Setting up an effective affiliate email marketing campaign is the cornerstone of your affiliate business success. Affiliate marketing is a great way to generate a passive income stream, and one of the best ways to get regular income is to actively engage your target audience through email marketing.

Affiliate marketing is a type of marketing in which companies pay their partners for each visitor or customer brought in by their marketing activities and can be operated on different channels, including email marketing. So, before you start planning an affiliate email marketing campaign, you need to find a market niche to serve, products or services to promote, and a partner system to work with.

This is the quick and easy part of affiliate marketing, but this is where the real work begins. In fact, to effectively promote your niche and make it profitable, it takes work and commitment, and integrating other forms of marketing into your business, such as content marketing, email marketing, and social media, to get real results.

Designing an effective email campaign can increase views of promoted content and ultimately increase conversions and revenue.  If you’re interested in launching an affiliate email marketing campaign or wondering how to get started, in this article, we’ll show you, step by step, some ways to create a successful affiliate email marketing campaign.

After explaining what an affiliate email marketing campaign is, we’ll look at how affiliate email marketing can increase your affiliate revenue, and we’ll discuss the eight steps to launching your own affiliate email marketing campaign.

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Before we get into the nitty-gritty, it’s important to understand the concept of e-mail marketing.

What Is E-mail Marketing?

E-mail marketing is a process whereby you send e-mails to prospects to turn them into customers, and occasional customers into regular customers. E-mail marketing has many advantages, the most important of which are the following:

E-mail marketing allows you to create an asset: E-mail marketing allows you to build an e-mail list, which you own and which is a major asset for your company.

Email marketing is an effective communication channel:

According to statistics, it is clear that e-mail is one of the most effective means of communication. In 2020, the number of global e-mail users amounted to four billion and is set to grow to 4.6 billion users in 2025. Recent email marketing statistics show that email is the preferred channel for 60% of consumers versus 20% of consumers who will follow brands on social media for offers.

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E-mail marketing has a high conversion rate:

Email marketing has a 6.05% conversion rate, while social media has a 1.9% conversion rate. (OptinMonster).For every dollar brands invested in email marketing, they received $42 in return.   (Litmus) This means that as an affiliate, email marketing should be a top priority if you want to increase your sales.

What Is Affiliate Email Marketing?

Affiliate marketing and email marketing overlap perfectly, creating a flexible approach to customer outreach that can increase your commissions. Affiliate email marketing is a method of affiliate marketing that involves promoting affiliate products through a series of well-targeted, well-written emails.

These letters are created to engage your subscribers, which would improve the conversion rate and traffic to your website.  By including affiliate links in your existing automated email sequence, you can increase communication, engage your audience and generate sales.

Effective marketing campaigns start with the right product that is already popular or can be set up independently. Typically, people find and click on your affiliate links from your website content, such as a blog post. But with an affiliate email marketing campaign, your affiliate links land directly in your readers’ inboxes. You still need to build trust, add value to your readers’ lives and provide quality content.

Before we look at how to launch your affiliate email marketing campaign, let’s look at why it’s such a valuable way to create passive income.

Why Use Email for Affiliate Marketing

Email lists allow you to lead the conversation and actively engage your audience. When you rely on social media platforms, you’re helpless against algorithm changes, temporary shutdowns, or the possibility of the platform’s popularity dropping, whereas email campaigns are immune to these types of issues.

Moreover, the people in your contact list are already interested in your niche and have voluntarily chosen to sign up. You can therefore direct the conversation with those who are already interested in your niche, your content, and your activity.

It will be much easier to convince them to buy the product or service you are promoting than with the usual affiliate marketing technique of posting links on websites or blogs. And that’s what makes e-mail campaigns the ideal tool for affiliate marketers to generate sales.

According to a SaleCycle study, 59% of respondents said that commercial emails influence their purchasing decisions, while just over 50% buy from commercial emails at least once a month.

How to Start a Successful Affiliate Email Marketing Campaign in 8 Steps?

Let’s look at the eight steps to setting up a successful affiliate email marketing campaign.

Step 1: Determine Your Target Audience

The first step in creating a successful affiliate email marketing campaign is to determine who you want to reach and create a customer avatar for your business. One of the main goals of your affiliate email marketing campaign, besides generating additional revenue, is to establish a trusting relationship with your target audience.

It is therefore essential to know their wants, needs, concerns, and worries. Their income, age, and general demographics are also taken into account. The clearer the picture of your target customer, the better you will understand who they are, and you will be better able to refine your messages to increase the chances of attracting them and moving them through your sales funnel.

Step 2: Identify Your Target Market

The next step is to identify your target market. Once you have determined who you really want to reach with your affiliate email marketing campaign, you need to know where your target market is.

Make a list of all the places your target market congregates and design advertising, PR, SEO, influencer marketing or affiliate marketing techniques to get into each one.

Step 3: Join an Email Provider that Allows Affiliate Links

You also need a way to send mass emails and to do this you need an autoresponder also known as an email service provider. Therefore, it is necessary to register with an email service provider to get started with email marketing. To get started, make sure your e-mail provider allows you to include affiliate links in your e-mails

Some autoresponder providers, due to deliverability issues, typically prevent or outright ban the use of affiliate links, which can be frustrating for marketers. So check to see if yours accepts affiliate links.  If you don’t pay attention to your email service provider, you may temporarily lose access to your account or, worse, lose your entire email list.

You must first add users to an email list, and do so with their permission. It is also essential to follow laws and rules when sending emails.  In order to send emails, you must first obtain the consent of your recipients when you do not know them and you must obtain their explicit approval before sending an email.

Step 4: Choose the Right Affiliate Links to Promote

Any affiliate links you choose to promote with your email list must have three qualities. They must be:

Relevant

Since your audience initially joins your email list because they are interested in your content and niche, it is important that the product or service you are promoting is relevant to their interests and offers valuable solutions to their problems. By promoting products related to your content, your chances of generating sales that will earn you commissions will also be increased.

Your affiliate links should be appropriate to your niche. Your readers signed up for your email address because they liked your content so much that they gave you direct access to them whenever you wanted. Don’t abuse that trust. So, the affiliate link you promote must be related in some way to your niche and the content you offer because you already know that your readers are interested in that topic.

 Profitable:

Your affiliate links must be profitable. You need to estimate the return on investment (ROI). If the earning potential of your affiliate link is low or limited, you need to ask yourself if the return on investment (ROI) will be enough to make the campaign worthwhile. Although adding affiliate links to your email sequence usually does not involve any additional cost, it is better if you put in the effort, and time and focus only on affiliate links with good earning potential.

Constant: 

If you’re trying to integrate affiliate links into your email marketing campaigns for ongoing passive income, they must be consistent products. This implies that the product or service you are promoting will be useful in the years to come. This way, you won’t have to constantly worry about changing, updating, or adjusting your emails.

Step 5: Create a Lead Magnet

The next step is to draw in subscribers using what’s called a lead magnet. Often a lead magnet builds on the content you’ve provided for free to everyone but offers more in-depth information about the topic you’ve covered.

This could be a how-to guide, product comparison infographic, e-books, video training, or other useful content related to your niche that the reader will only have access to in exchange for their email. You can use lead magnets on your website or as part of the first stage of your affiliate email marketing funnel.

The main purpose of your lead magnet is to grow your email list but you can use it to promote the affiliate product. To ensure that your lead magnet is as appealing and effective as possible, it must:

• Solve a specific problem.
• Be relevant to your audience and match a problem your audience is facing.
• Be quick and easy to consume.
• Contain concrete steps and actions your audience can take immediately to achieve a result.

Here is an example of a lead magnet: 

Step 6: Create Autoresponder Sequences

Now it’s time to create an autoresponder sequence. An autoresponder sequence is a series of automated emails that are sent to subscribers when they first sign up for your email list. Sending emails through an autoresponder sequence helps you build relationships, introduce yourself, provide content and promote affiliate products.

Even though different email sequences have different purposes, you can break them down into several identical parts:

• The welcome email sequence is triggered when a lead is first generated.
• Build and maintain relationships
•  Recognize your audience’s existing problem
• Inform your audience about the solution
•  Offer a concrete solution to your audience through a product or service

To get the highest possible open rates in your affiliate email marketing campaigns, you need to either subtly add affiliate links into emails focused on other content or create emails for affiliate products in an already existing sequence.

With an autoresponder sequence, you can choose to send emails to all subscribers or to specific subscribers and even decide how many emails to send in the sequence. Since you are welcoming new subscribers, who have no prior relationship with the product or company you are proposing, you should take the time to write emails explaining to your audience why you found it useful.

However, avoid going too far with affiliate promotions or you will come across as a money-making salesman, which will hurt your ability to generate sales. Once you have written a few emails that are both highly educational and lead to a clear call to action, you can add them to your autoresponder email sequence.

As you do so, remember the best practices that apply to all email sequences, regardless of their purpose:

– Your affiliate promotions should contain more educational information that adds value to your readers, as your readers have no pre-existing relationship with the third-party brand.

– The frequency of your emails should be consistent and avoid long intervals.

As you grow your email list, each new subscriber becomes part of your funnel and sees your affiliate promotions.

Step 7: Launch Your Affiliate Email Marketing Campaign

Once you have set up an email sequence or have an outline of how to structure it for your website or services, it’s time to launch your affiliate email marketing campaign. Once you’ve completed all of the steps outlined above, you can begin launching your campaign. However, it’s important to keep in mind that this process doesn’t stop. Not even when you have completed your launch.

Don’t abuse the benefit of connecting with your consumers and prospects.  To improve sales, should you send emails on a daily or weekly basis. Email broadcasts are also useful for sending updates on current events like the release of a new blog post or when you record a new podcast episode, etc.

Step 8: Track your Affiliate Email Marketing Campaign

Once your email sequence is up and running effectively, maintaining your email list and email campaign is necessary to ensure that you continue to grow your commissions. This means taking an active role in tracking your subscribers and making adjustments to your email campaigns as needed. It is also important to track all of your subscribers’ interactions with your emails in order to make appropriate improvements to your email campaigns.

Automate the process of sending emails

There is numerous powerful automation software to manage scheduled or triggered bulk mailings and track the level of engagement of your emails.

They allow you to know:

– Where your subscribers are coming from

– Mark the links they click on and the offers they opt for

– Monitor your open and click-through rates

Automation allows you to send carefully crafted, pre-prepared emails in a sequence designed to meet campaign objectives. These are trigger emails that are sent to your audience based on their behavior to provide support and follow-up to your customers to ensure they receive the full benefits of the product.

 They are also used to provide important updates, contact information, and to motivate positive behavior. Most trigger emails are divided into two categories:

• Segment-based: when your subscribers meet certain conditions.
•   Event-based: when your subscribers sign up or make a purchase.

Personalize emails

Personalization is essential in affiliate emails to increase open rates and have a measurable impact on your ROI and revenue. Emails with personalized subject lines have a 26% higher open rate. [6] This rate is even higher in affiliate email marketing, as it is all about building trust between you and your customers. By sending personalized emails, your list will see you as more of a partner than just a vendor.

Conduct A/B testing

Email marketing is most effective when you track campaign results and adjust your approach to what works best. That’s the whole point of A/B testing. With the right practices and tools and you can make the most of your email list to promote your affiliate products and watch your commissions continue to soar. For example, with an A/B test, you can create two different emails and find out which one gets a better response from your target audience.

Segment your email list

Email list segmentation is an email marketing technique that consists of segmenting, or dividing, your email list into different groups based on the product you are promoting or the preferences and behavior of your subscribers to target only a portion of your contact list. This keeps your marketing messages relevant to those who receive them.

By excluding certain subscribers, the email is relevant to the subscribers you are sending the promotion to which makes your subscribers satisfied and less likely to unsubscribe. By segmenting your list, you’ll not only increase sign-ups, open rates and conversion rates, but you’ll also be able to focus on each audience and send the right content to the right buyer at the right time.

 Optimize your email content

The success of your affiliate email marketing campaign is assured when you lead your target audience to the conclusion that you are an expert. Use the emails you send as a channel to establish yourself as a useful authority in your niche and make sure your message speaks to your target audience in a way that makes them respond. Make your emails more engaging by telling a little story that sparks interest and makes your reader want to discover your product.

Conclusion

I hope this article has enlightened you on what an affiliate email marketing campaign is. An email marketing campaign, as a means of direct and collateral promotion of affiliate products, can be the key to a considerable increase in sales. Email marketing allows you to communicate with your target audience on a more personal level and build relationships and trust with prospects and convert them into buyers. To be successful with an affiliate email marketing campaign, you need to track and A/B test it, measure your success, and know that successful affiliates do so over the long term.

Now it’s up to you…