How to Use Email Marketing to Increase Your Affiliate Sales [Ultimate Guide]

In the following email marketing for affiliates guide, you will learn what email marketing is and, most importantly, how to use email marketing to generate affiliate sales and increase your commissions.

Before anything else, you should never forget that your audience isn’t waiting for your emails– you are likely interrupting them. That’s why you need to offer a compelling reason for them to give you 10 seconds to read it and then do an auction (visit a website, purchase a product, etc.).

Briefly, email marketing is an aspect of direct marketing used mainly to promote your products or services. You send emails to build relationships with your subscribers and leads by providing them relevant and helpful advice to help them take action and go a step closer to achieving their goals.

There are plenty of solid reasons you should start email marketing to generate affiliate sales.

1. Six Reasons for starting an email list today

When you build an email list, you can get more people to subscribe to receive your emails.

The more ways you offer your visitors to subscribe to your Email, the bigger your email list will be.

You should know from the beginning that your email list will become one of the essential ingredients of your affiliate marketing blogging success.

So here are the reasons why you should start with list building from the very beginning:

1.1 Promote new or newly updated content

With an email list, you can drive a flood of traffic to new (or freshly updated) pieces of affiliate content.

Let’s pretend you have an affiliate blog about the best running shoes.

You just published a shiny new guide reviewing a brand new item from Nike.

Without an email list, that page sits there until you start ranking for your targeted keywords on Google or paying for PPC ads on Google and Facebook. You might get some traffic to the page from visitors who click links from your other pages, but it’ll take a while before you start driving enough traffic to generate revenue from it.

With an email list, you can drive hundreds to thousands of visitors to the page as soon as you publish it for every new article you write. That makes producing new affiliate content more profitable since you can see immediate profits from your promoting product.

Not only that, but it’s like having your dedicated outreach database. Instead of cold emailing a bunch of people to check it out and hope they share it, you can send it to thousands of people who have already asked to receive it with a single broadcast email. That results in an immediate boost of traffic to the page, feedback, social shares, links, mentions, and most importantly, sales.

The same goes for your old pieces of content. For example, let’s say you wrote an article last year about the 50 best running shoes of 2021.

In 2022, you can re-update that article, add a bunch of new shoes to it (with brand new affiliate links), and blast it out to your email list. Again, immediate profits you can realize much faster than if you were just to publish and wait for it to rank.

The point is, that you have the control to send a lot of traffic to the pages you want. And that’s an exciting thing to have for an online business.

1.2 Direct traffic to your most profitable pages

Let’s start with the one that directly affects your affiliate sales.

If you’re collecting emails, you can create autoresponders. Whenever someone subscribes, they receive a series of pre-written emails. I do this using ConvertKit.

Why is that good?

Because within these emails, you’re able to direct more people to the pages you want them to see, maximizing traffic to your highest converting affiliate pages. You’re adding another traffic source for your more profitable pages instead of relying on Google.

But wait. Wouldn’t trying to collect email addresses distract users from clicking on affiliate links?

No. You can optimize your opt-in forms according to your site’s primary objectives. So if your goal is to get the maximum amount of people to click on your affiliate links, simply don’t show any forms during this stage.

You can use ConvertKit or OptinMonster (exclusive discount here) to build exit-intent popups only to show an opt-in form when the reader is about to hit the back button. Exit-intent popups convert exceptionally well.

1.3. Email Helps You To Make A Connection With Your Audience

Building an email list is vital because it’s the best way to build a connection with your audience in a personal way. People will subscribe to your email list because they like the things you share.

When you send them emails, they will be thrilled because they like you and trust you enough that they want to see more of what you have to offer.

1.4 Run special affiliate product launches

If a company you’re promoting runs any special promotion, an email list allows you to take advantage of that and use it for a launch.

For example, if Nike decides to run a huge sale one week for their Fall collection, you can treat that as a chance to do a big launch to your email list.

You can use their sales deadline as your scarcity factor and run a full-blown launch campaign.

1.4.1 Partner with companies to run exclusive promotions

If your email list becomes large enough, you can get companies to partner with you and run launches for their new products or any deals they’re offering. This is a little more work, and many affiliate sites never get large enough to make this work, but it can be done if you build up a sizeable audience.

1.4.2 You can run your product launches

Want to add another income stream to your affiliate site?

Creating your product can be a very profitable option. I’ve seen this first hand for my content sites.

Revenue earned per product sale will usually be multiple times higher than a 5% affiliate commission, so it can quickly outgrow your affiliate revenue, especially if you’re using evergreen sales funnels.

1.5. Email Is An Effective Way To Grow Your Social Media Channels

Your audience is probably not following you on all your social media accounts, and Email is a great way to tell them about the places you share your content.

Make sure you grow your social media accounts while growing your email list. Don’t forget to invite your followers on social media and join your email list.

When you are just starting with email marketing, you don’t have the set-up to grow your email list. Even if that sounds discouraging, don’t worry because you can set up everything you need in one hour.

1.6 An email list increases your site’s valuation

Apart from the fact that it gets valued higher due to higher monthly revenue, an email list is a bonus for selling your site.

An email list is an asset on its own, and as you learned, many options become available to you when you have grown a large subscriber base.

Including an email list of thousands of people can make it more attractive to buyers and increase your site’s valuation since you’re adding another asset to it.

One of my recent sites was listed for sale with a list of nearly 10,000 people, and it received a valuation of over 30x monthly revenue.

2. How to build an email list for affiliate marketing

With around 300 billion emails sent each day, there’s a lot of competition for your audience’s attention. That’s why it’s essential to learn the correct email marketing method, so you can catch up with your target audience and hold their attention.

2.1 Sign Up With an Email Service Provider

First, you will want to sign up with an email service provider.

Email service providers will help you capture new subscribers, create awesome emails and newsletters, organize your subscribers, segment them, and provide all the statistics you need after sending an email.

I recommend the email provider, especially for beginners, is HubSpot’s free email marketing tool. It enables you to create, personalize, and optimize marketing emails that look professional. There is a combination of features to help you build the best email marketing campaigns.

My top two recommendations for advanced users are Activecampaign and Convertkit. I ran my business on MailChimp, then moved to Aweber, CoverKit, Drip, Infusionsoft, and ActiveCampaign. From all of that, these two suggested options stand out for different reasons.

Some top-rated email service providers are on my shortlist, and Drip is a solid platform and seems to fit somewhere between CovertKit and ActiveCampaign. It has great automation and an excellent email builder, but where ConvertKit and ActiveCampaign stand out in their respective areas, Drip didn’t amaze me. And Infusionsoft, for a pretty long time, has been the standard for automation. I used it for a while and then found that even simple automation requires a whole complex bunch of tags to set up, but managing and changing these things can become an absolute nightmare.

So as I said, my top two recommendations for email service providers are ConvertKit and ActiveCampaign.

2.2 Create Your Opt-in Form

An opt-in is a form of permission given by your visitors to contact them with additional information.

Opt-in forms allow you to grow your subscriber list by collecting email addresses. They can be presented as popup forms on the homepage or landing pages and built-in widgets across your website.

If this looks complicated and you just want a simple form, you can check Hello Bar and Sumo.

2.3 Hello Bar

Hello, Bar is a WordPress plugin that you can use to add a notification bar at the top of your WordPress blog and some other popups to help you engage with your visitors. These notification bars help boost conversion, drive traffic to a particular page, or increase affiliate sales.

Hello, Bar is a decent lead generation tool and offers a free plan. Setting it up is very easy.

• Type your domain name in the homepage text box to create an account.
• After creating an account, you can choose from the different types of Hello Bar. If you’re using it to collect emails, you’ll want to choose to show an announcement or collect Email.
• Then fill in the information for the bar, like color and message.
• Use the Next button to continue through the five main steps or click the left menu tabs.

When you click Save and publish, you can choose the installation option. Install the code yourself or install the Hello Bar plugin to make it easier.

2.4 Create Your Content Upgrade

You have to create a content upgrade that will add more value to your content and convert the visitors into subscribers. Those visitors will give you their email addresses in exchange for the free content upgrade.

Content upgrades are specific and targeted. Because of that, they can improve your conversion rates while increasing your chances of making the sale. A visitor who downloads your content upgrade is very interested in what you are talking about, and it’s more likely that he will follow your affiliate link.

Open your best blog posts on your website and think about what you can create to add more value to that particular piece of content. Ask yourself what problem is the reader encountering. What information does it cover?

When you have a few ideas, create them.

It’s not nuclear physics and won’t take more than an hour or two per content upgrade.

Here’s a list of content upgrades you can create easily:

When you know what you want to offer and create it, you have to insert the content upgrade into the content and offer it to your visitors.

2.5 Create Your Lead Magnet

In the previous paragraph, I explained your content’s conversion rate optimization. But you’ll want your whole website to be optimized. So now, I’ll show you how to optimize the site-wide conversion rate.

That means you’re going to try that more of the traffic that visits your site, sign up for your email list. You’ll do this by creating a lead magnet.

A lead magnet is practically the same as a content upgrade, but it’s not specific. You can create checklists, PDF articles, challenges, or blueprints. You can choose to offer whatever you want but keep in mind that it has to be made for the bigger part of your target audience.

So, content upgrades are tied for the specific blog post and lead magnets for your website’s general theme.

As I already said, you won’t do good if you just ask for emails. Instead of just asking for emails, you offer something in exchange for their emails. That’s why you need to create a site-wide opt-in offer.

It can be simple. Just offer something and set up your email apps just like you did for the content upgrade.

You can increase your site conversion rate by giving your visitors more chances to subscribe.

For example, let’s say you are using Sumo, so you have the Welcome Mat and add an exit-intent popup. So visitors who weren’t ready to subscribe with a welcome mat get another opportunity to subscribe when they leave your website. This way, you can collect emails you wouldn’t collect otherwise.

How does it sound to you? Not bad, right?

Remember, if you distract visitors with too many things to do when they visit your page, they probably won’t do anything at all. Remove distractions and only keep what is necessary on your page.

So far, you’ve discovered how to set up email technology and how to set up your website and content to collect emails. Now it’s time to write a couple of emails you’ll send to your new subscribers through autoresponder on an automated schedule.

2.6 Create a Landing Page

A landing page is a page that is specifically designed to get and convert traffic from your online marketing campaign. I recommend using an affiliate marketing theme with high converting landing page templates.

3. Writing Your First Emails

It’s best to write a couple of emails simultaneously and save them to your autoresponder. Otherwise, you’ll have to constantly think about creating content for your emails.

Just focus on creating several valuable emails to keep your subscribers engaged for a couple of hours.

Do you think you can do this?

I bet you can. It doesn’t have to be complicated. Just do it.

Types Of Emails You Can Send To Your Subscribers

You can choose some of these ten different types of emails. Start with the Welcome Email, and go down the list until you create at least 4.

3.1 Welcome Email

A welcome email is your chance to tell your subscribers more about you, your website, and how they can benefit from it. You must start to build a connection with them immediately after subscribing.

Don’t forget to include a call to action of what you want your subscribers to do next, like following you on social media. Take advantage of the momentum while they are still interested in what you are offering.

Remember, they have to get this Email right after subscribing.

3.2. Expectation Email

You should include when you’ll send emails, how often you’ll send them, and what you’ll send them in this Email.

You should also include a call to action to whitelist your email address. This will tell your email service provider that your emails are not spam.

You can include this into a welcome email if you want or send it separately a day after your welcome email.

3.3. Resources Email

This Email should include a list of free and paid tools you use (make sure you have your affiliate links) to help your audience get the desired results.

Send it at the beginning of the sequence while they are still engaged.

3.4. Inquiring Email

With this Email, you invite them to tell you about their challenges around your topic. In the end, let them know that you will read every response you get. This can help to achieve maximum engagement from your subscribers.

They will tell you precisely what to write about in your future emails to please them.

Asking your audience about issues they’re experiencing will help you create content and give you insight into exactly what your audience wants. You can use their exact words for your sales copy, content, and emails.

Send it within the first couple of weeks.

3.5. Informative Email

In this Email, you ask them to respond to you with information about themselves. As an affiliate marketer, you want to know as much as you can about your subscribers. The more information you get from them, the more targeted your marketing can be, achieving more sales.

It should be different from inquiring Email, don’t ask for their issues with your topic. Ask them about their lives and experience with your topic in general.

Send this one within the first two or three weeks.

3.6. Free Gift Email

Every once in a while, send your subscribers a gift. It can be a worksheet, a video, or a tool to help them. You have to surprise them from time to time and remind them that subscribing to your list was a good choice they made.

Send it often if you can.

3.7. Exclusive Content Email

Sending out emails with exclusive content to your subscribers is a great way to reward them for being on your list. It helps build loyalty.

You don’t have to complicate here; you can give them exclusive content in a shorter form, like a couple of quick tips. Just give them something that can not be found on your website.

Send them maybe once a month. The more exclusive and valuable content you give to your subscribers, they’ll be more interested in what you have to say.

3.8. Content Email

Content teasers are an incredible way to get your subscribers back to your website because they can excite them about a post you’ve published. So every time you publish new content, send a content email to notify subscribers about it.

There is another, more straightforward way to do similar things. It’s called RSS to Email. I prefer content teasers because people will come back to your website, and with RSS to Email, you automatically send the whole post into subscribers’ inbox, so they don’t need to visit your site.

Send them every time you publish something new.

3.9. Recommendation Email

You share other people’s content in this Email, so you don’t have to create it yourself. For example, you can tell them about ten articles you enjoyed so they can read them too.

You can send them regularly or anytime you need a break.

3.10. Newsletter Email

Newsletters are regular updates about your site. Send them when you have updates to share with your subscribers.

Best of all, after creating these 10, you can repeat 8 of them for a continual follow-up sequence.

4. The Best Time To Send An Email Campaign

If you have no idea how to schedule your emails, here’s a quick guide.

You should send the first emails faster, as you are getting your new subscriber introduced to you. Then, you need to back off for a couple of days. You don’t have to follow that exact format, but don’t email every day. If you send too often, that can increase your email unsubscribe rates.

4.1 When to send your emails

5. Email Marketing Segmentation

Email marketing segmentation divides your email subscribers into smaller lists based on different criteria. With Segmentation, you have the ability to send only the most relevant information to your email subscribers based on their particular interests.

You realize that not everybody will be interested in everything you write about, so every website has different audience categories (or segments).

Let’s say, for example, that you have a fitness blog. Some of your readers might want to lose weight, and others want to gain muscles. Those are some segments of that audience.

Your audience has segments, too. Think of the larger categories that could fit your audience. When you’ve recognized these categories, set up segments related to those categories in your email service provider. Surveys and quizzes work wonders when it comes to Segmentation.

After doing this, you can connect your content upgrades to different segments.

Segmentation is an important part of email marketing. Believe me, once your list grows, you’ll be glad you do Segmentation and have an organized email list. Without email marketing segmentation, connecting with your subscribers and boosting your conversion rate is challenging.

6. Email Marketing KPIs

How do you know that your campaign efforts are paying off, and most importantly, what can you do to get the desired results?

Through KPIs of email marketing!

KPIs or performance indicators are like “your on-board computer,” which shows you moving in the right direction or away from it.

We’ll show you 9 KPIs for email marketing that you should monitor in your campaigns by the end of this article.

One thing to keep in mind: in this article, we will not address the average values ​​(benchmarks) for these indicators because they vary depending on the niche, the stage in the funnel, etc.

Okay, let’s go.

6.1. Open Email Rate

This is the percentage of subscribers who open an email sent by you.

Email Open Rate FAQ

6.2. Click-through Rate

It is one of the essential email marketing KPIs. This is the percentage of subscribers who click on one or more of the links in an email you sent.

Click-through rate FAQ

6.3. Conversion Rate

As the name suggests, the conversion rate is the percentage of subscribers who clicked on one or more email links and completed the desired action (e.g., filling out a form or purchasing a product/service). This is one of the most common email marketing KPIs marketers and entrepreneurs look for.

Email Campaigns Conversion Rate FAQ

6.4. ROI (Return on investment)

The ROI is the percentage obtained from division no. of the total sales obtained following a campaign. Total investment.

Email campaigns ROI FAQs

6.5. Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is another KPI for email marketing that you need to pay attention to. This is represented by the percentage of email addresses where our message was not delivered due to email providers (e.g., Yahoo, Gmail, etc.)

The bounce rate is divided into two categories:

• Soft Bounce – These are usually emails that “return” due to situations such as attachment too large or the recipient’s inbox being full.
• Hard Bounce – Represents invalid emails (domain name is incorrect or does not exist)

Bounce rate FAQs

6.6 Conclusion on email marketing KPIs

In conclusion, we recommend checking and analyzing each email marketing KPIs for your email campaigns. They will help you follow the process closely to develop new ideas or tactics where appropriate.

7. Fast List Building Techniques

At this point, we set everything up, and now you can continue creating content and content upgrades and wait a couple of months before you start getting significant traffic from Google.

Or you can try some of the most effective, fast list-building techniques available to grow your list quickly and see the power of email marketing.

7.1 Give Something Away

Giveaways are one of the best strategies to drive visitors to your site and grow your email list.

You have to select something valuable to give away to your audience. Something that is specific to them and what they will want to have. Then promote the giveaway on giveaway submission sites, social media, and your website and make it necessary to sign up for your email list to enter the giveaway.

You can use the RafflePress plugin for WordPress to get your visitor’s attention with giveaways. They’ll have to enter their email address to participate, and they can share it to earn additional entries.

7.2 Create Cornerstone Content

Cornerstone articles are long, informational articles that integrate knowledge from different blog posts and cover everything necessary about a specific topic. They should provide the best and most complete information, so don’t use them to sell products.

Cornerstone content is viral in that it’s so good that your readers cannot help but share it. That’s why it needs to be detailed. If you just scratch your topic, nobody is going to share it.

All your other posts about related topics should link to the cornerstone article. This internal linking structure will increase the chance of your cornerstone content articles ranking in Google searches.

After you’ve created the content, you should also create a content upgrade. Cornerstone content with a content upgrade can be your most valuable list-building tool.

7.3 Write a Guest Post

The difference between cornerstone content and guest post is instead of writing a fantastic piece of content for your own site, you write it for your competition.

You are looking for blogs with content related to your niche and an engaged audience interested in your niche. By engaged, I mean that posts have been shared and commented.

As for your cornerstone content should also create a content upgrade that the audience can’t resist and link to it in your bio if the host site allows that.

Guest posting is a great strategy to grow your email list to do email marketing, connect with other blog owners, and build backlinks and social proof.

Conclusion

Let’s summarize:

• Get an email service provider and an email capture tool
• Create content upgrades, lead magnets, and landing pages
• Write at least 4 emails and add them to the autoresponder
• Don’t forget about Segmentation
• Use giveaways, cornerstone content with content upgrades, and guest posting to rapidly grow your email list and get your email marketing onto a higher level.

That’s it. I hope you have more knowledge about email marketing, and now it’s up to you how you’re going to use it.

Studies show that email marketing still beats other digital marketing channels like social media and paid search. Email marketing is the best long-term investment with a high return, and one of the biggest mistakes you can make is not to build an email list from the start.

Email lists can significantly influence traffic and your opportunities for success with your online business.