Guide to Being Successful at Email Marketing for Affiliate Marketers

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Email Marketing is the act of sending electronic mail as a means of communicating commercial messages to an audience who are potential or even current customers. It is a phenomenon tool and it is a necessary tool for internet marketing.

Importance of Email Marketing

Marketing your products or services by email can be a fast, flexible, and cost-effective way of reaching new customers and retaining existing customers. A good email marketing strategy can help you grow your online business way more than you could imagine.

Below are More Advantages of Using Email Marketing:

Even if a social platform or website you are using shut down, you will still have your list of fans.

Posting on platforms such as niche sites or social media doesn’t guarantee all your fans see your content. But you are guaranteed that the email was sent.

When you post on Facebook, there is a possibility that only 2% of your fans saw it while 0% of your Twitter fans may see your post. On the other hand, data presented by MailChimp show that the average open rate for emails across all industries is at 21.80%, and the average click-through rate is 2.78%. This shows that email marketing has the power to deliver way more content than a social media post.

Cultivate strong relationships: Email marketing can allow you to create targeted and personalized messages as well as share multiple messages. You can send several stories and promos in one email, thus providing a bunch of useful information at once. This can help you to build meaningful relationships with prospects, leads, current customers, and even past customers because it gives you a chance to speak directly to them, in their inbox, at a time that is convenient to them.

When to Use Email Marketing

1. Lead Generation: Convince your potential customers to provide their email addresses in exchange for a lead magnet (an asset that they’d find valuable).
2. Product Marketing: Promote your own or even affiliate products and services.
3. Brand Awareness: Keep your brand top-of-mind for the moment when your prospects are ready to engage.
4. Build Relationships: Email allows you to establish relationships through personalized engagement.
5. Content Promotion: You can use email to share relevant niche site content or useful assets with your audience.
6. Lead Nurturing: provide your customers with valuable content that can help them reach their goals.

Getting Started with Email Marketing

Email marketing is not a walk in the park. But with practice, it can become easy and a game-changer.

Below are the key things to get you started building a strong email campaign that will delight your potential customers:

Identify Your Target Persona

It is important to send people emails that are relevant to them.  To be clear on who you are targeting, you need to create a complete description of that person.

Grab a cup of coffee and a piece of paper or open a document and start writing the description. Include things like:

Name

Age

Gender

Job Description

Hobbies

Write down every detail. What is it that this person does at work, and even when socializing? The more details you can include, the easier it will be for you to target this person as you implement your brand strategy.

As you build your persona’s profile, you must get inside their head and figure out their motivations. This will help you identify how you can help them achieve their goals as a way to achieve your own goals. 

Write Clear and Specific Goals

Before you start an email campaign, you need to have clear and realistic goals. But first, I would advise that you research on google to gather some context, especially if you are a beginner and have no previous campaigns to benchmark on. Go on and do research on the average email statistics for your niche and use them as a point of reference for your goals.

With the information that you get from your research and based on the audience on your email list, decide exactly what you want to accomplish with an email and maintain that goal with whatever you distribute. You could be trying to sell to them or maybe updating your list with a newsletter. 

Whatever your focus, keep it short and sweet. No one has time to read a lengthy email.

Which Email Tool is Best for Beginners in Email Marketing?

To create an email list, you need to get hosted by a 3rd party.

You have many options to choose from:

• Mail Chimp
• Aweber
• Get Response
• Karta
• Active Campaign
• MailerLite

If you are a beginner, I recommend that you use Convertkit  FREE plan. These guys have a free plan of up to 1000 subscribers. I am sure if you manage to get 1000 subscribers; you will be able to make money for upgrading. So basically, there is zero investment there.           

But, whatever platform you chose, you have to then create a list and it is super easy. I don’t know how to do it on all platforms but with their guidance in the form of tutorials you can figure it out, it is very easy.

Create a Lead Magnet With an Opt-in Form

What is in for them? For all this email marketing to work, you need something that will make people subscribe to your list and that’s where a lead magnet comes in. A lead magnet is a piece of value that is good enough to have people want to get it for free. It is a free piece of content, so people are going to opt into a funnel to access your lead magnet.

It is something that you give away for free in exchange for somebody’s name and email or whatever you’re collecting but of course, the email should be part of it.

Here are a few types of lead magnets you could create:

Ebook

Video Training

Mini-Course Pdf

Report or Study

Tool

Template

Webinar or Course

Checklist

The bottom line is that it should be relevant, useful, and makes your audiences’ lives easier. If you’re short on resources, you can even repurpose your existing content to create lead magnets.

If you are an affiliate marketer, many vendors have freebies available for affiliates to give out as bonuses. Just ask for them. Overall, you need to give your prospects more value to boost your credibility.

For beginners, you may find it easy to create a pdf. One powerful and free tool to use is Canva. You don’t need to have technical skills to use this tool.

Capture Email Addresses

After getting traffic to your landing page, you need to ‘capture’ your visitors’ email addresses. To do this, there must be an opt-in offer (in the form of a lead magnet), to collect emails.

One way is to have a headline, maybe a little sub-headline that has an opt-in field for people to put their name and email. All you need is their name and email address to get started. 

Don’t ask for too much information at this point. It may discourage them from filling in the form.  

Once they give you their name and email you are going to have your autoresponder send the lead magnet to them, whatever it is, book, video training, etc.

Promise Privacy

Many prospects may be hesitant to sign up for an email list unless you promise them you will keep their email addresses and personal information private. This should be promised upfront.

A privacy statement must be included at the bottom of every email you send. It should be very short and to the point and must promise that you will never give out email addresses to third parties.

Example:

Your privacy is important to us. We will not disclose your personal information to any third party unless you have given us consent.

You must also make sure that they have a choice to unsubscribe in case they don’t want to receive communication from you anymore.

Grab Their Attention

Write an effective subject line

The headline is the most significant part of any email copy. You, therefore, want to make sure that you write it with care because if it does not catch the attention of the receiver, they will not open and therefore will not read the email. The headline should evoke curiosity to make people want to read the body of the email.

Think about your audience at all times when you are writing the headlines. Is it enticing enough for them to go on and read the email? Put yourself in their shoes. Always remember it is not about you but your audience, offer what they want.

In your headline, you can use trigger words and phrases such as:  will change your life, important, Re: did you get this ?.. Discover, secret, click the link, Did you get this earlier? I want you to get this: This video can change you forever, Drop everything. Your customized picks are here”, you’re on the list, etc. 

The bottom line is to make sure your subject line always creates curiosity in the receiver. Always plan emails very well before you send them.

Another trick is to use phrases that are time-sensitive such as a limited time bonus, expiring at midnight tonight, only a few more hours to claim it, etc.

You can also use a hyperlink and highlight it. And don’t put the link once only. It should appear at the top, middle, bottom of the email so they can easily click on it.

You can also use the PS method at the end of the email. Look at the example below:

Talk to you soon

PS: —- [link] This video will change your life.

Say something that suits your email message well. At the end of the day,  you want to enhance the chances of clicking. Just use it wisely, for example, don’t use PS every time.

Provide Interesting and Easy to Read Content

There should be continuity between the subject line and the content of the mail. Information given in the email must flow.  Once they’ve opened up the email, the first three sentences should also be catchy enough to keep them reading.

Instead of pitching your product right away, make the email about your readers. Do not describe your products and all the amazing services you provide. Instead, write about problems that might be troubling your readers, and only then introduce solutions that include your products and services.

You can achieve this by telling a story, building a mystery, or even being creative and use a convincing image in the email body.

The bottom line is to try by all means to reiterate the benefits of the product or offer.

And you don’t have to be so serious, be casual sometimes. For example, you can write:

Hey, I came across this, it’s about this, and maybe you can check it out 

                                              or

I also want to give you this extra book, check it out.

Create a Call to Action

Make sure you have a clear call to action in your email; this should tell readers exactly what you want them to do (your goal). However, the action does not necessarily mean getting them to buy something immediately. The goal could be getting them to reply to the email or even just getting them to click a link that brings them to your website or YouTube channel.

Although it is possible to take them straight to the selling page, you will have more success getting people interested in reading more about your offer.  The bottom line is to have an actionable element that keeps them engaged and very important, that you can track.

Don’t Sell all the Times

Do not always send promotional emails. At times you must send non-promotional emails. By this, I mean emails that consist of informative and niche relevant articles or videos on YouTube or embedded on your website. As a result, leads are sent into those videos from an email which increases your channel or page views. That can be beneficial in the long run.

Preview and Test Before You Send

Once you are done writing your emails, preview the email on both PC and mobile versions. Before you send an email to your list, try an email test to make sure it goes through in the format you chose.

Don’t be afraid to test your emails with a part of your list. To do this, divide the list and send each part version with different subject lines or slightly different content. If you have a stronger response to one version, send that to the rest of your list. As time goes on, you’ll learn what resonates with your audience best. It is a learning process.

Send a Welcome Email to New Subscribers

Welcome emails are one of the most important communications you’ll ever send to your recipients. Regardless of the industry, your first email should be sent immediately after new subscriber signs up.

Some important tips for writing a welcoming email:

Thank your new subscriber by using his or her first name. This can get their attention and increase engagement.

Deliver What You Promised

If you promised a lead magnet, it is time to deliver. If you don’t keep your promise you will lose subscribers.

Set Expectations

Your new subscribers deserve to know what to expect from you. You must, therefore, explain the kind of emails you’ll send them, how regular you will send them, or if you will let them know when there are new products or promos. This will help define the relationship and avoid your audience from being taken by surprise by the content of your future emails.

Tell Them Who You Are

Go on tell them what your brand is all about. Introduce yourself. You can even show off your personality to start building a connection. This can be helpful when you want to sell your products or service in later emails because your subscribers will already be familiar with who you are and what you do.

Ask Subscribers to Whitelist You

The purpose of whitelisting is to improve your deliverability and make sure that your emails to subscribers don’t get filtered to spam. In that first email, give them instructions on how they can whitelist you. Just do it creatively.

Track the effectiveness of Your Email Campaign

It is very important to monitor the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns. It is the reason why I asked you to have an actionable element in the call to action section. This will help you make informed email marketing decisions and justify the effort and time you invest in email marketing campaigns.

The best way to analyze the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns is through A/B testing. This method helps you to see what type of email performs best with your audience by analyzing the results of email A against email B.

Below are the steps you must follow to perform the A/B testing on your emails:

Choose one variable to test at a time, e.g., subject line, Images, Call to Action.

Make two versions of the email: one with and one without the variable in Question.

Send your emails out concurrently for some time.

Study your results and keep only the version that performed better than the other.

Test a new variable and repeat the process.

If you are a beginner or don’t have time, no worries because most of the email service providers already have A/B testing built into their software, so it will be easy for you to compare your email results without much manual work to do.

Growing Your Email List

Here’s are proven ways to grow your email list:

Create a Contest

Create a contest related to your brand and ask the visitors to register for that. Offer an attractive prize to the participants and winners. If possible, you can also provide some discounts in the form of coupons.

Promote an Offer Through Social Media

Social media is one of the best media through which you can get many potential customers. With this strategy, you will create an offer through social media which requires an email address to grab that offer. Motivate your audiences to share. To spice it up, you may reward those who shared most.

Create a Niche Site that Readers Can Subscribe to

A niche site is an effective way of growing your email list. You can easily create an opt-in form on your site that will prompt visitors to give you their email addresses in exchange for valuable content. Seeing all the content and valuable content that you have posted on your site, it becomes possible for more visitors to opt-in to your list, expecting more.

Making the Most Out of Your List

To make the most out of your list, you can leverage your list with Facebook ads.

What you do is, upload these emails that you first download on a CSV file into a custom audience in your Facebook business manager right. When you upload a custom audience, Facebook will automatically create data around that audience. In other words, they create a lookalike audience of those emails, of similar people that have similar profiles to the emails you submitted. This is a very powerful strategy because you don’t have to worry about targeting the right people with the right interest. You just upload it and Facebook does the hard work for you.

Using Branded Email Address

For your campaigns, make sure you use a branded email address. Email from your domain looks more professional and can easily earn your trust as it signifies authority in your niche.

Bluehost’s basic plan includes 5 emails on your domain so as a beginner, make sure you use these instead of using Gmail.

Creating Different Email Lists

You need to segment your email list because each person who signs up to receive your emails is at a different level of readiness to convert into a customer. The best way is to keep email addresses organized in spreadsheets and make sure you separate them. At a minimum, you should have emails broken into lists of current customers, past customers, and prospective customers. This will help you to:

• Personalize content for different customers, each with their targeted content.

For example, the emails to your buyers’ list ( bought from you) must be different from your emails to your leads list(didn’t buy yet). You don’t want to keep emailing your buyers to list your lead offer because they’ll get upset since they already bought.  That way you can easily lose subscribers.

• Prevent spamming them with irrelevant content which is bad for your brand.

• Build relationships with your recipients. For example, you might send an email to customers who haven’t been in lately with an offer to get them back or send a special offer to your most loyal and regular customers.

The bottom line is to treat your subscribers like humans that you want to connect with, as opposed to a herd of leads that you’re trying to cage into a one-size-fits-all box. Believe me, the more you segment your list, the more trust you build with your leads, and the easier it’ll be to convert them into buyers.

Email Automation

We use an autoresponder for automation. Don’t get confused with an email platform – here I am referring to the functionality of marketing so it’s something you set up inside your email marketing platform. This is very important because it is what creates automation within your business.

When you have an autoresponder you can create emails ahead of time so you would sit down on a Sunday afternoon with a cup of coffee, you know and you just write up an email sequence.  An email sequence is a sequence where you create emails, so you’d have email no 1,2,3,4 however many sequences or emails you have and they would send right away.

Email two would be sent 24 hours after email one, email three would be sent 24 hours after email two. You only set it up one time and it continues to work for you behind the scene even if you are at the beach.

That is the purpose of an autoresponder. It gives you an easy way to monetize your list after a one-off task of lining up the emails by broadcast emails. After all, the purpose of broadcast emails is to nurture and build a relationship.

Nurturing Your Email List

Once you have captured their emails, you must start nurturing your contacts. I recommend that you first send them five emails before you start selling to them, but, it depends on your products or services. Starting selling to them straight away is a big NO. Here are the reasons why:  Before they buy from you, they need to trust you, so you need to give them time to trust you. Once they trust you, try to build a relationship with them.

Besides seeing the authority or expertise in you, they also want to see you as a friend, someone who is there for them. On your part, try to know your audience, let them know you care and are there to help them. By doing this, you build a long-term relationship that leads to your business success. You are likely to retain customers.

Once the above was attained, it is time to sell to them. This can be informational products such as video training, books, or anything from your affiliate programs.

Invest time in looking for different ways to improve and expand your email marketing strategy. As time goes, adapt to your audience’s changing tastes and want to scale up.