How to Do Affiliate Marketing Through Email (7 Simple Steps)

Last Updated on 6th February 2024

Wondering how to do affiliate marketing through email? You’re not alone.

In a digital marketing world teeming with marketing strategies and tactics, it’s all too easy to overlook the robust potential of a good old-fashioned email.

But, trust me, affiliate marketing through email is far from old-fashioned. It’s a powerful, under-utilized method that can significantly amp up your sales and extend your brand’s reach.

In this concise guide, we’re going to illuminate the path for you, making this seemingly intricate process easier and accessible for everyone, even if you’re just starting out. Stay with us, and let’s get your email revenue soaring!

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What Is Affiliate Email Marketing

As someone who’s been involved in affiliate marketing, I’ve found that email marketing is a crucial component of any affiliate strategy.

Affiliate marketing is a process of promoting other companies’ products or services, and when someone purchases through your affiliate link, you earn a commission. This commission is usually a percentage of the sale price or a fixed amount.

Email marketing, on the other hand, is essentially sending targeted emails to leads and potential customers to turn leads into customers and one-time customers into repeat customers. Combining these two concepts, affiliate email marketing is when you use email marketing to promote affiliate products or services to your subscribers.

Why Getting the Email Is a Must for Affiliate Marketing

When it comes to any super affiliate, the secret sauce for their success is leveraging email. Having a targeted email list of interested subscribers is incredibly valuable, and here’s why:

Firstly, with email, you can reach your email subscribers directly, ensuring that your content is delivered straight to them. This personal approach creates a connection between you and your audience, giving them a reason to trust your recommendations.

Moreover, email allows you to follow up with your subs with relevant and timely information related to your niche. By providing valuable content consistently, they stay engaged and are more likely to take action based on your recommendations.

Another advantage of using email in your affiliate efforts is that it opens up opportunities for remarketing. By keeping track of audience interests and behaviors, you can design personalized email campaigns that speak directly to their needs. This targeted approach leads to higher conversions and a better return on investment (ROI).

Your email list will also give you insight into your target audience’s preferences and behaviors. By analyzing click and open rates, you can identify which content resonates with them and adjust your affiliate strategy accordingly.

How to Launch a Successful Affiliate Email Marketing Campaign

Now you know exactly what we’re talking about, let’s get down how we actually implement the whole process.

Here are the 7 steps to getting started with email affiliate marketing and launching a successful campaign:

1. Choose a Niche

The first thing you need to do when launching an affiliate email marketing campaign is to choose a niche.

It’s crucial to select a niche that aligns with your interests and expertise, as this allows me to create authentic and engaging content.

To find a lucrative niche, I research market demand, competition, and audience pain points, which helps me target my marketing efforts effectively.

If you’re struggling to choose a niche, or if you just need some ideas, then see my article on choosing a niche here.

2. Choose an Affiliate Offer

Next, find suitable affiliate offers to promote.

I look for products and services that have a reputable brand, high commission rates, and strong conversion rates.

It’s essential to choose offers that are relevant to your niche and offer genuine value to your audience.

Personally, I like to look for high ticket offers, or products that pay a recurring affiliate commission.

3. Create a Lead Magnet

Once you’ve chosen your affiliate offers you’ll need to create an enticing lead magnet to attract people to sign up to your email list.

A lead magnet can be an e-book, a cheat sheet, a newsletter, a checklist, a case study, a piece of software, or a free course, for example.

Your main goal here is to provide value to your audience and encourage them to sign up to your list.

To make the lead magnet appealing, focus on addressing a specific need or solving a particular problem in your niche, but overall, keep it simple and easily digestible.

Below is a step-by-step video to show you how to create a professional level eBook super-fast with AI:

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4. Set Up Your Affiliate Funnel

After creating a lead magnet, you’ll then need to set up an affiliate funnel to showcase your lead magnet and entice them to sign up.

An affiliate bridge page funnel typically includes a landing page, a bridge page, and an email sequence.

The landing page promotes your lead magnet, the bridge page shows thanks to the subscriber for signing up and also introduces your primary affiliate offer. The email sequence then nurtures the leads on the back end eventually converting them into customers.

Below is a video showing you step-by-step how you cans et up your affiliate bridge page for free:

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5. Choose an Email Provider That Allows Affiliate Links

Next, you’ll need to choose an email autoresponder platform. While there are lots of options to choose from, many of them don’t allow you to add affiliate links in your emails.

If you sign up for the wrong email platform, then you could have your account shut down pretty quickly once they detect affiliate activities.

Don’t worry, affiliate marketing is 100% legal and above board. Some email providers just don’t like the business model. Various email marketing platforms have different policies regarding affiliate marketing, so it’s essential to review their terms and choose one that’s suitable.

My number one recommendation for an affiliate-friendly email platform is GetResponse. They’re one of the biggest email marketing providers, their platform is easy to use, they have great deliverability, and they like affiliate marketing. They also have a free plan up to 500 subs, which you can get access to here.

If you want more recommendations, then you can see my article here on email providers that supports affiliate links.

6. Write a Highly Engaging Email Campaign Series

When crafting promotional emails, you need to focus on making them engaging, informative, and persuasive enough to sell your products.

Personalizing each email helps to build a connection with subscribers. You should also use strong calls to action without being pushy to encourage them make purchases.

Aim is to strike a balance between providing value and promoting affiliate offers that are good quality and helpful to your subs. This way your subscribers will trust you and are more likely to keep buying from you long term.

Having said this, being able to write highly engaging and helpful emails that your subscribers actually look forward to reading, and also do the job of selling products when you pitch something is hard.

Many affiliate marketers struggle to know what to write. And if you know what you want to say, it’s a time-consuming process.

If this part of the business is intimidating to you, or if you just want to shortcut the whole process, then I recommend using this AI tool to write all your email copy for you. Not only can this tool write an email copy designed for engagement and conversions, but it can also write entire email campaign series for you as well.

You can get a free trial of this AI email tool here.

7. Drive Traffic to Your Landing Page

The last step is to drive targeted traffic to your landing page to build your email contact list.

There are lots of strategies you can use to drive traffic. However, it basically comes down to 2 overall methods:

• Free (organic) traffic
• Paid traffic

Free traffic methods for affiliate marketing are slow and take a long time to build. However, they can lead to a steady source of passive traffic over time. While they won’t cost you money to build, they will cost you time.

Paid traffic, on the other hand is very fast, almost instant. This method gives you the ability to build and scale extremely fast with minimal time investment. However, it can be expensive.

Like free traffic, there is also a skill involved in paid traffic too. It’s crucial to learn the skills first, otherwise you can end up wasting a ton of time and money, get demoralized and quit.

If you’re using free methods like TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, or blog posts, for example, then you’ll need to learn how to drive traffic on these platforms effectively. If you get it wrong then you’ll either not get much traction, or risk having your platform shut down by the powers that be.

Overall, it will pay huge dividends long-term to get the right training.

If you’d prefer to save time over money and gain traction quickly, then it makes sense to learn paid traffic.

Here are my recommendations for solid training on paid traffic for affiliate marketing and list building:

Building Trust With Your Audience

In affiliate email marketing, building trust is the foundation of an effective email campaign. To achieve this, you need to ensure that you provide value consistently to your audience through helpful and informative content.

One way to add value is by sharing your own experience and knowledge in the niche. Always make sure that your content is meaningful, impactful, helpful, and easy to understand. This will help your readers to see you as a reliable source, which in turn makes them more likely to follow your recommendations.

If you’re not sure how to do this with your email content, then I recommend using this AI tool to write all your email copy for you.

In addition to sharing valuable content, make an effort to connect with your customers on a personal level. You can do this by sharing some personal experiences form your life (that you are comfortable sharing), and using these stories as a way to build a connection and familiarity.

By showing that you’re genuinely interested in helping your subscribers and taking the time to understand their needs, you can build a loyal following over time. This also encourages people to reach out to you for guidance. This, in turn, can open up more opportunities for providing them with relevant affiliate offers.

To maintain trust with your audience, always ensure that you’re transparent about any affiliate offers that you’re promoting.

By being honest about the fact that you’re promoting a product or service, you are respecting your audience’s intelligence and demonstrating integrity. This transparency can go a long way in maintaining their trust and ensuring that they continue to engage with your content.

Implementing Affiliate Links in Your Email Strategy

Once you’ve selected the products, create engaging content that smoothly ties in these affiliate links. It’s important to strike a balance between providing valuable information and promoting the affiliated offers. This way, your subscribers don’t feel overwhelmed with promotions and are more likely to click on your links.

Don’t make the mistake of cramming your emails full of affiliate links. If you have too many links in an email, then your email service provider won’t like it.

Worse, email platforms like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and more will absolutely hate it and start diverting your emails to the spam folder before long. Thirdly, if your subscribers do manage to receive an email like this, then your message will likely come across as very pushy. This could then cause the sub to unsubscribe.

So don’t do it.

Instead, you need to take a conservative approach to link placement. If you’re emailing from a newly registered domain, then you’ll need to be even more conservative until your domain becomes more trusted. So start off with no more than 2 links per email.

Monitoring, Tracking and Optimizing Performance

It’s also important to track the performance of your affiliate links. This helps you to understand what’s working well. The information you will gain from effective tracking is crucial and it will allow you to make better decisions about which campaigns to scale up, and which ones to cut.

This involves tracking various email metrics, including open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and more. This will give you valuable insights into what’s working and what needs improvement in your campaigns.

One of the best tools for affiliate link tracking and monitoring is ClickMagick. Not only can ClickMagick help you to make a lot more money (by telling you where to focus your marketing efforts), but it can also help to protect you against click fraud.

You can get a free trial of ClickMagick here.

How to Do Affiliate Marketing Through Email: Best Practices and Tips for Success

Having a strong and engaged email list is crucial. I’ve always focused on building a genuine relationship with my subscribers by sharing valuable content and being responsive to their feedback.

Secondly, creating a welcome email for new subscribers is essential. This email sets the tone for your relationship. In this message, I introduce myself, thank them for subscribing, and let them know what they can expect in upcoming emails. I often include a small incentive, like a discount or an exclusive piece of content, as a thank you for joining my mailing list.

Another important aspect is developing a consistent email schedule. For example, sending out bi-weekly email newsletters, and mixing informational and promotional content to maintain a balance.

It’s important not to overwhelm subscribers with sales pitches but instead, create informative and engaging content that provides value.

In terms of formatting, use bullet points, bold text and tables, wherever necessary, to present information more effectively. This makes it easier for my readers to grasp the key takeaways from my emails and encourages higher engagement.

Frequently Asked Questions 

Here are some frequently asked questions that I often get when it comes to using email for affiliate marketing:

What are the best platforms to launch affiliate email campaigns?

There are many email marketing platforms available, but some (like MailChimp and MailerLite) are not affiliate-friendly.

Some of the best email platforms to use for affiliate marketing include GetResponse, Aweber, and Omnisend.

How do beginners start with email affiliate marketing?

Getting started with email affiliate marketing isn’t easy. There is a ton of misinformation out there. There are also a lot of outdated courses that no longer work to sift through as well.

The only training I recommend when it comes to email affiliate marketing is the 301K with Igor Kheifets.

Igor is a super affiliate, and the 3rd highest paid affiliate in the world. He’s also a master at email marketing and email copy. He is also my mentor for email marketing. I have taken several of his trainings and can highly vouch for what he teaches.

Are there any legal considerations in email affiliate marketing?

Yes, there are legal considerations to keep in mind while doing email affiliate marketing. Compliance with the CAN-SPAM Act in the USA and the GDPR in the European Union is vital. You should always obtain consent from your subscribers to send them marketing emails, provide a clear unsubscribe mechanism, and disclose any affiliate links within the email content.

What strategies can improve affiliate email conversion rates?

To improve conversion rates in affiliate email marketing, focus on creating attention-grabbing subject lines, providing value to your subscribers, and creating personalised email content. Test and optimise your calls to action and utilise email segmentation to send targeted messages to different subscriber groups. Consistent analysis and experimentation are key to finding the right strategies that increase conversions.

What form of email address should you use for affiliate marketing?

The form of email address is important for building trust with your subscribers. I’d advocate using either your name or your website name as the domain, e.g., john @ yourwebsite.com. Avoid using generic email addresses like info@ or sales@, as they may appear less trustworthy and can negatively impact your open and click-through rates.

What to put on your signature line in an email promoting affiliate marketing products?

A signature line in an affiliate marketing email should be professional and informative. Be sure to include your name, your website or blog URL, and a brief, engaging statement about the affiliate product you’re promoting. It’s also helpful to include a clear call-to-action, guiding the reader on what to do next, like ‘Learn more’ or ‘Shop now’. Remember, your signature line should reflect your personal brand and add credibility to your email content.

How to Do Email Marketing for Affiliate Marketing – Final Thoughts

Well, there you have it! You’re now equipped with the knowledge to turn your emails into powerful affiliate marketing machines.

Remember, as with any marketing strategy, persistence and fine-tuning are key.

Test different tactics, play around with your emails, and most importantly, keep the conversation with your engaged audience genuine and value-driven.

Affiliate marketing through email doesn’t have to be a maze. Keep referring back to this guide, apply these steps diligently, and soon enough, you’ll be reaping the rewards.

Now that you know how to do affiliate marketing through email, it’s time to roll up your sleeves, hit that send button, and watch your profits soar!