How to Use Email to Improve Your Affiliate Marketing

Social media may be the first thing that comes to mind when you think about affiliate marketing. Email can still play a significant role in an affiliate marketing program overall, even though social media affiliate marketing has undoubtedly taken over as the most popular method for many people. Here are some essential strategies for expanding your email-based affiliate marketing program.

Keep Communication Open With Your Affiliates

Building upon your current marketing program is an excellent approach to communicate with your affiliates via email. Encouragement of your affiliates and open conversation with them are the two typical approaches to keep up this kind of communication.

Your affiliates will work harder if you give them encouragement. Even though you may not be a typical employer, you act in the capacity of an employer toward your affiliates. Workhuman claims that performance reviews and recognition initiatives can increase employees' sense of purpose and meaning in their job as well as increase the likelihood that they will report having a happy work experience.

On the other side, neglecting communication is one of the biggest mistakes new affiliate marketers make. When you have an affiliate marketing program, you also need an easily-accessible email address for affiliates to contact, as well as routine quick responses to these emails. This makes it feel as though you really care about your affiliates.

Include Affiliate Information and Content in Your Newsletter

A newsletter can be a great way to create an even better relationship with your affiliates. There are two common types of newsletters that you might want to use to spotlight affiliates, including a general customer and contact newsletter and a specialized affiliate newsletter.

Most businesses already have an email newsletter of some kind that goes out to customers and contacts. You can use this newsletter to highlight wins from your affiliate; spotlight an affiliate perhaps once per quarter, doing a short interview about who they are and what they do. It improves recognition and even advertises your affiliate program to individuals who may want to join.

If you have a good number of affiliates–at least a few dozen–then you can also start your own affiliate newsletter. The affiliate newsletter can spotlight unique ways to advertise, give more in-depth information about a specific affiliate’s wins, and generally give tips and tricks for your affiliates. This ties into the first point: creating an affiliate newsletter can help you ensure more effective communication with your affiliates, helping them feel like you really want to help them succeed.

Additionally, consider leaning on your affiliates to help you write the newsletter in the first place. If you see that one of your affiliates has written an especially good piece of content that has information relevant to your business, then reach out and see whether you can republish it within your newsletter. It shows that you care about your affiliates’ content, helps you talk more with your affiliates, and can even reduce the amount of time you spend on your newsletter.

Provide Email Templates for Your Affiliates

Email templates can be a hugely helpful tool for many affiliate marketers, especially if they do a lot of affiliate work through email. If you find that your affiliates often use email to reach out to new clients, especially if email is a big part of where their customers come from, then why not provide them with an email template that can make it easier for them?

Whether you have an email template page on your website where affiliates can go to use them or you email them out directly–potentially within your email newsletter–providing these templates shows that you’re okay doing some of the work as long as your affiliates show up. That can prompt them to work even harder on their affiliate marketing.

Additionally, you may be able to notice that one of your top affiliates has an email that converts incredibly well with their customer base. You could reach out to them and ask them if you could create a template together, taking cues from that specific template. In your next newsletter, you can share this template, stating that you created it with your affiliate marketer and boosting both of your presences.

Share Tips and Tricks for Better Affiliate Marketing

Finally, it can be a good idea to actively share tips and tricks for better affiliate marketing with your affiliates themselves. Remember, you and your affiliates are working together, and you want to do as much as you can to emphasize this fact throughout your affiliate marketing newsletters, materials, and other forms of communication with your affiliates.

Let's take an example where you have A/B tested with your clients and found that specific groups react better to particular email formats. Display the data to your affiliates. It can reduce the time required for your affiliates to conduct independent testing, freeing them up to concentrate on actively attempting to convert visitors.

Email marketing is one of the most powerful tools available, and affiliate marketing is no exception. There are a few strategies that might help you communicate with your affiliate marketers via email considerably more effectively. You may improve your affiliate marketing program by using these pointers and techniques.