Make Money with Affiliate Email Marketing in 2024 (Step-by-Step)

Affiliate Marketing is a performance-based marketing approach in which affiliates may receive a commission or payout for every customer conversion. The affiliate marketing program is a proven method to generate new customers for the business. In affiliate marketing, individuals or businesses can earn a monthly commission from the company as a reward for each successful sales closer.

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The combination of email marketing and affiliate marketing remains a strong trend. For example, it helps businesses generate a profit of $49 for every $1 spent, so it is worth it for companies to focus on email affiliate marketing programs.

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It is an income-based advertising strategy where the business pays its affiliates (those targeting the business's customers) for each visitor or client they bring to the company. This strategy helps the business to generate more leads and maintain over cost per acquisition.

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You can do affiliate marketing over various channels, including email marketing. As email has 4.26 billion active users worldwide. Setting up an effective affiliate marketing campaign can increase brand awareness and boost your conversion & revenue. In this blog post, we shall discuss deeper affiliate marketing campaigns and how businesses can automate them more effectively in 2022. 

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What Is Meant By Affiliate Email Marketing? 

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Affiliate email marketing is a type of email marketing that utilizes emails to promote products or services through affiliate links/referral links. All your business requires is a well-crafted email to attract your subscribers and boost the site traffic & conversion rate. 

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Affiliate marketing campaigns are different from traditional email marketing campaigns. The goal of an affiliate marketing campaign is to promote and sell items. Here the customer or the influencers in your niche industry will share the benefits of your solution after using it.

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In affiliate marketing, the sales rep will not promote the benefits of your offering; instead, the affiliate marketer will promote your product or services to your targeted audience. The affiliate marketer can generate revenue by generating sales. The affiliate's commission structure is based on the Pay per lead (PPL), Cost per action (CPA), Pay per sale / Cost per sales (CPS), and Pay per click (PPC). The commission rate and type depend on the business. 

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Why Businesses Need Email For Affiliate marketing 

Still, today email is the most effective channel for reaching your audience base and improving your sales. Because as per the research study, 99% of customers go through their email daily, and 50% of customers are respondents to them. Through affiliate marketing, the marketer can generate more sales. 

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Companies need to understand the importance of email marketing. As per a recent survey, 59% of people have been convinced by email marketing in their purchase decisions, which can be used to trigger a purchase.

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Emails are an effective way to communicate with your large audience base and help the business to build a trustworthy relationship. Your mailing list subscribers are an opportunity to grow your business. They've already opted-in to your email subscriber list willingly. Converting them to purchase the product or service is much easier than converting a cold lead. Affiliates use these emails as an opportunity to reach potential customers in bulk to promote products or services. It is a proven strategy for marketers to generate sales.

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You can surely engage and initiate a conversation with the potential customer through the prospect list as they are not cold leads. Email campaigns are the perfect tool for affiliate marketing and can easily drive discussion among your audience just by placing the affiliate links.

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When it comes to affiliate marketing, many markets prefer blogs, social media, and youtube channels. Emails are often overlooked channels. But emails are a more powerful channel than social media. 59% of the marketers agree that email marketing has a high return on investment. For instance, a business spends an average of 38$ then its ROI is 3,800%. As per McKinsey's research, emails are 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. In this article, we shall continue discussing launching a successful affiliate marketing campaign.

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Do's and Don'ts

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What Should You Do?

• While adding an affiliate link to your copy, ensure you have included the valuable contents for the receiver. 
• You can also add the promotional link to your existing campaigns. 
• Diversifying the placement of your affiliate links is recommended depending on your audience.
• Your campaign copy has to offer a solution to your audience and don't have just affiliate links for the sake of your outreach. 
• An effective affiliate campaign will help to build trust and improve the conversion rate and sales. 
• Ensure your deliverability rate. Good deliverability will generate more revenue and prevent your messages from landing in the spam folder. 
• Email marketing software will enable you to create hyper-personalized content for your target audience and send timely campaigns to people who need it.

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Mistakes to be avoided 

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• Not having enough traffic: There are thousands of products out there that could potentially help someone with their problems. You'll never reach your target market if you don't have enough traffic. You must be popular among a particular audience to successfully promote products in a specific niche. 
• Promoting too many products: You must focus on relevant products for your niche. Remember that your goal isn't necessarily to sell all the products that are available on the market. Promoting an irrelevant product to your niche audience will lead to an unsuccessful affiliate campaign. To build a successful business, learn everything about each product you choose to promote. 
• Using poor quality products: When affiliate marketing, what product or service offers to your target audience plays a vital role. You must always ensure the quality product before reaching your audience. Otherwise, it may damage your reputation and hurt your brand impression. In addition, you run the risk of receiving negative reviews from unhappy customers.

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4 Easy Steps To Launch an Effective Affiliate Campaign

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We shall see how you can set up an effective campaign for your affiliate marketing in this section. Firstly, you must remember to use affiliate or referral links in your outreach sequence. 

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You're not trying to sell people on the product. You're just sharing your experience using the product. Ensure the campaign copy shares your experience with a casual conversational tone, not salesy.  

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As you go through each step of launching an affiliate marketing campaign, it's vital that you cultivate a friendly conversation with potential clients. Otherwise, you'll ruin your deeper relationship with current customers, and they will unsubscribe from your list. Now let’s dive in.

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Step 1: Pick Right Email Service Provider (ESP)

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To begin your affiliate marketing campaign, choose the right email provider. We recommend selecting the service providers who allow you to include affiliate links in your emails. If you are unsure about their rules, you can ask them before sending a campaign. Some providers will suspend your account for a time if you're violating their policies and will delete your list, which will result in wasting all your hard work and impact your potential income.

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Service providers come in all different shapes and sizes. It helps the business to create and send your campaign message to your customer base. It is necessary to follow the laws and rules when sending any cold outreach. First, you need to get approval or authorization from your recipient whether they are interested in receiving the message from your brand. So before you start your affiliate marketing, you need to build an affiliate marketing mailing list.

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Step 2: Collect Subscribers List
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The most essential step for affiliates is building a list for their campaign outreach with a valid email address of the targeted audience to promote the product. Ensure your prospect list has correct and up-to-date data so your outreach message can get rid of spam and eliminate hard bounces. Creating a landing page with a subscriber form, providing exclusive offers like ebooks, free webinars in exchange for prospect data, etc. 

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Once you have acquired the subscribers, you want to keep engaged by sharing interesting pieces, valuable content, industry news, newsletters, and more. This will enable the marketer to build an effective relationship through value offerings, access to a library of articles, free webinars, Ebooks, etc. 

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SmartLead is the perfect tool to help you create a valid email list before outreach. Once uploaded the CSV software will validate all aspects of your prospects' information. Any invalid or non-existing addresses are removed so that only accurate ones remain on the list. 

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Step 3: Create Your Effective Campaign

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Once the subscriber list is ready, create a personalized subject line and outreach message to get more open and click-through rates. You can automate your email campaign sequence that can be sent when subscribers take specific actions. 

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SmartLead enables the affiliates to automate entire affiliate campaigns and follow-up sequences naturally. Through the conditional customer triggers option, you can automate your campaign by setting up sequences of emails that will be sent out when a subscriber takes a certain action. The cold email software contains powerful email campaign management with intuitive workflows to make your life easier.

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This platform lets you manage all your emails in one place, without complex email routing. So you can easily collaborate on campaigns with colleagues or clients. Using this software, you can perform mass email outreach with personalized content that increases conversion. The unlimited auto-rotating email account helps the affiliate marketer to automate their email outreach without worrying about daily limits or reputation.

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Step 4: Track And Monitor the Metrics

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Affiliate marketing campaigns are more successful if you send the campaign message on the right day and time to the targeted prospect's time zone to boost the conversions. Using an email marketing tool, you can schedule your sequences more effectively using an email marketing tool. 

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Open rate, unsubscribe rate, click-through rate (CTR),  and bounces are common metrics you need to track on your affiliate campaign. SmartLead Campaign analytics help you improve your success by measuring the effectiveness of your email campaigns. This is done by tracing the metrics such as open rates, reply rates, and clickthrough rates. The in-depth analytics enables the marketer to make profitable decisions about the campaign types to focus on and the best messages to use. 

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Consider sending a short campaign series to inactive or low-engagement subscribers who have been unsubscribed, reminding them about all the good reasons for staying subscribed. Offer them an option to opt out if they don’t wish to be on your list. 

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Best Practices For Affiliate Email Marketing Campaign

This section will discuss how to build a successful affiliate marketing campaign and the best practices you need to implement as an affiliate on your next campaign. 

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Segmenting Your List 

Segment your prospect list based on their behavior, preference, and interest. You can easily promote the product or services based on the prospect's need through prospect list segmenting, and It will result in boosting your sales, conversion, and revenue. Segmenting your list will increase your email opt-ins and conversion rates. It helps businesses focus on each audience and enables marketers to send the right content to the right customer at the right time.

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Implementing Trigger  

According to the prospect's behavior, the trigger messages are sent to the prospect. It is categorized into two event-based and segment based. Event-based triggers are sent when a customer purchases or subscribes to an opt-in. In contrast, segment-based are sent when the customer meets conditions. 

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Trigger email nurture campaign is used to nurture interested customers and educate them on how they can benefit from your product or service offerings. These outreaches are also used to give important updates and motivate positive behaviors of the customer.

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Email Personalization 

Email that contains personalized subject lines has a higher open rate of more than 26%  than the subject line with our personalization. Email that is penalized helps the receiver to have a personal connection with the brand, and it improves the response rate more than the generic one. 

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Personalization in affiliate marketing helps the marketer to build trust among the targeted customer base. Through personalization, you can establish and strengthen your business relationship with them. 

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Optimize Your Content

The success of affiliate marketing will rely on how professional you are with the audience. Your copy indicates how much you are an expert within your niche. It will make your subscriber consider the recommendation of your product/service offerings of the specific brand. 

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Your cold outreach copy needs to show your deeper understanding of the particular product/service within the industry and your expertise in the field. You will have a more successful affiliate marketing email campaign if the customer trusts you. You can gain trust with your targeted audience by using stories, video clips, images, and more.

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Automate Your Affiliate Campaign

To make your affiliate campaigns successful, it is vital to introduce automation in your outreach process. Automation software like SmartLead helps you schedule multiple campaigns at the prospect time zone. Automation allows you to send bulk emails and schedule mail-outs in seconds easily. 

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Implementation of the automation software enables you to track the outreach performance. The analytics feature of this cold email software will help you track your clicks, bounces, and opens so that you can modify based on what has worked best in the past when it comes time for campaign optimization.

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Do A/B test

A/B testing to discover which outreach copy for your target audience gets better results. In affiliate marketing, you can use the same technique to measure the effectiveness of different campaigns.

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Wrapping it up

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Automation can help you manage your affiliate campaigns more effectively and efficiently. By automating the process, you can save time and ensure that your affiliates get the information they need to promote your products. We believe this article has given you a better understanding of how marketing automation can benefit your affiliate campaigns. Start trying affiliate email marketing today!