Email marketing is one of the easiest ways to make money online as an affiliate marketer.
It is the most profitable online business model. You are estimated to earn $44 for each $1 spent in email marketing.
Why do you need to use email marketing?
Imagine this: you have a list of 5000 subscribers in your autoresponder, and you find an offer that you think will help people in your list.
You write a short email recommending that product, and 10% of those people read the email.
That is 500 people, and out of those 500 people, just 20 of them end up buying the product, and if the product pays you $50 per sale, you make $1000 for an email that took you 20 minutes to write.
That sounds simple, but you must work to get those 5000 subscribers. Here, I explain how to build a list for affiliate marketing.
5 Email marketing tips for affiliate marketing
In this post, I will share my 5 top email marketing tips for affiliate marketing. These are the things I do daily to improve my open rate, conversion rate, and trust in my email list.
Do not sell. You need to share.
This is one of the biggest mistakes I made since starting. I was so desperate to make money that I sent emails to sell affiliate products.
Remember this: people love to buy but hate to be sold; do not sell products to them. Just share your experience, tips, and the tools they need.
When you do this, you are not selling to them. You are helping them solve their problems, and they will thank you.
People do not like to buy a drill. They want to create a hole. Teach them how to create a hole and recommend your favorite drill you use to create the hole.
Keep this advice in mind when writing your affiliate marketing emails:
- Highlight the product’s benefits without going over the top.
- Personalize the recommendation and explain why you recommend the product.
- Keep the affiliate links to a minimum, say one near the start of the email and one at the end as a reminder.
- Indicate that the link is an affiliate so people don’t feel tricked.
Remember, you should write your emails as if you were talking to a friend. It’s a casual conversation over coffee.
You found a product that improved your life or business and want to let your friend in on the secret. That’s it.
Make sure you can use affiliate links in your emails
You need to include affiliate links in your emails. Aweber allows you to include affiliate links in your emails without any issues. Still, some autoresponders like Activecampaign do not allow it.
ActiveCampaign recommends including a link to websites you own and then sending your subscribers to affiliate products from your website.
Check with your Autoresponder company to see whether they let you include affiliate links.
Many discourage, or even ban, affiliate marketing because they’re worried about being able to deliver emails consistently.
If you don’t look at their rules before sending your affiliate email campaign, you risk being banned by your provider and losing your entire list. Which means you’d have to build it up again from scratch.
Choose the right affiliate products to promote
People trusted you with their email addresses; do not abuse that trust by promoting to them every garbage you can find online. Ensure that every offer you recommend to your email list is right for them and you.
Relevant
Each product you promote and recommend to your list should be relevant. By relevant, I mean it should be related to the information that they signed for.
If people join your list to learn how to make money online, you should promote and recommend products about making money online.
Your affiliate links should logically connect to your brand, site, and niche. For example, if you’re in the food service industry, you wouldn’t send affiliate links to pet products.
Profitable
The first point was for your subscribers, and this one is for you. You are in business to make money, so you want to earn as much as possible with each sale.
Find products you know can convert, and people will buy, and find products with low refund rates that help people.
It would be best to try those products before recommending them to others.
This does not mean you should not recommend products that do not pay you. If you find a great product that does not pay you a commission, recommend it to your subscribers. This will make them trust you more.
Ask for your subscribers to reply to your emails.
It does matter how great emails you write. Some of them will end up in the spam folder. That is the reality. You can increase the chances of your emails hitting your inbox by just doing this tip.
When you write an email to your list, encourage them to reply to your emails in case they have any questions or suggestions.
Not all of them will answer, but with each reply, you are telling email providers such as gmail.com and others that your emails are friendly, and they will reward you by making your emails hit more inboxes.
Tell stories and find a link to a product.
People love stories. It would help if you learned how to tell stories to make more money with email marketing.
You do not need to be a comedian to make money from storytelling. I know some people who even tell fake stories ( do not do this).
All you need to do is tell stories about aspects of your life and somehow link them to the product.
Remember the famous show Seinfeld? All the episodes are stories. They went to a coffee shop. What happened there is a new episode; they travel. Whatever happened is a story, and you can do the same.
For example, one of the most popular emails is a story about going to a restaurant. I met this girl who had a bad attitude toward me ( she thought I was broke). When I paid using my American Express platinum, she changed her behavior and gave me her number without asking.
Why was I able to afford an American Express card? Because I have my own business.
Note: The annual fee for the American Express Platinum card in Mexico is $1300, and the minimum monthly income to get approved is 100,000 MXN, which is a little more than $5,000. Making that kind of money and living in Mexico is a flex.
I included the link to a course on how to start affiliate marketing. Most people loved that story, clicked the link, and bought the product.
Personal and relevant stories connect people to you; they can relate your stories to their lives.
You can write a story about a soccer game and recommend how to make money online products. You need to find a way to link the story and the product.
It can be something like. I can play soccer in the afternoon because I do not have a boss. Here is how you can be your boss ( you include the link to an affiliate product).
This way, you entertain your audience with your stories, and at the same time, you make a commission.
Final words
That is it, and those are my five email marketing tips for affiliate marketing. The biggest thing to remember is that your affiliate emails should be heavy on education and nurturing and less on selling. Remember to tell stories to your list to sell more products.