, you should plan to send a marketing email to customers before peculiar days such as Black Friday, Thanksgiving, and other holidays.
Sending the right content at the right time and using phrases that people can connect with will help you find success in affiliate email marketing.
5. Use storytelling to become successful
The best way to sell affiliate products via emails is to tell stories of how a particular product has helped solve a problem you were facing. When you present your audience with common issues, your readers will be able to empathize with you and trust you.
As indicated earlier, your subscribers won’t be interested in reading an email that’s only there to sell something to them.
6. Soft sell
Once it’s ready, re-read your email content to ensure your pitch is not sales-heavy. Sell products subtly.
As a rough guide, 80% of your email should be educational, while the rest should promote affiliate products with nuance. While there are so many tips for email marketing, this is one you should not forget.
7. Utilize lead magnets
Lead magnets will help your customers engage with your email; they are also helpful when building your email list. In terms of tips for email marketing, this is one to prioritize acting upon.
Lead magnets are incentives given to customers to engage with you, and many affiliate marketers use them to build their email lists. The lead magnets that you feature away should be able to address customers’ problems. For example, you could offer a guide to gardening tasks, a checklist to save or invest money, etc.
8. Use email automation
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There are different platforms and tools for email marketing available. Use the various features on offer to automate your email sequence and deploy your email campaigns.
You might want to begin with the subscribe forms that allow potential subscribers to fill out their information and download the lead magnet easily.
Email automation can help save time, money, and effort. Hence, it is always wise to find ways to automate tasks.
9. Segment your email lists
Segmenting email addresses to categorize your list is also a smart move when targeting different audience personas.
Doing this will help you send targeted emails that appeal to your readers and increase open and conversion rates.
The key to this is that different people like different content. By segmenting your subscribers into groups, you will be able to attend to their needs and interests.
10. Use A/B testing
To get optimal results, you need to perform A/B testing. Have an alternate email content for your email sequence. Once you have two or more alternatives, you should test which one gives you the best results by sending that email to the same number of people.
Check the open and conversion rates to find the email content that delivers the best results. Reuse email template(s) that give the best results too.
11. Call to action
So that your subscribers can undertake the action your email prompts them to, add a call to action (CTA) button at the end of your email. Without a clear call-to-action message at the end of your email, your subscribers might not act on your prompts.
12. Stop over-emailing
Over-emailing your subscribers or customers will drive them away. Instead, ensure you are not sending emails so often that the recipients feel irritated by them.
At the same time, after sending a welcome email, do not wait for three to four weeks before sending a follow-up. When you don’t interact with them regularly, people lose interest or forget the message you are trying to convey to them.
Maintaining a balance in terms of email frequency is important. Otherwise, people won’t appreciate your messages. For instance, you can send emails more frequently to B2C clients than B2B.
And if you don’t pay attention to the segments of your email list, some of your subscribers in different segments might be contacted too often. To prevent this, use some of the email marketing tools that help you track down various metrics and check on different aspects of your communications.
13. Use the exit page to retain your subscribers
Sadly, many affiliate marketers overlook the potential of using the unsubscribe page to interact with their customers or subscribers one last time before they decide to leave your email list.
If you want your list to grow, you need to ensure a good inflow and minimal outflow of subscribers.
The exit page is for people who want to remove themselves from the email list. Use this forum to retain your email subscribers by offering something that will make them rethink their decision.
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14. Expand your list with referral marketing
If you have already collected a number of email addresses, you should expand your list by conducting referral giveaways or contests.
It doesn’t take a lot of effort to run these things, and they are the best way for your email list to continue to grow once you already have a healthy number of subscribers.
15. Create your own product
As per the PPS model of affiliate marketing, you only receive an affiliate commission when people or traffic you send purchase a product on the merchant’s site.
What’s more, the commission rate will be a small percentage of the total value of the product based on the affiliate program’s pre-agreed terms.
If you create your product and use affiliate email marketing, you can keep the profit each time you sell an item online on your website, social media channels, or email. Moreover, the profits can be huge if you sell a digital product.
These email marketing tips will help you get an edge over your competitors and move in the right direction.
In Conclusion
Affiliates promote affiliate products through email marketing, blogging, and social media channels.
Using emails to do affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to reach people and make money online. There are various platforms and tools for email marketing.
You should choose the right platform for your affiliate marketing campaigns or email sequence. The 15 tips for email marketing for affiliates cited above will help you stand out from the crowd and get an advantage over other affiliate marketers.
