Affiliate marketing through email is one of the best ways to sell products. With email marketing, you collect email subscribers and automate the follow up of email messages. By building a large database of subscribers, and offering useful information to the right audience, you can promote products which help them solve a particular problem. This is done through a marketing platform/strategy and through using a landing page to collect email subscribers.
- Send targeted traffic towards your landing page – offering something of value in exchange for the visitor’s email address
- Follow up with a course of some kind which will help your subscribers with some problem and keep them engaged (e.g. a training course for golf enthusiasts)
- Sell affiliate products through your email links which relate to your messaging (e.g. An online golf training course)
Affiliate Marketing Though Email – Traffic
Of course before you can sell affiliate products to anyone you need to send people to a landing page where you can collect their email address. To do this, you need to use either a marketing platform (in which you pay for traffic with adverts), or through content marketing such as blogging or a video channel. Content marketing is a free strategy to generate traffic, but it takes much longer to generate traffic. Paid marketing is fast and you can almost instantly turn on traffic to your landing page and start collecting subscribers.
Before you start a marketing campaign on a platform such as Google Adwords through, you’ll need to understand who you are targeting with your marketing. Your target audience is the small sub section of the online marketplace who would be most likely to purchase your product/service.
By getting clear on who this is, where they hang out online, what they search for an so on, you can more easily find the right people to send to your landing page. Those people who are most likely to buy from you. To know who these people are you need to learn who your customer avatar is.
Affiliate Marketing Through Email – Choosing An Advertising Platform
There’s many ad platforms you can choose from such as:
- Google Adwords
- Bing
- Yahoo
- YouTube
- etc.
Who your customer avatar is and your product might help you determine which ad platform to use as your marketing engine; to send people to a landing page. So using the example of gold enthusiasts as above, you might find them looking for golf instruction videos on YouTube, or searching for golf training on Google.
Building A Landing Page
A landing page is an important part of selling affiliate products through email marketing. A landing page is much better than a website, for example. This is because on a website there’s many things to do.
You can browse around and read through multiple posts on a website. On a landing page there’s only two things to do: sign up or leave. This forces the visitor to make a quick decision. By offering a highly desirable offer on your landing page you are getting your visitors to overcome their potential indecision by offering a benefit driven reason for them to sign up.
In the golf example, for instance, you might offer a free video series which helps them improve their golf swing. You can access a landing page software here to help you build super fast landing pages which are suitable for your affiliate offer.
Sending Automated Emails
Most affiliates who use email marketing will automate most of their emails. Some will also send out regular “live” emails which is helpful for building trust. With live emails, you can reference something relevant and relatable which shows there’s a real person on the other end of it. This could be a reference to the time of year, some recent news or other sign that emails are from a real person and not just a “bot”!
With an autoresponder software like this one here, you can queue up pre-written messages. These can be sent our at regular intervals on autopilot.
The sending of emails can be automated for many weeks, months and even years in advance. Ideally these messages should contain a lot of value for the subscriber. If they don’t or you have the wrong people joining your email list, you’ll be wasting ad budget and your subscribers won’t be opening their messages.
When you are giving more value in email messages, your subscribers will be more likely to open your messages for the longer term. You’ll build more trust with them too if you give them something valuable. If you’re just pushing a product first, and offering nothing else, they will quickly unsubscribe and/or stop opening your messages!
Your subscribers should get to know, like and trust you, through your email marketing messages. When they do, they are more likely to buy from you when you send them products to look at.