Building email campaigns that effectively engage your audience and convert them into paying customers is crucial in making affiliate revenue. If you want to maximize your affiliate commission, you must have an email list at hand to directly communicate with your audience to increase your reach, foster trust, and boost sales.
If you are unsure where or how to start, this article will help you to grow your email list and tell you how you can monetize it to increase your affiliate commissions.
Growing Your Email List
First things first – you need to build up your email list before you can make money with affiliate marketing. There are a number of different strategies that you can use to do this.
Find An Email Provider
If you haven’t already got one, an email marketing service will help you streamline email campaigns for affiliate marketing. There are great tools out there that might help you to create better customer relationships through maintaining strong communication. Features like automation, A/B testing and personalization allow you to engage with your recipients so that they take action, giving you more affiliate revenue.
Unsure how to pick an email provider? Consider your business size, features that you want to be included and the different packages available from each. Your choice of the ESP might depend on the size of your list, your demographics and the type for products that you’re promoting as an affiliate.
Create Amazing Content
One of the most straightforward ways to grow your email list is to create great content on your own website. First of all, it’s your own channel which you control completely. Secondly, it’s sustainable and very cost-effective, especially in the long-term.
A good strategy is creating content for each of the funnel stages. As shown on the infographic below, top of funnel content builds the awareness of your personal brand and of the affiliate products that you promote. The middle of the funnel content is more specific and responds to the specific needs of your audience. For example, it could be a comparison of the best products that solve a particular need.
Finally, the bottom of the funnel content is supposed to sell products and solve your readers’ problems. It could be a detailed review of a particular product — the kind of review that one might read right before committing to purchasing something.
Guest Blog For Other Sites With A Call-To-Action
There are a lot of publishers and sites out there that are catering to your audience, and bigger portions of it. Guest blogging for these sites can help you to grow your contact list with this audience. Sometimes, the other bloggers would be interested in returning the favor and contributing a post to your own website.
When you are creating content as a guest blogger for another site, include a call-to-action as well as a link to your site that you should have optimized, so people are more inclined to sign up to your newsletter – bringing us to the next point.
Optimize Your Online Forms
The forms on your website play a vital role in growing your email list. These are the forms that allow people to subscribe to your newsletter, and thus express a formal consent to receiving regular email communications from you.
As well as serving its purpose of capturing your leads’ contact information, your forms need to look good. You might use a form builder like Paperform to build forms that are aesthetically pleasing, simple, and easy to fill out.
It can be tempting to try and get as much information as possible about a lead straight away. However, you can scare people off if you include too many fields in your lead-capturing forms as they are harder to fill out and take up more of their time.
Keeping them short boosts your form conversion rate – giving you more subscribers for your email list. You can even automate the process after you receive a new subscriber by sending automatic welcome emails, saving you time from routine procedures.
Use Social Media To Grow Your Email List
There are various ways you can use social media to grow your email list, but all of them involve encouraging people to click through to your site and then enticing them to provide their email address. You might do that with ads or genuinely helpful and potentially viral content.
Other options include publishing links to gated offers through social media. For example, you might be promoting an ebook and collecting the email addresses upon its download from your website.
Reach Out To Inactive Subscribers
Inevitably, some of your recipients will cease engaging with you, which can damage your stats and sender reputation. Re-engaging subscribers through sending emails is a great way to encourage people to start participating in your campaigns again or removing them from your email list entirely – though the latter is not preferred. You may want to send recipients an incentive to re-engage with you, such as a special offer (which could be your affiliate partner’s campaign), or you could just simply ask them if they intend to visit your site again.
Monetizing Your Email List
Now for the fun part – making money! There are a number of actionable strategies you can use to monetize your email list to make affiliate revenue.
Observe Visitor Behaviour
The first step to monetizing your email list via affiliate marketing is studying your audience and learning more about their needs. You can use tools like Crazy Egg, HotJar, and Google Analytics to figure out your email list demographics and interests. By doing this, you are going to be able to get some of the most actionable insights into what your audience likes and does not like.
You can use this information, for example, to send personalized emails or use behavioral triggering to ensure that your email marketing campaigns bring in the money. For example, if your user has looked up the article about VPN tools, you might send them a follow-up email with advice on picking the best VPN tool for their needs.
Select The Products To Promote
Based on the insights about your audience, you now need to choose the tools to promote as an affiliate partner.
There are hundreds of options out there, but you need to pick wisely. If your audience is relatively young and tech-savvy, you might try to promote the numerous SaaS products out there. For example, you might promote a podcast hosting solution like Buzzsprout, an email marketing solution like ConvertKit, or different hosting and VPN providers, most of which have very lucrative affiliate programs.
On the other hand, if your audience is quite niche, older, and interested in purchasing things online, you might look into becoming Amazon’s affiliate partner and promoting all kinds of products through your email list.
If your email list is relatively big, you might even want to segment it based on the demographics and promote different products to different segments.
Place Your Affiliate Offers
You should be all set: you now have a well-segmented email list, and you know what products you want to be promoting. But how do you actually do that? There are a number of ways to place your affiliate offers into your emails.
If you’re promoting SaaS products, you might email your subscribers any special promotions that they’re offering. Your emails could include a good screenshot of the product, a short description of what it does, and a compelling CTA enticing your subscribers to check it out. If they click your affiliate email link and subscribe within a permitted cookie window — you will get your affiliate commission.
If you’re running a niche website and promote Amazon products, you might, for example, design a newsletter highlighting different product options for your customers. The “Shop Now” affiliate links would lead to the respective product listings on Amazon:
Remember that your email list can’t be only about promoting products — you need to be creating some real value for your customers. Consider sending out at least 3-4 educational newsletters for every sales-oriented email blast.
Wrap up
Affiliate marketing is a great way to build a stream of income online. If you really want to maximize the earning potential from your affiliate revenue, you should start building early on a high-quality email list as a means to engage and communicate with your audience.
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This post was written by Vlad Shvets from Paperform — a professional alternative to Google Forms.
