7 Tips and Tricks to Promote Your Products with Affiliate Email Marketing

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With a powerful market cap of $8.2 billion, affiliate email marketing is a business tactic definitely worth your time.


If you want to know how to create an affiliate email marketing campaign or discover the best places for an affiliate link to be embedded in, then climb on board.


We’ll teach you everything you need to know — and we’ll throw in some tips for affiliate success, as a bonus.


So without further adieu, let’s begin!

1. What is affiliate email marketing?

Affiliate email marketing is a method of affiliate marketing where you promote affiliate links using highly targeted and well-crafted emails.


Unlike traditional email marketing where the goal is to sell, in this case, the affiliate's goal is to share the benefit of the solutions they’ve used.


These email campaigns are designed to attract interest from your subscribers to improve your conversion rates and site traffic.


But what other benefits can affiliate email marketing programs give you?

2. The benefits of email marketing for affiliates

Creating an affiliate email marketing campaign comes with a whole array of benefits:

  • It’s cost-effective
  • You can create highly-targeted personalized emails
  • You have a worldwide audience to market to
  • Performance tracking is easy and near-immediate
  • You can send timely campaigns with little effort
  • The affiliate industry is highly-compliant with marketing laws
  • You have a forum to promote yourself

As mentioned earlier, you can also increase your email list and conversion rate.


Let’s examine some of these benefits in more detail.

2.1. Cost-effective

Because there are no postage or print costs with affiliate marketing, you can make a large impact in your business with minimal expenses.


Email marketing’s return on investment also sits at around $42 for every $1 spent, making it an attractive channel for affiliate marketers.


Another bonus of using email campaigns is that you can produce them much faster than printing formats.

2.2. Targeted personalized messages

Audience segmentation is something any affiliate email marketing campaign should be accustomed to.


Research your target audience to get to know who you want on the receiving end of your emails.


Creating targeted messages can start with something as simple as mentioning the customer by name.


You can also recommend products based on their purchase history or the needs they might have.


These small tweaks to your affiliate emails can improve the likelihood of users buying from you by up to 75%!


By segmenting your emails, you’ll be able to send the right emails and affiliate promotions to the right clients at the right time.

2.3. Market to the world

With more than 4.6 billion internet users across the globe, there’s no reason why your marketing efforts can’t be successful.


As an affiliate marketer, you can use emailing and social media to get your products into the hands of your audience.


Here are some hints to help with your marketing:

  • Don’t be impersonal84% of users are more willing to hand over their wallets if treated like a person and not a potential sale
  • Use FOMO to your advantage60% of millennials make a purchase after experiencing FOMO (fear of missing out) email campaigns
  • Join affiliate partnerships — The easiest way to promote affiliate products is to link up with affiliate partners

Depending on your niche market, offer sponsorships in the form of discounts or freebies to content creators in exchange for a space to promote your affiliate products or services.


By adding helpful links to your landing pages, you improve your chances of growing your email list and generating sales by almost 10%.

2.4. Responsive performance tracking

Compared to printed or even social media campaigns, the email ecosystem provides one of the easiest ways to track leads and effectively measure the performance of your affiliate emails within minutes.

systeme.io’s affiliate dashboard

systeme.io’s affiliate dashboard

With systeme.io’s affiliate program, you’ll be able to:

  • Track new leads and affiliates easily with in-depth analytics
  • Manage your affiliates, commission structures, and payouts
  • Publish any affiliate product or service on our marketplace

You can also integrate your email list, payment system, and membership sites into your affiliate dashboard.

2.5. Compliance

Any affiliate marketer worth their salt knows that when you launch an affiliate email campaign or simply send welcome emails, you need to be compliant with the laws and guidelines of the CAN-SPAM Act.


Normally, an email service provider, like ourselves, is already compliant with these laws.


However, it’s always good to do your research before choosing an affiliate email marketing program or email provider.


As an email marketing affiliate, here are some of the rules you need to follow when creating an affiliate email marketing campaign:

  • Your personalized subject lines and email headers may not provide false/misleading information
  • Always indicate when adding affiliate links to your email campaigns or general content
  • Make sure every email you send has an unsubscribe button
  • Don’t sell or reuse your email list for any other purpose than email marketing
  • Don’t keep the details of contacts that opt out

2.6. Increasing leads

Whether you want to be a sales rep or expand your audience circle, an affiliate email marketing campaign will help you do just that.


By using inbound email marketing, you’ll be able to boost your conversion and click-through rates (CTR).


Including lead scoring in your affiliate email marketing will provide you with numerical data based on values generated from past leads.


These values can include:

  • How leads engage with your website and brand
  • Personal demographics
  • Business information
  • Spam detection

This can help you turn a normal customer into a happy customer by formulating the right message for important leads.


It’ll also help with adding a more personal touch to your email marketing campaigns.


Now that you’ve learned of the benefits of affiliate email marketing, let’s look at tips and tricks to improve your affiliate marketing.

3. Affiliate email best practices

While focusing on the next few tips, also consider researching other platforms to promote and review your products on.

3.1. Make sure your email provider allows affiliate links

Many email service providers don’t approve of affiliate marketing because they’re afraid such emails would be marked as spam or blacklisted, damaging their deliverability rates.


If you pick the wrong email service provider, you could potentially lose access to your account or mailing list.


To be sure your email provider will allow you to launch an affiliate email campaign, contact their support team before signing up.

3.2. Use affiliate links in your existing email sequence

If you already have an email sequence with high click-through and open rates, go back to the email copy and subtly add your affiliate links.


Make sure it doesn’t break the flow of your content.


It’s also important that you don’t overburden your email sequence with affiliate offers.


Your audience could become annoyed if you continually try to sell them something and you could get your account locked if your deliverability drops.


Instead, keep your content fresh and valuable, and post regularly to grow your email list.


As you gain new subscribers, you’ll get new eyes on your affiliate promotions, which could start to generate a good passive income.


You can also use your existing email sequence to drive users to resources where you promote your affiliate products, like a blog post or YouTube video.

3.3. Use the right affiliate links

Once you’ve hunted down products or services to link to, make sure they follow a set of criteria.


The right affiliate links are:

  • Relevant

Only share affiliate links related to your niche content. Irrelevant products or services might cause users to unsubscribe from your mailing list.

  • Evergreen

Evergreen products can provide a good passive income because they’re unlikely to change over time, saving you unnecessarily updating your product list.


If you find a product that boosts sales over certain holidays, create a separate timed affiliate marketing campaign for it.

  • Profitable

Although affiliate marketing is free, it still costs you time.


Make sure the products you promote have a strong commission rate and return on investment for the time you put in.

An example of Amazon’s affiliate commission rates

An example of Amazon’s affiliate commission rates

High commission rates also mean you don’t have to sell as many units to live sustainably.

3.4. Re-engage with quiet clients

Source: ReallyGoodEmails.com

If you want to keep your conversion rates from dropping, consider resending some of your marketing campaigns to inactive users.


Simply segment the leads with low engagement rates and send through your emails again.


With 45% of recipients reading re-engagement emails, it might just be that your emails weren’t seen the first time around.

3.5. Add social proof to your email marketing campaign

Adding customer success stories and social proof to your affiliate marketing campaign can help boost your trustworthiness as well as credibility.

Source: CharlesNgo.com

It’s also really easy to do.


Ask customers to review your products or send in testimonials in exchange for a freebie or discount.


Alternatively, sharing any achievements you have as an affiliate marketer, or famous companies that you work with, is a sure-fire way to get clients on your side.


For a more in-depth look, give this post by Sprout Social a read.

4. Best places to add your affiliate link

Where you’re adding affiliate links when you launch an affiliate email is just as important as choosing which affiliate links you want to add.


Here are some of the best places to add your valuable affiliate links:

  • Product reviews and tutorials
  • Your resources page
  • Your website (affiliate banners)
  • Newsletters and email sequences
  • Video content
  • Social media and forums
  • Your own products

Let’s do a quick dive into each of these points, shall we?

4.1. Product reviews and tutorials

When creating content in your niche, focus on these 2 types:

  • Reviews — Use these with comparisons to target users with purchase intent to make sales
  • Tutorials — Use these with guides to build traffic and improve your web authority

Write honest, transparent, and fair reviews about the products you’re promoting (and linking to) on your affiliate site.

Source: Business2Community.com

You can also create a review template, like the example above, and add it to your email with your affiliate links.


Use SEO tactics to make sure your review pops up when users are researching the products you’re promoting.


For reviews, provide everything a potential customer might want to know about, such as:

  • The top pros and cons of using the product
  • Examples and screenshots of others who have been successful with the product
  • Useful tips when using the product
  • How and where to buy the product

For product tutorials, you’ll add the same features as with reviews, as well as teach users in-depth steps on how to use the product.


Finish your content with a CTA that’s linked to your products.

4.2. Your Resources page

To grow your authority as an affiliate marketer, create a Resources page on your website highlighting the top tools and products you recommend.


These have to be products you actively use — no lying.


On this page, list these products and add a short description of them.


When linking to these products, as a bonus, try to link to free trials for your leads to test.

4.3. Your website (affiliate banners)

Although affiliate banners are more visually appealing, some users might turn a blind eye to them, so use them sparingly.


Banners can be:

  • Placed on the sidebar, header or footer of your content page
  • Embedded in blog content
  • Added to your email marketing messages
Source: DreamHost.com

Simply check if your affiliate marketing program allows the use of banners, get the HTML link, and copy-paste it on your website.

4.4. Newsletters and email sequences

To get visitors to sign up for any new email sequence you’ll distribute, add an email sign-up form on your website.


Remember to share useful content if you want to grow your email list.


Besides discounts, you can also share exclusive content in your newsletters not published online.


Value first. Sales second.


Instead of pumping an entire campaign full of links, link to relevant articles in your welcome email series that your audience might benefit from.


Let your affiliate marketing on those posts drive your revenue.

4.5. Video content

Adding links to your video content is fairly simple.


There are 2 ways to do this:

  • Add affiliate links on your video descriptions
  • Use YouTube annotations

Annotations are those transparent boxes that pop up on YouTube videos during specific times in the video, usually with a call to action.


Some users might prefer to turn annotations off, so remember to call out the links in your descriptions to be sure viewers are made aware.


Seeing as we mentioned YouTube, let’s consider other platforms too.

4.6. Social media and forums

Not every social media channel will be suitable for your audience, and promotional content is often frowned upon, so you need to be smart.


You can market your affiliate content for free, which is great for affiliate marketers just starting.


As a default rule, include your links in all your profile descriptions.


Let’s look at how to promote your affiliate business on the following platforms:

  • Facebook

Without spamming your followers’ feeds with your affiliate marketing links, post interesting, entertaining, and educational content that will convince them to click on your links.

  • Instagram

Because Instagram posts aren’t clickable, instead use the Sticker feature to add your affiliate link to your Stories.


Make sure you’ve built up a sizable fanbase first.

  • Pinterest

As a visual social media platform, you can share your links by creating pins and boards around a specific topic and then adding your products.


You could also add your link to a pin in a broader topic.


For example, if you market for a pet toy company, create a board filled with fun tips and ideas to keep your pets happy and healthy.


Add your links to 1 or 2 pins within that board to market your toys.

  • Twitter

You only have 280 characters at your disposal, so you’ll need to get creative with your links.


Experiment with different styles of copywriting and see which ones entice your audience to click on your links.


You can also pair your copy (and links) with images or videos to make your content more appealing for your audience.

  • Forums

Forums like Quora and Reddit don’t allow you to directly link your affiliate posts — this is considered spam and could ban your account.


Instead, link to your affiliate site and market to your audience from there.

4.7. Your own products

The last, and most obvious, place to link to is your own products.


As your following grows, you could consider creating courses on specific topics in your niche or ebooks teaching others how to achieve your success.


For example, if you want to teach users how to build a website, your first chapter could have a link to sign up to systeme.io as your website builder.

5. Systeme.io — Easy email marketing for affiliates

systeme.io logo

systeme.io logo

As an all-in-one ecommerce machine, systeme.io offers the perfect affiliate email marketing program to help you get started.


With us, you can earn up to 60% lifetime commissions every time your affiliate link is used to purchase a systeme.io subscription or course.


Even if you’re not a systeme.io customer, you can still sign up for our affiliate program — no questions asked and no conditions that need to be met.


Systeme.io offers features perfect for affiliate marketers that allow you to:

  • Send unlimited emails using automated email sequences
  • Get direct access to professionally designed email templates focused on generating leads and selling products
  • Keep track of your emails with in-depth statistics
  • Categorize your customers and send tailored emails to specific groups
  • Create your course or blog site with our easy-to-use editor
  • Create drip campaigns for your courses, available to an unlimited number of students

And more!


To get started, sign up to our forever-Free plan and watch your affiliate dreams come true!

6. Conclusion

Whether it’s for lead generation or making money, affiliate marketing could be a potential gold mine for you.


Remember to always provide valuable content to your audience, only link to products in your niche, and use social media to monetize your affiliate efforts.


Let systeme.io take your hand.


Use our automation, emailing, website, and blogging features to design an affiliate hub that will burst from the seams with new clients!


Sign up today!

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