Email Marketing for Affiliate Marketers
The job of email marketers is to promote affiliate products through email marketing. To truly understand how email marketing assists affiliate marketers, let's know what affiliate marketing is in the first place.
Why should I be interested in Affiliate email marketing?
Affiliate Marketers are a type of email marketing that promotes affiliate links through email marketing campaigns targeting a specific audience. By adding affiliate links to the automatic sequence of your email marketing campaigns, there is a significant increase in communication and engagement with the audience. It increases the chance of sales and creating that trusting relationship with your audience.
Going through the steps to create an effective affiliate email marketing campaign is the foundation for running a successful campaign. There are many upcoming new people in the field of email marketing who need help to create a successful and interactive strategy that drives sales and engagement. The key to success is identifying the market and audience you are trying to reach. There are a plethora of routes to explore in the affiliate marketing realm.
When creating a campaign and ensuring it is effective, a lot of marketing research needs to be done to determine what product is likely to succeed or vice versa. What product can produce success that isn't being marketed correctly? Researching competitors and how they go about marketing their campaigns and targeting their ideal audience is a significant first step in configuring your brand's voice. If you are nervous about launching your first email campaign, use a platform to assist. This is where Mailsoftly can come into the hand, using the software to do the heavy lifting and compiling the contact list where the only job left is the creative portion.
There are a plethora of reasons why Affiliate Marketing is beneficial for the brand. Such as having the ability to automate emails. It also provides the opportunity to use emails as a form of global communication and keep the flow of communication open to both the brand and the subscribers. Having the opportunity to create this strong sense of touch is excellent to aid in establishing relationships with users. Emails are also proven to have a great return on investment; they are one of the cheapest marketing tools that should be capitalized. Tracking the performance of an email campaign is very beneficial as well; evaluating the effectiveness of a subject line or a particular style of writing to see what works for the brand can go a long way. Finally, one of the best benefits is establishing a customer relationship through the email marketing platform. 
Let's Create an Approach for Affiliate Marketing
- Include affiliate links in your emails: A good starting point is to ensure that your email provider allows for the incorporation of affiliate links in emails. This is important because that is the whole foundation of the campaign; if your current email marketing software doesn't allow for the incorporation of links, then go ahead and give Mailsoftly a try. There is a free trial period to experiment and see if it is the right platform for you.
- Affiliate links need to be brand appropriate: Some unspoken rules exist when including affiliate links within an email. The links maintain the original message being portrayed instead of emphasizing a different marketing tactic. The first is to ensure the link and content are on brand; this is important because the original reason for subscribing was based upon what you are offering, don't abuse this opportunity and overwhelm the customer with unhelpful information. The content needs to be relevant, meaning the affiliate linking will be similar to what the brand stands for overall.
- Profitable: the profitability of affiliate linking is crucial to the success of the campaign. Calculating the ROI, aka return on investment, is a great way to maneuver the movement. There is typically no extra cost when incorporating affiliate linking into the email sequence except for effort and time. This is why when containing affiliate linking, and it needs to be worthwhile because you won't make your time back.
- Relevant: Subscribers often join the emailing list because it promotes items or essentials that they are interested in. This is important to promote or provide a product or service that is relevant to their interests and will make their lives easier or aid in a problem that they are currently facing. When starting to promote products that provide an essential service or are related to something similar to the brand, the conversion increase will be seen almost overnight.
- Constant: This is a broad idea, but to make sure that the affiliate links are constantly valued, meaning that over time and through different campaigns, the links you promote will stay active and relevant for years to come. This shows that your product or service is trustworthy enough to have that long-term relationship. As well as, there will be limited tweaking, updating, changing emails or content, etc.
- Personalize the Emails: Including personalization is essential to running a successful campaign. This is a contributing factor when it comes to recipients deciding if they want to open and interact with an email. When having success in affiliate marketing, relationships are crucial, and a great way to jumpstart that positive relationship is to make a solid connection with the customer. If you think about a real-life example, say you go to a gym and are constantly greeted by your first name every time you attend. This automatically creates a positive mindset towards working out, and you're going to want to participate because you feel seen and valued continually; the same goes for email marketing and adding that personal touch can have a long-term effect on conversion.
- Tracking affiliate Emails: There is constant monitoring in affiliate marketing; initially, there is a jump in sales, and it looks fantastic, but eventually, that campaign will fizzle out, and when this happens, the only tell will be the numbers. Essentially, for campaigns to improve and constantly increase conversion rates, there are some data points to monitor continually.
- Take advantage of the holidays: During the holiday season, people are constantly looking to purchase gifts or to expand upon the brands that they ideally shop at. This is a fun way to encourage people by adding promotions and deals that will be noticed. With this being said, it is essential that the discounts offered are affordable to the brand and do not financially hurt.
- Go above and Beyond: Affiliate marketing is great for increasing conversion, but there is much more to affiliate marketing content than just offering an irresistible sale. Get creative with the brand aesthetic by including videos of related content, fun and eye-catching imagery, and quotes or captions that will make an impact and be memorable. If the content is valuable, subscribers will interact more, and the conversion rates will increase.
Who does Affiliate Email Marketing work for the best?
This is difficult to answer because almost anybody selling a service or product can benefit from affiliate marketing. This being said. Ideally, affiliate marketing is for companies and influencers whose primary concern is building connections and establishing solid relationships with their subscribers. The reason these two have the highest conversion rates and produce adequate numbers is that subscribers have more trust in them based on the previous communication. Therefore they are more willing to purchase a recommended product. Approximately 9 out of 10 customers trust recommendations if they come from somebody they know, and 7 out of 10 customers have made purchasing decisions based on word-of-mouth from an influencer. So they are breaking it down to the idea that if your brand is unable to create that safe place for communication and feedback, it will not have any success when being involved in affiliate marketing.
What not to do:
What needs to be established and remembered before inserting affiliate links into your campaigns is to build a relationship with your customers. In many marketing terms, your customers are referred to as your 'list' because they are part of the list of subscribers. That is where the money and conversion lie.
The first and foremost thing to know is that trust goes a long way. When influencing subscribers to purchase something or check out a new product, trust needs to be built before they dive head over heels to make that purchase. As we mentioned before, the 'list' is often segmented. Based upon this segmentation, you can specify which campaigns offer products they would be most interested in. Be sure not to try to sell or load up every email with affiliate links; instead, offer something of interest and value. This will keep customers around for much longer as they want to stay loyal.
What to do:
Ensure that the emails sent out contain valuable content; the affiliate links should fulfill a purpose. It is also an option to add them to an ongoing email campaign. Using segmentation will allow you to switch up the format of where you choose to incorporate your affiliate links. Do not do the most. This means that there should be a manageable amount of affiliate links; when you add them, they contain value and relevant information to give success to your subscribers.
When looking at the success of an affiliate marketing campaign, the ultimate goal is to build trust and engagement, which is the secret to sales essentially. People are more likely to purchase when interacting with a trusted company that prioritizes their interests and needs. In addition, the delivered emails will likely end up in the inbox instead of the spam folder. This will generate a higher return and increase conversion rates.
To make the process as easy as possible, outsourcing and using email marketing software is always intelligent. Mailsoflty offers excellent flexibility within campaigns. We are adding an email marketing list as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Affiliate Marketing Best Practices
Segment the Email List: As mentioned above, there are some essential benefits to segmenting your email list. There are many methods for segmentation, such as demographic, income, preferences and previous behavior, etc. These are all elements that should be taken into consideration when promoting products that may only pertain to a particular segment of people. Segmentation will increase the number of subscribers and open and conversion rates. In addition, it will allow your audience to hone in and enable the brand to send the right content to the correct subscriber at an ideal time.
Trigger Emails: Trigger emails are up and coming as it is all done based on the audience's behavior. Frequently trigger emails are broken up based on segment and event. Segment-based emails are when subscribers meet certain conditions, whereas event based is when a subscriber has to submit their email or sign up with their email to make a purchase. The triggered emails are the brand's way of having constant engagement by offering updates and contact information and hopefully increasing conversion rates.
Personalize Emails: This is the common sense of email marketing, and a little personalization goes a long way. Affiliate marketing builds trust and encourages growth in the relationship between customers and subscribers, so every touch of personalization counts. When incorporating personalization, the subscribers will feel of a higher value than just a salesperson.
Email Content: The discussion of triggers, personalization, and segmentation are great, but the content matters the most. Having the content mapped out and made in a way to turn conversion is essential. Make the emails compelling, tell a story, use vivid images and catch their attention, but remember, don't get lost in the words of it all. Keep it concise and to the point.
A/B Testing: This is a great way to test the success of your affiliate marketing. By creating two emails and sending them out to evaluate which got opened the most, which interacted with the most etc. All of these produce measurable outcomes to take this information and adjust accordingly. 
Let's start incorporating Affiliate Marketing!
As mentioned in writing above, many steps go into affiliate marketing and what is expected when that approach is taken. There are some best practices to keep in mind that will, without a doubt, produce results. But there are also dos and don'ts. We informed you of these to ensure the process of incorporating affiliate marketing is easy and harmless, so don't let the don'ts scare you away. There is often room for improvement in email marketing campaigns as the experience flutters in and the tests show which way to route the movement. All this being said, the most straightforward approach to eventually incorporate affiliate marketing is to use an outside source. Many are out there, but none offer the personability and easy-to-use process like Mailsoftly; explore our webpage to learn more.