The 5 Secrets of Email Marketing for Affiliate Programs
If one of the New Year’s resolutions you’ve made for your business revolves around email marketing, it’s good to start with a strategy. Because email can be an incredibly important tool when you’re working with affiliate programs. Email not only gets your messages and promotions seen by an interested audience. It also helps to build brand awareness, cement company identity and enhance customer loyalty. And this is as relevant for individual bloggers as it is for large-scale corporations.
But – and this is a big BUT – you have to get your email marketing right if you want your campaign to succeed. So, what are the secrets behind a successful email marketing campaign when you’re working with affiliate networks?
5 Email Marketing Tips for Affiliate Program Work
1. Compelling previews
One of the reasons that email marketing fell out of favor a few years ago is that people’s inboxes reached saturation point. Every one of us receives scores of emails every day. And we only open the messages that actually speak to us. A strong preview will help ensure that that your emails are among that number. So, break away from the expected.
- Use unusual subject headings, making sure that they’re relevant to your readers. So, if you’re working with an online dating affiliate you might want to avoid the things that have been said a billion times – Looking for love? And go for headers that are a bit more off the cuff: Are you committing these five online dating sins?
- Keep your content quality high, right from the start. The best way to get people to read your emails is to give them something they’d like to read.
- And be consistent. Your subject header should actually reflect the content of your email. So, if you do start with a dating sins headline, that should be the first thing that you talk about in your email.
2. Format sensibly
When you want to catch someone’s attention, it’s tempting to go all-out. You might GO WILD WITH CAPS. AlTeRnAtE yOuR lEtTeRiNg. Use obscure fonts or vibrant colors. Don’t. Undisciplined formatting simply looks like you can’t be bothered to make your emails legible. And it makes it a whole lot more difficult for your audience to read the important bits. Stick to the color scheme that you use on your website. Employ a couple of font sizes and keep it simple. Space well. And use images, but don’t make the file sizes too big to avoid downloading issues.
3. Keep to the point
If you open an email supposed to contain dating offers and it looks like an undiscovered Leo Tolstoy epic, you’re not going to read it. Keep your content short, sweet, simple and to the point. It needs to be entertaining too. But, if you can use two or three syllable words to make your sentences, don’t go out of your way to find humongously inspirational diction… As with the last three words. Because people will just think you pretentious.
4. Deliver value
When you’re working with affiliate programs, you need your audience to engage. And if you want them to engage you have to deliver value. This doesn’t mean that you have to have multiple discount codes and giveaways. But it does mean that you need to be giving your readers something of value to them. This could be advice, information, reviews: anything that makes it worth their while to open it. Personalization is part of this. By personalizing your mailing list – separating out your subscribers into demographics and areas of interest – you can deliver greater value to your readers. And greater value will lead to a far greater return from your pay per sale affiliate contracts.
5. Email platforms
It is possible to manage your email marketing directly. But, it’s much easier to make use of a dedicated email marketing platform. There are loads to choose from. And they not only make email management – formatting, scheduling, personalization, monitoring – more straightforward. But will provide you with a huge amount of data which will allow you to better refine your content and manage your mailing list to keep the search engine bots happy. And, importantly, help you to stay on the right side of the law.
Email marketing can be one of the most effective tools for driving any online business forward. Especially when your business relies on customer trust and interaction. And when you’re working with affiliate programs to monetize your online presence, that’s exactly what you need.