Affiliate marketing and email marketing intersect well, providing a versatile approach to consumer outreach that can overpower your commissions.
You necessarily need to use affiliate marketing software to run an affiliate campaign, but to run an email campaign, you can use a simple email marketing software.
Affiliate marketing is a fantastic way to create a passive revenue stream, but if you want steady revenue, you need to reach your target audience actively. One of the easiest ways to do this is by email marketing.
If you’re a new affiliate marketer or you’ve been at it for a while and want to raise your commissions, we’ve got some advice to support.
After describing what an affiliate email marketing campaign is, we’ll talk about how affiliate email marketing can raise your commissions and take the five steps needed to start an affiliate email marketing campaign.
See Also: 13 Best Affiliate Programs for Beginners in 2021
What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing means receiving a commission by advertising the goods of someone else. Practitioners recognize the product they know (if not enthusiastic about), then market it, earning a percentage of the benefit when a visitor makes a purchase.
An affiliate email marketing campaign is an affiliate marketing strategy that includes sending carefully crafted, highly targeted emails designed to create interest in the product and increase commissions.
How to Boost Your Commissions through Email
Email marketing will produce more commissions, and it’s a sustainable practice—for more revenue, just to rinse and repeat. However, another simple marketing strategy is at the heart of this approach: content marketing.
Content marketing is used to nurture the target audience by delivering content that they find useful. It helps you to build a relationship with your audience, one that enhances your reputation as a trusted expert in your niche.
There is a fundamental link between email marketing and content marketing. Email outreach is the best way to help your material. You should publish content that is important to your audience and do all you can to make sure they see it.
Driving traffic to your content would push up your commissions, and the best way to promote the content is through strategic email outreach.
Some affiliate marketers submit emails that bypass the content marketing phase instead of specifically promoting the affiliate product.
Your emails are expected to do both.
Focus on sending emails that implicitly support the product by driving traffic to your content and providing messages that specifically promote the affiliate product.
Steps to start a successful Affiliate Marketing Campaign
We’ve looked at your affiliate email marketing and what it can do to raise your commissions. Let’s get into the 5 steps you should take to start an effective email marketing campaign for your affiliate.
1. Study Your Audience
Your affiliate email marketing campaign’s primary aim, apart from earning more commissions, is to create confidence with the target audience. You need to understand who you interact with—their age, gender, interest, place, economic status, etc.—to connect effectively with a customer community.
Research that buys goods that you endorse and drill down on the characteristics of that category. With a high-level understanding of who you’re approaching, you’re going to be better able to refine your posts.
In some cases, the target demographic will be anyone who fits your broadest customer profile, but you’ll want to target a customer base subset for some campaigns. Understanding the entire community is a prerequisite for identifying the audience segments, so be sure, to begin with, a macro-view of your customers.
2. Segment Your Audience
As decided by your affiliate product or other marketing variables, you can need to target only a portion of your contact list.
Let’s say that you’re supporting budget-friendly earbuds. When you’re marketing to a broad community, inspiration strikes—a campaign you can’t ignore with a narrow target audience. In that case, you’d filter your contact list so that emails designed with campaign-specific material go to the target community only.
You may want to target just people over 30. That’s the right kind of approach often, but using demographic data to research the target group is typically more complicated than mere exclusions. The best insights come from overlaying consumer demographics with the overall awareness of the customer base. This method helps you to make correct predictions about the usual members of your target audience.
For example, our earbuds marketer does not need demographic data to know that their outreach can emphasize the product’s low cost. But, if the same marketer has planned a campaign directed at college students, their messages can be refined to better align with that audience.
3. Optimize your material
In affiliate marketing, the biggest success comes when you lead your target audience to conclude that you are an expert. Use the emails you send as a conduit to develop yourself as a useful expert in your niche.
Your recommendation won’t mean anything if people don’t think you’re familiar with the product inside and out, so show that you’re using your material. Explain the importance of the commodity in full. Explain its virtues by providing a first-hand account of how it benefited you.
Make sure your email speaks to the target audience in the way they respond. Using age, gender, and other information about your customer base to send messages that will resonate with recipients.
Make your emails more convincing by sharing a story—a tiny story that somebody is making a journey from wanting your product to purchasing your product. The reader is then going to put himself in the plot. If you know your audience well, you can paint an image of what they’re thinking.
Make sure you’re not getting too heavy. Any emails in the campaign series can hardly mention any of the product suggestions. A soft selling in which you explain the advantages of a product is typically the most successful approach. It’s best to nurture a relationship that makes you the specialist and the consumer the consultant. It would be best if you strived for a low-pressure approach that is as personalized as possible.
4. Include a magnet for lead
As another tool to promote your content consumption, which directly correlates with increased commissions, you can provide a lead magnet—the gated content that the reader would only have access to if they respond to your CTA.
Although your lead magnet is designed to promote the affiliate product, its main objective is to create your email list. Offering a prospective need, and getting them to subscribe to your email newsletter, is a key step in getting daily traffic to your content.
An effective lead magnet will often draw on the material you have freely given to others, but it will offer more in-depth knowledge on the subject you have covered. It may be a purchaser’s guide, a product comparison infographic, a guide, or other valuable material specific to your niche.
5. Automate & Testing
You should not run your campaign manually—there are so many great software products available for automation. Such systems manage scheduled or activated bulk sending and help monitor the degree of interaction your emails have reached.
Automation allows email drip campaigns in which carefully crafted emails are planned ahead of time and then sent out in a series designed to help achieve the campaign objectives.
Email marketing is most effective when monitoring your campaign’s outcomes and adapting your strategy to what works best. That’s exactly what A/B research is all about.
You can create two emails to figure out which one would get a better response from your target audience. A popular approach is that the “A” email is one that you’ve had success with; the “B” email is an alternate version that you think could do better. After you send each version to the same number of people, you’ll figure out which one will get the best answer.
Watch Growing Commissions with Affiliate Email Marketing
Some affiliate marketers (probably not you) cause their passive revenue stream to become a little too passive, which means that they miss the required customer engagement but still expect revenue.
What they’re actually doing is settle for meager commissions when they should do it!
We hope this article was helpful and has shed some light on the power of email affiliate marketing. As a means of indirect and direct promotion of affiliate goods, an email marketing campaign may be the key to rising commissions.
See also: Five Things You Shouldn’t Expect From Your Marketing Consultant, Best Affiliate Programs, Learn more about digital marketing