Bernard Meyer
Content Growth Marketer
Reading Time: 6 minutes
Affiliate marketing is often praised by many expert marketers. In affiliate marketing, an achievement-based marketing technique, companies pay affiliates for each client they bring from their targeted marketing activities. In simpler words, affiliates find a powerful solution in their niche, promote it to their audience, and enjoy part of the profit per sale.
According to in-depth research, there are currently 4 billion active email users, and email campaigns boast a solid 6.49% conversion rate. From this, it’s easy to see that email marketing is not going anywhere.
Even better, because of the pandemic, ecommerce has boomed. If you’re an affiliate marketer, you should start looking into affiliate email marketing for great products and high profits.
So let’s take a closer look at affiliate marketing, its benefits, and the top email marketing affiliate programs you should consider.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate email marketing is a modern twist on email marketing. Instead of promoting your own products in your email marketing strategy, as an email affiliate you include promotional links for other products via targeted and engaging emails.
These emails are created to captivate subscribers, which, in turn help improve the conversion rate and organic traffic.
Affiliate email marketing is a great option for high-conversion marketers, since they know their audience well, can find the best-fit tools for that audience, and can create engaging content to communicate this perfect fit.
Why Should You Use Email for Affiliate Marketing?
Often, affiliate marketing is overshadowed by SEO and social media marketing. However, email marketing remains one of the most effective ways of connecting with your target audience.
According to an in-depth study, for each dollar you spend on email marketing, you enjoy an incredible average return of $38. Not to mention, more than 59% of all marketers agree that email marketing represents their most significant ROI.
Moreover, email marketing is an excellent way of reaching out to your audience. In fact, research reveals that 99% of all customers check their email on a day-to-day basis. At the same time, 50% of respondents recheck their inbox at least ten times a day.
This behavior provides marketers with the perfect opportunity to increase outreach by generating sales.
The benefit of email for affiliate marketing is that marketers don’t concentrate on increasing sales via social media content or organic search engine traffic. Instead, they curate targeted email lists to market affiliate products to past customers. In turn, marketers benefit from direct and personalized access to their audience.
In this way, email lists allow you to engage with the audience and drive conversations actively. Typically, people on your email marketing lists are already involved with your niche and voluntarily offered their email addresses.
For this reason, converting them to purchase the service or product your brand is promoting will be comparatively easier—especially compared to conventional affiliate marketing, where marketers have to post various links across their blogs, YouTube descriptions, and websites.
An insightful study shows that email marketing influenced the buying decisions of up to 59% of participants, which reflects its overall effectiveness.
How to Choose an Affiliate Program?
An easy way to select the perfect email marketing affiliate program for you and your brand is by remembering which program makes it easier for you to promote and commission.
Here are a couple of pointers to keep in mind when choosing your affiliate program:
- Does the program have a good or established reputation?
- Does the product match your niche?
- Does the program have an excellent conversion rate?
- Can you get access to unique tools and techniques in the program?
- Can you track sales in the program?
- Does the program boast a good cookie life?
What are the Best Affiliate Email Marketing Platforms?
Enhance your revenue by focusing on your email marketing niche and finding the top affiliate email marketing programs. Some of the top choices include:
Omnisend
One excellent platform to consider is the ecommerce marketing automation platform Omnisend. If you want to drive better revenue and generate organic traffic, while providing a top-notch solution to your audience, this is the way to go.
Omnisend’s affiliate email marketing platform allows affiliate marketers to get up to $1,200 per net new-referral.
The program also offers:
- up to 300% one-time commissions for the referred new businesses that join Omnisend on a paid plan
- a dedicated account manager that will provide materials and priority support
- ready-made packs of banners, ads, and other types of content that you can share in your campaigns as soon as you start
Even better, affiliate marketers can also benefit from Omnisend’s new partner program that comes with such perks as new revenue share opportunities, including bounties, percentages, and potential one-time bonuses and access to value-add services.
Convertkit
A leading email marketing platform, ConvertKit helps creators earn a smooth stream of revenue by building a robust audience base and strong email marketing skills.
The joining process of ConvertKit is simple, and it assists you in connecting with an engaged audience. The revenue sharing is stricter than Omnisend’s, but still quite appealing and stands out as one of the top email or autoresponder affiliate programs.
ConvertKit will send affiliates a 30% commission for every person who signs up to ConvertKit through your affiliate link. This 30% will be paid monthly for the entire time that the referred account is active on ConvertKit.
Unfortunately, ConvertKit does not offer creative assets and banners. Affiliates will have to manage with ConvertKit’s various logos and produce the rest of the creatives.
Hubspot
Another popular platform among marketers is Hubspot. This state-of-the-art platform offers a combination of incredible marketing tools to enhance your outreach.
Moreover, the platform allows you to earn good passive income. Affiliate marketers can stand to make $250-$1,000 per sale, depending on the product the customer buys. Similar to Omnisned (and unlike ConvertKit), Hubspot offers free resources to affiliates that they can use in their affiliate email marketing campaigns.
However, there are some important things to consider. Hubspot’s affiliate program can’t track commissions on any domain other than .com, and no commissions are paid for HubSpot for Startups or Entrepreneurs purchases.
Unfortunately, Hubspot’s email marketing affiliate program is currently suspended as it moves to a new program.
How to Launch a Successful Affiliate Email Marketing Campaign
Let’s consider the steps to launching a practical and profitable affiliate email marketing campaign.
Choosing the Right Affiliate Links to Promote
When choosing the perfect affiliate link you wish to promote, look for these main qualities.
Profitable
For your affiliate link to be effective, it must be profitable. For this, you need to spend some time estimating the ROI of the promotion to ensure it‘s worth the effort.
While you don’t have to spend extra cash integrating affiliate links into your emails, you still have to invest time and effort. For that reason, it’s always a better idea to concentrate on affiliate links that promise a better earning potential.
Relevant
Your email affiliate list includes people who have willingly provided you their email addresses. Most likely, they’re already engaged with your content, products, and niche.
If you want to increase your sales, you must promote products and services to your affiliate marketing email list that align with their interests. You can also attempt to provide beneficial solutions that suit the audience’s pain point. As long as you follow this golden rule, you can be sure that your chances of generating more sales will also go up.
Use Website Triggers
Prompt viewers to take action by making use of website triggers. For instance, if a viewer visits your website twice, you may automatically offer them a discount or coupon.
This technique is perfect for affiliate email marketing since you can link your website visitors to their email. Here, you can trigger emails based on browsing behavior.
For example, if a reader reads your recent articles on a particular subject, you could set up a website trigger that automatically sends related promotional emails to that user.
Personalize Emails to Foster a Relationship
Emails boasting personalized subject lines have a 26% higher chance of being opened. Personalization not only helps you increase the open rate, but it also helps build a deep relationship with your customers as well.
Affiliate marketing focuses on garnering trust and creating a robust customer base. The more your viewers trust you, the greater the chance of them following your recommendations. Personalized email portrays you as a knowledgeable and helpful friend rather than a salesy marketer.
To Sum it Up
Launching an effective and successful affiliate email marketing campaign can be a daunting and challenging task. However, with the right tools and best practices, you can benefit from your affiliate list and promote your products. In turn, you’ll notice your commissions increasing steadily.
All in all, the best way to affiliate market through email is by staying genuine. Seek products that you believe in and promote them to users who will benefit from them. You can bet your sales will go up significantly and your subscribers will be happier.