12 Tips for Successful Affiliate Email Marketing Campaigns

In the past few years, affiliate email marketing has become a leading marketing strategy for businesses globally.

It’s evolved from sending out an email to more personalized communications between your business and your customers. And we are not saying it to make a statement, we are backing it with numbers!

As per Statista, 37% of customers are likely to purchase something when instigated by a newsletter.

Isn’t it awesome to be able to work from home, make your schedule and earn passive income while you’re sleeping?

Launching an affiliate email marketing campaign successfully can turn your dreams into a reality. You’ll learn exactly how to do it in this article.

Our focus will be on:

• What is affiliate email marketing
• The benefits of affiliate marketing by email
• Launching affiliate marketing emails

It’s time to get started!

What is affiliate email marketing?

Affiliate email marketing involves promoting someone else’s products via affiliate links/coupons through well-written and targeted emails. The goal is to get your subscribers and customers’ attention, which will increase conversions and traffic.

Unlike traditional email marketing where the goal is only centered on sales, affiliate email marketing focuses on making sales through a different approach.

Why is affiliate email marketing helpful?

Email campaigns allow you to have a direct word with your audience. Your audience is one click away whenever you want to promote a product review.

Although SEO and social media marketing have advanced, email remains the most effective way to reach out to your audience.

It’s an effective way to engage your audience and drive the conversation. The audience in your contact list is already interested in learning more about your offerings.

And that’s why they have opted in to receive your emails.

Consequently, converting them to customers can get much easier.

How to launch a successful affiliate email marketing campaign: 12 pro tips

Affiliate marketing for beginners can be tricky, especially if you have no money.

But with the right tricks and tips, you’ll be able to do it efficiently in no time.

Here are the tips on how to start affiliate email marketing:

Find an affiliate-friendly email provider

The first step is to ensure that your email provider allows you to include affiliate links in emails. The deliverability rate of email automation services is often a concern. Check yours to see if affiliate links are allowed.

You can make all these email campaigns and tasks more efficient using Icegram Express.

It allows you to add affiliate links in emails, automate personalized campaigns, reduce costs and do a lot more with its email automation features.

Compile a segmented subscriber list

Make your website signup-friendly by integrating signup widgets and pop-ups. Ensure that signup forms are properly visible to your audience at all times.

Simultaneously also make sure to test different popups to see which one gets you the most lead sign-ups.

Icegram Collect can help you create contact forms and subscription widgets in seconds. Embed them anywhere on your site to collect leads. You can store and relay submissions however you want.

Segmenting allows you to tailor your emails to the specific audience groups in your list. The segmentation can be done based on interests, demographics, relevant criteria and past purchases.

This further ensures high relevance to the recipient and boosts engagements and conversions. For example, you wouldn’t want to send a welcome email to a customer who has been with your brand for years.

Personalize your emails

Personalization has proven to improve engagement rates. A few techniques such as using your subscriber’s name, past behavior, buying patterns and interests could make your emails as relevant as possible to each subscriber.

This could make the customers feel valued and can notably increase the possibility of them taking action on your affiliate orders.

Here are a few examples:

• Potential leads: Introductory offers that lead to landing pages, addressing their pain points with brochures, highlights about the product benefit and testimonials to build trust.
• Premium customers: Exclusive deals, early access to new products and personalized loyalty rewards.
• Past customers: Introduce re-engagement offers, updates on new products and personalized recommendations based on previous purchases.

Place affiliate links wisely

Affiliate links when placed haphazardly can lead to counter-productive effects.

• Continually sharing third-party products can annoy your audience or confuse them.
• Low deliverability rates may cause email service providers to close your account.

A fair practice would be to add affiliate links to other content verticals such as product listings, webinars, resource lists, guides and through social media platforms without over-promoting.

Embedding affiliate links organically in the content is a great way to improve opens and click-throughs on your email sequence.

The ideal times to add the affiliate links could be maximum 2 times in the email depending upon the length and content.

Here’s how the sequence must be:

1. Introduction:

Don’t place any link at the beginning of the email. This will help in establishing the audiences’ interest in the product offering without sounding too persuasive.

2. Body:

You can place the first link midway through the email, and integrate it naturally into the content, such as within a product description, testimonial or benefit highlight.

3. Conclusion:

Place another link towards the end of the email, as part of the call-to-action and encourage the recipient to take the next step.

This sequence ensures that the links are spread out and provides multiple opportunities for recipients to click without overwhelming them.

The most important part is providing the content and value you promised in exchange for the signup. Here’s how to do it:

• Make each email unique.
• Send emails consistently.
• Nurture and educate more than promote in your emails.

Automate drip emails

Automate the flow of your drip emails to save your time, resources and efforts. Assure your subscribers get emails on a specific date after signing up.

Prepared email flows help you send the right emails at the right time. Your audience will also be engaged with regular emails.

Produce high-quality content

Yet another rule for affiliate email marketing is producing high-quality content. Your content must be valuable to ensure that your customers continue to read and engage with your emails.

Keep your audience up-to-date on the latest developments in your niche.

Don’t focus on what you want your audience to read, but instead what they might enjoy and find useful and informative.

However, it is also vital to note that you mustn’t go overboard with affiliate email marketing programs, or try too hard to sell, that’ll make your subscribers leave.

Offer exclusive content

If you’re offering exclusive content that can only be accessed by signing up for your affiliate marketing email list, that’s another great way to get people to be a part of your campaign.

This information can be valuable tips, actionable insights, cheat sheets, whitepapers, free reports, discounts or exclusive offers.

When your audience finds value, they are more likely to engage with your content and take action for your affiliate orders.

Top affiliates rely on exclusive marketing content for a reason. The best content of some affiliates is only available to subscribers who subscribe to their email lists.

Monitor affiliate email marketing

Your affiliate marketing email sequence is working, and commissions are starting to come in.

But there’s still one thing to do. In order to continue receiving more commissions, you need to actively track your subscribers so you can tweak your campaigns accordingly.

If you are a WooCommerce store owner, you can now easily set up your affiliate program and create marketing campaigns and commission plans for affiliates with the Affiliate for WooCommerce plugin.

Your affiliates can get all the marketing resources that can be used in the emails for your product promotion.

Use landing pages in affiliate emails

Instead of using affiliate links, you can link to the landing pages from your emails.

Promote the following content through a landing page:

• Product promotions
• Event registrations
• Special offers and discounts
• Membership or subscription sign-ups

This not only helps with personalized content but better tracking as well. While SEO-optimized landing pages improve visibility, you can continuously track user behavior.

Landing pages provide more control over the user experience and messaging. This leads the landing page to offer robust analytics and testing opportunities compared to the basic tracking of the affiliate links.

Don’t oversell

Make sure that you do not violate your privilege of reaching out to the audience. Increasing the frequency of your affiliate emails might make them feel like they are being spammed.

Likewise, seeking their permission to reach out to them through emails in the first place is yet another way to ensure that boundaries are established.

Test your emails

This refers to testing varied elements of your email to see what works for you and your audience. This can include the subject line, email content, layout, images, CTA, sending times, frequency and a lot more.

This not just shows how well your campaign is performing, but also highlights if there is room for improvement.

Use social proof

There is nothing like sharing the success stories of previous customers to build credibility.

Social proof can also be diversified with testimonials, positive reviews, ratings, highlighting the number of people who have already used the product, case studies, videos and more.

To get more testimonials, you can ask your customers to review your products and send a testimonial in exchange for a discount or a freebie.

A great way to do this is by adding social proofs to your emails along with the affiliate link for the reviewed product.

This approach builds trust and credibility making recipients more likely to click the link and make a purchase.

Best practices to follow for affiliate email marketing

Regardless of the techniques we apply, it is always better to be cautious while we implement any email marketing for affiliate program plans.

There are a few more things that can be considered while we practice some of the tips mentioned above:

• Greeting the recipient by their name: People feel more connected to you when you send them an email with their name in the greeting.
• Be concise: Bring new information to your audience. It’s possible to lose subscribers or have them ignore your emails if you keep repeating yourself.
• Avoid spamming: Emails should be sent out on specific days and at specific times on a set frequency.
• Enhance email content: Write compelling emails, illustrate what you’re promoting and tell a story. You can use videos, images, audio files and podcasts.
• Make the most of holidays: When the major holidays approach, people start looking for deals. Perhaps this is a good time to promote affiliate products creatively.
• Organize the elements logically: Place the white space and elements such as images logically. Make sure everything can be seen by your audience at once, properly.
• Choose the right colors: Ensure that you use colors that align with your brand. It is considerable to note that colors play a huge role in evoking emotions in your audience.
• Consider mobile optimization: It’s important to note that more than half of the emails must be read on the go over a mobile device. Hence, emails that are not optimized for mobile miss the purpose. Ensure that your email layout and elements are tailored to fit the resolutions of the devices they must be seen on.

Conclusion

What better than simply being a click away from your audience?

Affiliate email marketing gives you the same opportunity.

There’s no rocket science to starting an affiliate email campaign. By using the right tools and practices, you can promote your affiliate links and watch your commissions soar.

What are your thoughts on these affiliate email marketing tips?

We’d love to hear your views and ideas in the comments.

FAQ

What are the legal obligations for affiliate email marketing?
Here are the legal obligations for affiliate email marketing:

• CAN-SPAM act
• GDPR