How to Use Email Marketing for Affiliate Marketing
Want to make more affiliate commissions? Of course!
Here’s an extensive walkthrough on how to use email marketing for affiliate marketing so you can rock it as an affiliate and increase your chances of making more affiliate commissions.
I've been using email marketing with affiliate marketing together for the past two years.
And I've personally used my affiliate website and autoresponders to automate simple affiliate email marketing campaigns.
I also pay attention to other affiliates' emails to learn what affiliate products they make money with, what autoresponders they use, and how they set up their emails to make commissions.
So, if you have wondered how to use email marketing with affiliate marketing, this post is for you.
Contents
- Is email marketing good for affiliate marketing?
- How Email Helps You Sell More as an Affiliate
- What a Simple Affiliate Marketing Campaign Looks Like
- How to promote affiliate links with email marketing
- What is an autoresponder?
- Best Email Autoresponder for Affiliate Marketing
- Wealthy Affiliate Email Marketing Training
Is Email Marketing Good for Affiliate Marketing?
Beginner affiliates may wonder if email marketing is good for affiliate marketing.
The answer is yes.
Email is a great way to send traffic back to your affiliate website.
You can send traffic to helpful blog posts, to your bridge pages for affiliate offers, or directly to the affiliate offers landing page.
Pro Tip: Read the affiliate program policies to confirm requirements and restrictions for how you can and cannot promote the affiliate product.
For example: If you promote Amazon products, it’s against their policy to include Amazon affiliate links in your emails. They want you to include a link to a blog page where your amazon affiliate links live.
How Email Helps You Sell More as an Affiliate
Email can help you sell more affiliate products.
Therefore, email can help you make more affiliate commissions.
Because email gives you more chances in front of your audience.
If someone does not buy your affiliate offer on their first visit, they may forget about you and your offer.
When people subscribe to your email list, they opt-in to receive continued communications directly from you.
Those communications help build trust and relationships with your fans and followers while frequently reminding them of the solutions you have to offer them.
Not only can recommend your first affiliate offer, but you can also promote other offers as well.
At the end of the day, those people, your audience, your fans, and your followers have problems they want to be solved.
Do your job as an affiliate well, and you can be the one to recommend good solutions to their problems.
Every time they buy one of your recommended solutions, you make affiliate commissions!
What a Simple Affiliate Marketing Email Campaign Looks Like
This is what a simple affiliate funnel looks like leveraging affiliate marketing and email marketing together.
- You drive traffic from a traffic source, e.g., your blog ranked in Google, YouTube video, paid ads, etc.
- You send that traffic to a simple landing page on your blog. Your landing page offers a simple freebie in exchange for an email address.
- Once they submit their email address to you, your landing page automatically sends them to an affiliate offer page.
- Your email autoresponder automatically sends the first email to include the freebie you promised at the opt-in.
- Then, on additional days and times you set in your autoresponder, that person receives more emails from you.
How to Promote Affiliate links with Email Marketing
You can use email to promote anything.
The best way to start doing email marketing and building your email list is to build a short automated email series.
This series of emails is can last 5 - 7 days and are usually kicked off when someone submits their email address in your email opt-in form.
Using an autoresponder, you set up the emails to be sent out based on different actions and times.
Inside those emails, you can promote your affiliate links.
Ways to promote your affiliate links in emails
Here is what this could look like.
1. Promote your affiliate freebie in the first email
Many affiliate products will offer something free that you can give to your audience.
Example: Wealthy Affiliate Free Membership
You simply offer the free offer as your lead magnet.
It’s what you give away to encourage people to give you their email address.
After someone submits their email address, they receive an email with the link to the free offer. The link is your affiliate link.
2. Promote the paid affiliate product in your additional emails
Once someone has the free offer, tell them why they need the paid offer.
List out the benefits of the product, and all the problems it will solve.
You can include your affiliate link to the paid product page.
If you are offering a special bonus for people who buy the paid offer, then you can include a link to your landing page that explains your bonus package. And the landing page can include your affiliate link.
What is an Autoresponder?
Let's make sure you understand exactly what an autoresponder is.
An autoresponder is an email marketing software that automatically sends emails on your behalf.
Allowing software to send emails automatically saves you time and increases your chances of making affiliate commissions.
Best Autoresponder for Affiliate Marketing
My favorite autoresponder for affiliate marketing is Aweber.
Aweber is easy to use and offers fast ways to launch your affiliate marketing funnel.
They even have a free account with basic features to help you get started and start growing your email list.
And that’s all you need as an affiliate.
Just like Jay and Eric here tell you, the secret to succeeding with affiliate websites is content; the same is true for email marketing.
If you are not emailing your list frequently, you don’t create opportunities to make affiliate commissions.
It’s more important to launch your affiliate funnel quickly to start collecting email addresses and email them regularly than to delay six months trying to launch the perfect funnel or decide on the perfect email autoresponder to use.
Wealthy Affiliate Email Marketing Training
There is so much training on email marketing here.
You can easily learn how to incorporate email marketing into your affiliate marketing campaigns and increase your chances of making more affiliate commissions.
You have no excuse not to learn how to use email marketing with affiliate marketing.
If you are a premium or premium plus member, check out:
Affiliate Marketing Email Examples
See what real affiliate marketing email examples look like. See examples for different affiliate products and examples for promoting Wealthy Affiliate.
If you are a premium member, check out:
Email Marketing Foundations
A 5 part training series on the foundations of email marketing by Jay, Wealthy Affiliate Live Training Coach. You’ll learn the entire process of building your first email campaign to more advanced tips and tricks like how to write your emails to increase conversions and automatically send an email every time you create a new blog post.
If you are a premium plus member, check out:
Email Marketing 101: Using Aweber to Grow Your Business
A 4 part training series on how to use email marketing to grow your business by Tim, a Wealthy Affiliate Member. You’ll learn why it’s a good idea for your business, how to use Aweber to start your first email campaigns, and how to use email to grow your blog traffic and increase your blog authority.
Hope this post helps you out.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the comments below.
Recent Comments
18
A great read Kim! Having a solid email marketing plan and implementing it well, will always be beneficial for our businesses!
Have a great start to the weekend my friend!
Great post, Kim! Thanks for this reminder. If I can ask: did you write the emails by yourself with the help of a copywriter?
Julius
Hey Julius! Thanks ! And Great question! I wrote them myself. Know that my very first emails sucked!
I started looking other affiliate emails. How long were there? What did say? How did they set up the affiliate product. I eventually found my own style and voice. The best way to learn is to start writing and don’t be too critical of yourself. The more you write the emails, the better email writer you’ll become.
Awesome! Thanks so much! The email examples at the bottom will give you ideas on what your emails could look like.
Hi Kim
Yes I totally agree that email marketing is absolutely crucial to anyone wanting to make a decent income from their affiliate marketing business.
The best customers will always be those who know you!
Regards
Dave
I love that Dave! “The best customers will always be those who you know!” Great way to put it!
See more comments
This is great Kim.
I must admit I'm lazy with my email list.
They sign up the sequence goes out if they don't join WA I don't email them again lol.
I'm not saying it doesn't work I'm saying I don't work it!!
I really need to start mailing them more often.
Yes I totally get it. I struggled with this too in the beginning. It’s definitely work to keep the comms going. But worth it and gets easier as you go. Thanks for sharing!