When you think of affiliate marketing, you think of affiliate links in blog posts, the YouTube description area, and the Instagram bio section. That’s understandable. Social media has been pivotal to the boom of the affiliate marketing industry.
But what happens to your affiliate business when social media platforms randomly change their algorithms, impacting your visibility?
Affiliate email marketing works the same way as social media affiliate marketing. Affiliates send promotional emails to subscribers and earn money from sales through affiliate links. One of the key advantages is that you now own the medium.
There are several benefits to this approach:
- Direct access to customers: You’re not competing with algorithms or paid content for customers’ attention.
- Cost-effectiveness: For every dollar spent, you receive an average ROI of $36.
- Nurturing opportunities: Email allows you to follow up with leads.
- Increased sales: When subscribers trust your brand, they will buy your recommendations.
It’s possible and profitable to grow your affiliate business using email. But you need a solid affiliate marketing email list to get started. This article will show you how to build one.
8 Strategies to Build a Targeted Email List for Affiliate Marketing Success
The success of your affiliate email marketing campaigns depends on the quality of your affiliate marketing email list. Here are eight strategies to help you build and grow a high-performing subscriber list.
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1. Select an email service provider
Choosing a reliable email service provider will simplify your affiliate marketing efforts. You want email software that offers:
- Automation – creates automated email sequences and workflows
- List management – segments subscribers based on interest or specified criteria
- Customization – provide visually appealing, customizable templates
- High deliverability rates – ensures emails land in subscribers’ inboxes (and not spam folders)
- Integration – works with your existing tech stack
- Analytics – tracks essential campaign performance metrics
Many top email marketing software have these features. However, not all allow affiliate links. You risk being banned and losing your entire email list if you don’t double-check the Terms of Service.
Below are three reputable email providers that support affiliate marketing.
- GetResponse
- Brevo (formerly Sendinblue)
- ConvertKit
In addition to the essential features, these email marketing tools can help you create a landing page and signup forms to support your email list-building efforts.
The best email marketing provider for your affiliate business depends on your list size, budget, and desired features. Use free trials to discover which platform aligns with your needs and goals.
2. Develop compelling lead magnets
Today’s customers are conscious of data security and privacy. They don’t share their contact information unless there’s a good reason. A free digital gift usually does the trick. However, it must provide value. Otherwise, people won’t join your affiliate marketing email list.
Effective lead magnets incentivize potential subscribers to share their email addresses. They include:
- eBooks
- Free templates
- Free consultations
- Video tutorials
- Product samples
- Discounts
- Quizzes
Here’s an example of a quiz magnet that helps photographers discover their photography style.
Leads answer questions and must share their contact details to receive the results, as shown below.
Quizzes work as lead magnets because they are engaging and insightful. Chances are good that people will share their email addresses to get the results. This helps you build your email list while providing value to users.
The key to effective email opt-in incentives is providing value. That requires understanding your target audience’s pain points, goals, and interests. More importantly, you must follow through with the lead magnet promise. Otherwise, subscribers will unsubscribe, wasting your efforts and damaging your reputation.
3. Design landing pages
Affiliate landing pages are vital marketing tools. Compared to affiliate websites, they are cheaper and easier to maintain. Moreover, you can create multiple pages for different brands, products, or affiliate programs.
Many affiliates use dedicated landing pages to sell affiliate products. In this case, you would use a landing page to collect email subscribers. This is where they’ll land if they click on a social media post promoting your email newsletter, for example. The goal of your landing page is to capture your visitors’ attention and convey the value of joining your mailing list.
The illustration below highlights the elements of an effective landing page.
There’s a headline, image, benefit-centered copy, and a call-to-action (CTA).
- The headline communicates the value of joining your email list.
- The hero image gives landing page visitors a glimpse of what you offer.
- The copy tells potential customers what they’ll receive by subscribing.
- The call-to-action tells visitors how to take action.
Here’s a tip to ensure an effective landing page: keep the design simple, focused, and visually appealing. Every element, from the copy to the CTA button’s color, should drive the customer to join your email list.
Here’s an email sign-up landing page example you can adapt.
Besides collecting customer data, landing pages can improve brand awareness. That makes you visible to search engines and organic traffic.
With your landing page up and running, start promoting it through various strategies like SEO and social media. Use search engine optimization (SEO) by incorporating relevant keywords into your content, headlines, and meta tags. You should also optimize technical aspects like page speed to rank high on search results pages.
Your landing page promotion efforts should not end online. You can also promote your landing page offline. For example, you can promote the page at relevant events you may attend. Use tools like Uniqode’s digital business cards to build a business card with a link to your landing page. Then, conveniently share this card with relevant audiences through QR codes.
One major benefit of building landing pages is web analytics, which delivers performance insight into your affiliate email marketing campaign. Tools like GA4 collect traffic source and user behavior data, which you can use to understand and attribute conversions to the correct event.
4. Make your opt-in forms user-friendly
If you want people to join your subscriber list, you must make it easy for them to do so. That means a short, simple opt-in form. Lengthy forms with many steps turn potential subscribers off. Furthermore, unnecessary information is a data privacy concern.
Minimize this friction by reducing the form’s fields to essential information, i.e., name and email address. Use a multi-step form if you require additional information for segmenting purposes. Displaying fields one at a time will encourage visitors to complete the form. However, ask for the email in the first step. That allows you to follow up with the lead if they abandon the process.
Another element of a user-friendly opt-in form is data management. Data regulatory laws like GDPR govern how businesses collect and use customer data. Your form must include an opt-in check box or statement, and make it clear what their data will be used for–for instance, will it be added to your B2B contact database? Used for retargeting ads? Once ticked, this box represents the user’s agreement to receive marketing emails from you.
See the example below.
The copy below the call-to-action states that the customer agrees to receive emails by clicking the CTA button.
5. Provide valuable content
You need to create content on your site and other marketing channels that’s tailored to your target subscribers in the first place. If you create generic content, you’ll end up attracting a wide range of subscribers who may not be interested in the products you’re promoting in the first place.
Say you’re promoting pet products. Then why not create blog posts about dogs and cats? This way, you’ll ensure only folks who are likely to buy your affiliate products subscribe to your mailing list.
You can create a buyer persona to serve as your guide to create targeted content. It is a data-driven characterization of your subscribers. It includes demographic and psychographic information to give you a complete picture of your audience.
See the example below.
You can get the information you need for your buyer persona from analytics tools and surveys. Note that you may need different personas for the various products or services you promote.
When creating content before building your affiliate marketing email list, don’t just ensure it’s targeted. Make sure it’s high-quality, too.
High-quality content positions you as an authority. When people see you as an authority, they’ll subscribe to your email list and trust your recommendations enough to buy.
High-quality content is well-researched. It’s well-structured with headings, subheadings, and bullet points that break up the text, and is easy to read and understand. Good content engages, informs, and educates.
There’s no limit to the type of content you can create. It can take the form of:
- Blogs
- Videos
- Podcasts
- Infographics
Just maintain consistency across your content pieces for brand recognition. If you decide to use casual language in your blog posts, use the same across your videos, podcasts, and infographics.
6. Use social media to drive sign-ups
Social media platforms can help boost your affiliate email marketing efforts. You can use them specifically to drive email sign-ups.
There are several ways to do this.
- Promote email sign-ups on social media profiles. Most social platforms provide a link in the bio section (video description area for YouTube). Add the link to your affiliate marketing landing page to drive sign-ups.
- Create social content for your affiliate email marketing campaign. Highlight the benefits of subscribing, such as access to exclusive content and offers.
- Create contests and giveaways. Require followers to join your customer lists as part of their contest entry.
- Leverage social ads to get your content in front of targeted audiences. In addition to various ad formats, sponsored posts come with linkable CTAs, allowing you to drive traffic to your email sign-up page.
- Add sharing buttons to your emails and landing pages. This way, existing subscribers can introduce your brand to their social network. These serve as social proof and word-of-mouth marketing, which increase your credibility and reach
Each social media app has its unique format and culture. Popular content on TikTok may not work on LinkedIn. However, you don’t have to post on every social channel. Focus on the ones your target audience prefers.
7. Segment your affiliate marketing email list
71% of consumers expect personalized messages from brands. While it’s impossible to individualize emails for everyone on your subscriber list, you can still offer a high level of personalization through audience segmentation.
Segmenting your customer list allows you to tailor emails to specific groups, so you can deliver better experiences. You can easily do this using a good email marketing platform.
You can approach subscriber segmentation in several ways to ensure affiliate marketing messages are relevant to the recipient.
- Demographic segmentation: divides target consumers by age, gender, ethnicity, marital status, etc.
- Geographic segmentation: organizes subscribers by location, including time zones and cultural-linguistic regions.
- Behavioral segmentation: groups email recipients by actions such as level of engagement.
- Psychographic segmentation: classifies subscribers based on their values, lifestyles, or interests.
This list isn’t exhaustive. You can segment your list along any criteria you want. However, be careful not to over-segment. You can divide your list too much and lose the big picture.
8. Clean your email list regularly
To keep your mailing list targeted and high-performing, you should clean it regularly. Email cleaning involves removing invalid, outdated, or inactive email addresses to boost email deliverability, engagement, and conversion rates.
Here’s how you go about doing it.
- Segment disengaged or inactive email addresses. You can set up rules to filter subscribers with more than two bounce incidents or a six-month inactivity period.
- Identify the reasons for email bounce. Hard bounces are permanent delivery issues caused by invalid email addresses. Soft bounces are temporary delivery problems caused by full inboxes, blocked content, oversized emails, or mail server issues.
- Send re-engagement emails. Sometimes, subscribers are disengaged and inactive because your content doesn’t resonate with them. Try different strategies like gifts or special offers to pique their interest.
- Include unsubscribe buttons in your emails. The GDPR requires businesses to give email subscribers an easy way to opt out of marketing communication. If unsubscribing is confusing, recipients will mark your emails as spam, damaging your sender reputation.
Remove email addresses with hard bounces and those that don’t respond to re-engagement.
Clean your email at least once a year. You can also purge subscribers after major campaigns. You can also use email verifiers to check your list for typos and duplicate addresses.
Conclusion
Affiliate email marketing is the secret weapon to taking your earnings to the next level. Social media affiliate marketing means you’re dependent on those platforms. What happens if they go down, or you can’t access your account? You lose your business.
Building an affiliate marketing email list gives you control of your target audience. That allows you to personalize relationships and nurture trust with potential subscribers, boosting the revenue-generating power of your affiliate marketing strategy.
While getting started may take longer than social media, the payoff is worth the time and effort. Hopefully, this article made things easier.
Follow these strategies to build a strong email list for affiliate marketing and maximize your earning potential.
