Full Guidance to Launch Your Affiliate Email Marketing Campaign

With the ‘lighting speed’ growth of digital marketing, it has never been easier for online users to access a huge range of content and capture needed information for themselves. As a consequence, it will be a fierce battlefield for any marketers to attract their potential customers in the attention economy.

From digital advertisement, search engine optimization (SEO) to content marketing , etc, there are lots of digital activities that we can utilize to promote brands, products, and services. Along with these, affiliate marketing is also a popular option that will bring lucrative benefits for us and doesn’t require too much effort to implement. When it comes to this type of promotion, you don’t want to leave out email marketing as it is a gold mine with 4 billion users per day.

This article will share with you the best tips and insights to start launching and optimizing your affiliate email marketing campaigns. Let’s get started!

Table of content

• What Is Affiliate Email Marketing?
• Why Affiliates Shouldn’t Ignore Email Marketing?
• Email marketing is still making huge impacts.
• Things You Need to Know to Optimize Your Affiliate Email Marketing
  • Check If Affiliate Links Can Be Used on Your Email Service Provider
  • How to Build An Email List for Affiliate Marketing
    • Create a Popup
    • Use Landing Pages
    • Try Chatbot
  • Segment Your Email List and Be Selective
  • Learn to Write Subject Lines That Increase Your Email Open Rate
    • Keep the Title Short And Sweet
    • Including Number in Your Email Title
    • Test Your Email Titles
  • How to Write An Email For Affiliate Marketing
  • Build a Logical Email Flow
  • Test Different Affiliate Marketing Email Templates
  • Keep Track and Analyze Email Marketing Metrics
• Final Words

What Is Affiliate Email Marketing?

To simply define, affiliate email marketing is a passive way for marketers to increase online sales by cooperating with a third party to promote its products or services via their email channels.

Particularly, after joining an affiliate program, you will be provided an affiliate link with the cookie to track your sales referrals. Each time someone clicks on the link and makes the purchase, you will gain the commission from it without breaking a sweat.

Why Affiliates Shouldn’t Ignore Email Marketing?

Email marketing seems to be less flashy and appealing when compared to other activities like blogging and social media content. Nevertheless, don’t let this first impression deceive as this type of marketing can help you generate $42 for each $1 spent. According to Statista’s report in 2020, email marketing was regarded as the third most popular digital channel used by marketing leaders from 29 countries.

There are still some other statistics that prove it is still an evergreen tree solution for us to exploit:

• 78% of marketers agreed that email marketing plays an important role in contributing to their companies’ successes in 2020 (Litmus, 2020).
• The global email marketing industry is anticipated to dramatically increase to $17.9 billion (Statista, 2021).
• Email wins the battle against Facebook and Twitter in acquiring new customers as it is 40 times more effective (Campaign Monitor).

We are pretty sure that these numbers are also the reasons why affiliates need to use email marketing for their promotional activities. Besides, there are some other substantial benefits that affiliate email marketing can bring to program owners and affiliates:

Benefits for Program Owners

• Save costs related to email marketing
• Effortlessly reach a larger customer base.
• Effectively manage and supervise affiliates’ performances via affiliate software.

Benefits for Affiliates

• Get the chance to receive high incomes as the commission rates might go up to 20% or 30%.
• Only need to put the effort into the presale stage and don’t have to worry about later steps.
• Be able to track individual email marketing performances on the affiliate software.

However, launching an affiliate email marketing campaign will be a headache if you don’t equip yourself with fundamental knowledge. Thus, we are going to share with you detailed instructions on how to handle this effectively in the next parts of the article.

Things You Need to Know to Optimize Your Affiliate Email Marketing

Check If Affiliate Links Can Be Used on Your Email Service Provider

Due to the deliverability issue, some email providers will ban their users from using affiliate links in emailing activity. If you are not mindful of this, it is likely that you will be punished and accidentally lose your account.

To avoid this headache, we advise you to read affiliate marketing guidelines from your email providers or directly reach out to them for support. This is an essential step before you can officially gear up your email campaign.

How to Build An Email List for Affiliate Marketing

Principally, the most crucial part of launching every email campaign is to collect email addresses and build up lists of subscribers.

Behaviorally, when online users are willing to provide you with their email addresses, it means they would like to receive updates and useful information from your brand. This is a golden chance for you to warm up relationships with them and start making profit from affiliate email marketing. The more flexible you are, the more email leads you can have for your future email campaigns. So, make sure you know how to utilize different touchpoints.

Create a Popup

A popup seems to be annoying to lots of website visitors as it suddenly appears and disrupts their on-site experience. Nevertheless, this way of the lead collection has a 3.09% average conversion rate, and can still be beneficial if you know how to optimize it correctly.

Below are some recommendations that you can take into consideration while creating your popup:

• Use a short and catchy headline
• Follow your brand guideline to ensure the design consistency between the popup and your website
• Write a brief and straightforward description. Let viewers know what benefits they can get after giving you their email addresses. For instance, consider offering them gifts and helpful resources.
• Only requires basic contact information such as personal names, email addresses, and interests to save time for registers
• Timing is important! You should research the average time that users spend on your website, and decide when the popup will jump off their screens. According to Wishpond, your popups should appear at about 50% or 60% of the average time-on-page.
• Remember to create an attractive CTA button by choosing a color that contrasts with the background color of your popup. Also, consider adding a sense of urgency with strong words like ‘today’, ‘only’, ‘now’, etc. Along with these, there are other ways to optimize your CTA buttons which can be found here.

Use Landing Pages

Building a landing page is another option to capture email leads for your affiliate marketing activity. Similar to a popup, you should keep the page content concisely and catchy enough to encourage readers to provide their data.

Fundamentally, your landing page will gently require registers to submit necessary information such as name, birthday, location, interest, expectation, etc. To promote the page link, you could consider selecting social media or digital advertising channels such as Facebook ads and Google ads to implement.

Try Chatbot

It cannot be denied that chatbot has become one of the most effective conversational marketing channels nowadays. Impressively, this type of communication has generated more high-quality leads for 55% of B2B users. If you know how to set it up properly, then you will have more chances to collect qualified email addresses. Chatbot could be helpful for collecting email leads.

Segment Your Email List and Be Selective

Owning a long email list is not enough to ensure that you will have a high conversion rate while implementing affiliate marketing campaigns. You need to divide collected subscribers into different groups based on their submitted information. By doing this, you can identify the email content that matches each recipient segment.

Besides, your email subscribers won’t want to receive an email that promotes a whole new refrigerator, since they follow up with your brand to learn digital marketing tips. Therefore, you need to evaluate whether the affiliate product/service you are going to offer will align with your business.

Learn to Write Subject Lines That Increase Your Email Open Rate

Suppose that your email is a recipe, then the subject line is the indispensable ingredient that makes it become marvelous. Did you know that emails are opened by 47% of recipients just because of their titles?

Writing a catchy subject line also means that you will have a chance to increase the email open rate, and make the first move to approach subscribers. Knowing this, we have compiled some tips to guide you on how to create an appealing email title for your affiliate campaign.

Personalization Is One of The Top Priorities

Probably, you have seen some types of plain and stereotyped email subject lines that are usually ignored in your inbox among a whole bunch of others. That is the same for the recipients and, notably, they can mark 69% of emails as spam due to the titles.

As a consequence, what you should do is to add uniqueness into your email subject lines. When it comes to this, personalization will be one of the top priorities for your concern.

Basically, it won’t be that hard to personalize an email title since the first thing you can do is put the recipient’s name on it.

Dale Carnegie - a famous American author has quoted that “A person’s name is to him or her the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” Mentioning email receiver names can help you grab their attention easily and make them feel that their individualities are being valued. Here are two examples that you can take a look at:

• John, Check Out The Best SEO Tips This January

• Here Are Why You Shouldn’t Ignore Chatbot Marketing, Alex!

Don’t forget to use the customization feature of the email tool that you are using to massively insert recipients’ names to subject lines without a hitch!

Along with mentioning personal names, you could make use of your audiences’ interests to increase the personalization also. If one of your subscriber groups puts social media marketing in his/her favorite list, then this topic should be mentioned in the email title. For instance, your subject line could be ‘[Recipient’s name], Access The Top 7 Templates for Your Social Media Marketing Campaign!’.

Keep the Title Short And Sweet

Generating a lengthy title seems to be effective in attracting recipients to click on an email, but it is not always true.

According to MailChimp, an email subject line should be no longer than 9 words and 60 characters in total. With this length, you can ensure that your email titles won’t be cut off on both desktop and mobile screens.

Shortening is not enough, you should also describe the main point of your email content so readers could glance through the subject line, and quickly know what topic you are going to discuss.

Including Number in Your Email Title

If you like the straightforward and descriptive email subject line, then adding numbers to it can help you with this. After analyzing 1.2 million emails, Yesware found that those contained numbers have an average open rate of 45% higher than the average open rate of all titles. So, remember to try putting at least one number in the headline!

Test Your Email Titles

Looking to increase the email open rate sometimes can make you feel confused as there are different options to choose from. Hence, testing email subject lines should be “ticked’ on your ‘to-do’ list.

Ideally, you should create from 2-3 draft titles for an email campaign that targets the same recipient group to evaluate their effectiveness. The version that gets the best performance should be maintained and used for the upcoming times.

How to Write An Email For Affiliate Marketing

It should be noted that affiliate email marketing is quite different from the traditional emailing approach. ‘Sharing More Selling Less’ is the key motto that you should craft into your mind.

Specifically, you need to communicate with the targeted audiences like a real customer and write your affiliate email in the most natural way. To do this, experiencing promoted products/ services is highly recommended since it will allow you to add real perspectives and reliability to your content.

Before introducing any affiliate products/services, you should educate and share relevant information with recipients to nurture relationships. For example, you could choose to provide insightful SEO tips for email subscribers if you are promoting an SEO tool. Also, let them know how the tool has benefited you in facilitating your digital marketing activity.

After all, don’t forget to insert the affiliate link to your email content!

Build a Logical Email Flow

There is no ‘one size fits all’ when it comes to building a sequence for your affiliate email marketing campaign. Nevertheless, we still want to share this email flow below for your reference:

• Email 1: Say ‘Thank You!’ to your recipient for sharing their emails and sending them a warm welcome.
• Email 2: Including helpful tips and resources based on subscribers’ interests
• Email 3: Introducing the affiliate product/service
• Email 4: Following up with cool content (still containing the affiliate link)
• Email 5: Following up for the last time (still containing the affiliate link)

In case you have already had a ‘goosebump’ email sequence to utilize? It’s perfect, what you need to do is evaluate whether the affiliate link is highly relevant to your existing email content. If yes, you could definitely insert it into the sequence which will save you lots of time with generating a new email flow.

Test Different Affiliate Marketing Email Templates

You will hardly find the best option to use if you don’t test different email samples. Thus, it is necessary to create at least two to three email sequences for your affiliate marketing campaign to compare and evaluate. Although this might take you quite a lot of time, it is still worthwhile as you could know which email flow will bring you the highest amount of commission.

In case you intend to use multiple email addresses for your testing process, you should really need to know an app that can conveniently manage all emails in one place.

Keep Track and Analyze Email Marketing Metrics

We are living in the digital era which means most of our marketing activities need to be data-driven as well. No matter how much effort you have put into optimizing your email content, it will be problematic if you could not track and analyze email marketing metrics. So make sure that you don’t overlook these metrics below while analyzing your affiliate email marketing campaigns:

Open Rate

• Definition: The percentage of emails that have been opened.
• Formulation: (Number of opened emails / number of delivered emails) x 100%.
• Example: (500 opened emails / 1500 delivered emails) x 100% => open rate = 33.33%.

Click-through Rate

• Definition: The percentage of email receivers who make at least 1 click on an email.
• Formulation: (Number of clicks / number of delivered emails) x 100%.
• Example: (600 opened emails / 1600 delivered emails) x 100% => click through rate = 37.5%.

Conversion Rate

• Definition: The percentage of recipients who complete the intended action.
• Formulation: (Number of recipients who accomplished the intended action / Number of delivered emails) x 100%.
• Example: (800 recipients who sign up on your landing page by clicking on a link included in a given email / 2500 delivered emails) x 100% => Conversion rate = 32%.

Bounce Rate

• Definition: The percentage of unsuccessfully delivered emails.
• Formulation: (Number of unsuccessfully delivered emails / Number of sent emails) x 100%.
• Example: (20 unsuccessfully delivered emails / 1400 sent emails) x 100% => Conversion rate = 1.43%.

Final Words

To wrap up, email marketing is still one of the most effective advertising channels for many affiliates to monetize. We hope this article has provided you with helpful tips and insights to assist you in launching a fruitful affiliate email marketing campaign.