Email Marketing Software for Affiliate Marketers

Affiliate Email Marketing - A guide from SendX

Affiliate marketers have traditionally used blogs, social media, and forums to promote their links. They all seem to have worked in the past but now we have all realized how along with the sale, relationship building is also important. 

An average affiliate is not able to build the relationship or continue communication with customers without building an email list. So let’s talk about how to build that list, add maximum value to your subscribers while boosting your revenue.

Build your email list

First of all, direct all your leads from all channels you are currently using to your landing page or website with a subscription form.

• Running Facebook ads? Direct to your landing page. Have a social media following? Ask them to check out your website and download the free guide. In return, ask for their email.

• If you already have social media following, do stories or posts to create a buzz about your website and free guide or a coupon you are offering there. When they land on your website, you simply put a subscription form and collect emails. People who are already your fans on social media won’t mind sharing their email addresses.

• You can run a giveaway contest but let people know that it will be on emails and they have to sign up to take part in it.

• If you know someone else with an email list in a niche like yours, you can work with them to cross-promote your content and get you more subscribers.

Segment your audience

If you’re an affiliate marketer, you likely operate in lots of different niches, or even if it is one niche, there would be different types of audiences.

It would be odd to send an email promoting lawnmower to people who are interested in your backpacking emails and products. Right? 

So, right from the start, when people are opting into your email list, that’s the perfect time to find out what they’re interested in. Once they have given you their email address and you can trigger a series of welcome emails and one email can contain a form where you can put questions to know about their interests. 

To know more about people who are already on your list, you can start a conversation and tell them that you would like to know more about them and request them to fill-up the form or just reply back to the email. 
A few elements you can segment on are age, gender, geographic location, engagement (opens, clicks), buyers/non buyers.

Content of emails 

Don’t get too thirsty to make a sale even before you add any value, show credibility, or know exactly the pain points of people you are writing to. 

So start with some emails that either inform, inspire, or educate. When you provide value upfront, it's easier to convert subscribers into buyers when you later promote affiliate products and services.

Don’t go for a quick buck and promote whatever products you come across. Make sure your recommendations are sincere. Choose products you find useful yourself & that will only boost your credibility amongst people receiving your emails. 

When promoting, you can be upfront about the details such as you will get an affiliate commission if people buy using your link, without costing them anything extra. People appreciate honesty.

Analyze your campaign performance 

In your 2 am thoughts, did you ever question -  Are you simply using email marketing? Or are you using it to its full potential?

If you wish to use it for full potential, you need to track, measure, adapt, and repeat. 

If you call upon the wisdom of the internet, it will tell you to track an overwhelming amount of data points. Maybe they think data is literally the new oil. 

Anyway, to keep it simple, start with just three things:

• Open rate (OR)
• Click-through-rate (CTR) 
• Unsubscribe Rate  

Open Rate = Total emails opened/Total emails delivered

Dependent upon: Subject line 

With as much email as we get every day, we’re all pretty much pros at weeding out spam and sales emails with a simple scan of the inbox.

Don’t use vague or too-good-to-be-true subject lines. Keep them relatable to the topic of your email content. You can’t say ‘cute cat pics’ in the subject line to get people to open and then sell a kitchen sponge in your email. 

Click-through-rate =Total clicks/Total emails delivered 

Dependent upon: Content, CTA, Responsiveness of your email design 

The content of your relational email should be inspiring, informational, or educational. Are you telling them something new or something already known but in a fun and simple way? People should bother enough to read it. 

Then comes the taking action part with your CTA. Draw people’s attention to it by making it clearly visible with enough white space around it. Use text that’s not too pushy, e.g. choose to say ‘Learn More’ instead of ‘Buy Now’. ‍

Unsubscribe Rate =Total unsubscribes/Total emails delivered 

Dependent upon: How relevant and authentic your content is, What’s the frequency of emails 

Every time you send an email, there will be some churn so don’t worry if someone unsubscribes. It’s better than a non-engaged audience. But if there are unusually high unsubscribes than you need to look at your strategy, content, and kind of audience you are attracting. 

To find out why your subscribers are leaving, you can add a short survey for people to fill out when they hit the unsubscribe button. 

Keep your list clean

Since emails are your source of income, it’s important that your emails land in people’s inbox and not spam, every single time. This is called the email delivery rate (total emails sent/total emails that reached the inbox). So one important thing you can do to keep it high is to clean your list regularly. 

Check who isn’t opening or engaging with your content, and how long they’ve been inactive. You can send one last email asking if they would still like to be on the list. And if not, you can archive those or delete those emails. 

Now that you’ve got the best tips at your disposal, the only thing left to do is start using them.