Email marketing is a powerful and effective tool for affiliates, offering a direct and personal way to connect with potential customers. By understanding your audience, building a quality email list, crafting compelling content, and continuously optimizing your approach, you can create email campaigns that drive engagement and conversions.
Email marketing is one of the most effective strategies you can use to promote your affiliate marketing business. Email marketing helps you build a list of customers that you can return to again and again. The ROI of email marketing is quite impressive when measured in dollars. According to various research and industry studies, the average ROI of email marketing is approximately:
$42 for every dollar invested.
This means that, on average, for every dollar a business spends on email marketing, they can expect to see $42 in return. This high ROI highlights the effectiveness of email marketing as a powerful and profitable tool for businesses.
Advantages of Email Marketing
When you build your email list, it’s an asset you own. You can send regular newsletters to everyone on your email list to keep them informed, solve their problems, and build a relationship. People are much more likely to make a purchase from someone they know and trust. You can develop long-term relationships with your contacts through your engaging and informative email newsletters.
When you use one of the social media platforms to build your list, they own the list. They can control the frequency and amount of contact with their list. If your terms of service (TOS) change, it can have a major effect on your marketing efforts.
Email Marketing Personalization and Privacy
Personalizing your emails can also be an important factor in the success of your affiliate marketing. You can segment your audience and then personalize your emails to your audience based on their interests and the actions they have taken on your website. Personalization is necessary today if you want someone to listen to your message. People are tired of the constant barrage of ads they receive all day, so email personalization can help break down the wall that many people have built to keep out the noise of constant ads.
You can’t personalize your message to your social media followers. You can’t individualize your responses to your social media audience. Everyone receives the same message on social media, so you don’t get the benefits or higher response rates that a personalized message typically gets. You can’t individualize a mass communication for all your followers like you can with email.
Privacy is another benefit of using email for affiliate marketing. Privacy, or even more importantly, the lack thereof, is all over the news today. Surveys show that people today have a much higher level of trust in emails than in social media. Facebook was fined $5 billion in 2019 for privacy violations. As a result, they promised to tighten some of the regulations. But didn’t they violate those privacy concerns once before and promise it wouldn’t happen again? Surveys have shown that people’s trust in emails to maintain their privacy is much higher than people’s trust in social networks like Facebook or Twitter. So why not build your own email list from your own website instead of through social media?
Creating the Subscriber List
One of the first things you should do when setting up your website is to choose and configure your email marketing system. The second thing you need to do is place your contact form on your website so you can start collecting your subscribers’ email addresses. When you’ve set up your email system, you’ll automatically collect those emails, send confirmation letters, and build your list of confirmed subscribers.
Your subscriber list will be created automatically day after day, and before you know it, you’ll have a list of people you can pitch your affiliate products to over and over again. You don’t want to become one of those marketers who flood their subscribers with ads, but you can start an automated drip campaign that sends emails on a scheduled basis.
Marketing Emails
Most people equate email marketing with marketing emails, which are sometimes called mass emails (not to be confused with the terminology of years past, when mass email was synonymous with spam). Nowadays, when you send your email to your entire list or a segmented portion of the list, those are marketing emails. It’s a type of one-to-many email: you send an email to many subscribers at the same time.
In a typical email marketing system, you have a box on your website where visitors can sign up for your newsletter or perhaps the free bonus report you offer.
Autoresponders
An autoresponder is a timed series of messages in response to a subscriber’s initial action. Say, for example, a subscriber comes to your site, provides their email address, and confirms that they want to join your email list. Your welcome autoresponder can be set to send a series of scheduled emails (5-7 is a reasonable number) at different intervals to build your relationship and engagement with the subscriber.
Autoresponders are one-to-many emails. You have a series of automatic responses that are sent to everyone who subscribes. In an automatic reply, you have already uploaded a series of messages that are sent on a scheduled basis. A person subscribes to the autoresponder and the series of messages is sent without any additional manual intervention on their part.
An autoresponder can also be one of your first steps in personalization, so you can have another autoresponder on another page that has a different message. People who sign up for another answering machine receive a different series of emails based on their different needs. For example, you can set up a series for new subscribers, who receive welcome autoresponder emails. On another page you may be offering a free course with a series of lessons. Each of those lessons can be an email in your email course autoresponder.
When a subscriber feels like you are talking to them, the relationship and engagement with your subscriber increases. Your intention is to develop a relationship with your subscriber as an affiliate marketer who can introduce them to the affiliate products you are promoting. People buy from people they trust and your first goal should be to build that relationship and trust.
Transactional emails
The next big step in personalization is transactional email. When a subscriber takes an action, an email is sent. For example, a customer makes a purchase through your website and you send them a thank you or a receipt. But unlike an autoresponder, this is a one-to-one email. A subscriber takes an action and an email is sent.
You can also set up a transactional email system for your support service. An action taken (a support ticket from a visitor to your website) results in a response, perhaps an email saying that you received the support request and that your team is busy working on it.
For the email sending company, this is a much more complex operation than the marketing that makes up most email campaigns. Therefore, many email sending companies charge more if you want to be able to send transactional emails.
Email Campaigns
An email campaign is your overall email marketing strategy where you’ve thought about your audience, their needs, and how best to use a single email or multiple email sends to meet those needs. Email campaigns can span several different email sequences. It can be a combination of marketing emails, autoresponders, and transactional emails.
Hosting your Own Emails
All email service providers (ESPs) will warn you about the disadvantages of hosting your own emails, but the story is not completely black and white. When we talk about hosting your own emails, we mean having the email server on your own website rather than at an email service provider (ESP).
If you choose to host your own email server, check with your hosting provider to see what email sending limits they impose, although you can actually see that information in the hosting provider’s cPanel. Hostinger, for example, offers you 1GB space for emails. Most ESPs do not limit email storage per se but focus on the number of subscribers, emails sent per month, and features provided.
The advantages of hosting
You may decide to go ahead and host your own email service despite the doom predictions of many ESPs. If you choose to do so, we want you to be aware that we definitely DO NOT recommend sending your emails to recipients using your server (your website). There are many disadvantages and dangers to sending your emails to your subscribers directly from your server instead of sending them to an ESP who will then send them to your subscribers. Just don’t do it!
Cost
Of course, one of the main benefits of hosting your own emails, since you’re probably paying a hosting company to host your website, is that there probably won’t be an additional monthly fee while your email list is still relatively small. While your email list is relatively small, the additional demands will likely be within the limits of your hosting plan. Only when you get hundreds of thousands or millions of subscribers will this cause problems for your hosting company and more money for you.
Control
You have more control over your list and sending when you host your own emails. You are not subject to the filters, blacklists, limitations or other control measures of an email sending company.
All ESPs want to protect their businesses by avoiding spam. You should also stay away from spam. If your subscribers started getting spammed, it would destroy you and your website’s credibility (and your income). But sometimes innocent people get carried away by wrong corporate decisions to “cut costs.”
If you follow our recommendations to use serious companies such as Getresponse, Constant Contact, Mailchimp and Active Campaign among others, yes, you will be subject to their rules, but we believe that it is a small cost to pay to avoid the possible problems of sending your emails to their subscribers. using your own email server. Basically, what you’re doing is sending your emails to one of those ESPs, which then sends them to subscribers.
Easy to use
One of the big advantages of using a WordPress plugin to set up your newsletters and emails is the ease of use. You set up your campaigns and emails from your WordPress dashboard. The way the email plugin works is pretty consistent with the way you write your pages and posts. So if you know WordPress, you pretty much know your email system.
Most add-on email systems have a drag and drop newsletter builder, so you simply drag the various blocks of text, videos, images, etc. to the newsletter and place them where you want them to appear. If you want a recent post to be part of the newsletter, just grab it right there and drop it into the newsletter you’re creating. When you are ready to send the newsletter, simply click “send” in the newsletter plugin.
With an ESP, you are using their web applications to create your newsletter. Although they have generally made their newsletter and email builders easy to use with drag and drop builders, they are not WordPress, so you need to learn and adopt their email creation methods.
The cons of hosting
If you are on a shared host, you are sharing the IP address of that server. If someone on that server is blacklisted for sending spam or other illegal or prohibited activities such as pornography, the email service provider may blacklist the IP. That means that even if everything you were doing when sending your emails was fine, if the entire IP was blacklisted, your emails may not be delivered either.
The reliability of the different hosts you can choose to host your website can vary. Therefore, the reliability of your email delivery may also vary. There may even be glitches that prevent your email from being sent, in which case you should not only notice it but also restart the email campaign. You are the support staff, so if there is a problem, you must fix it. On the other hand, email service providers have large technical staff and servers around the world, so support is built-in. Any issue, if it arises, is handled very quickly and effectively without causing any problems to the user.
There is also the issue of how the recipients’ email service provider views the email and what folder they place it in. Some email providers look at the “from” address of the email and if it’s not from one of the big reputable email senders, they may send it to the recipient’s spam folder, so all your hard work will be in vain.
You can use WordPress to host your emails yourself. But never use WordPress to send your emails. Use an ESP like the ones we have mentioned. That way you’ll avoid many of the potential problems, like deliverability and having your emails sent to a spam folder because they come from a sender of unknown reliability.
Following the rules
The good news is that people trust email much more than social networks like Facebook, Twitter, etc. That’s great because it results in a much higher open rate for your emails. People like to buy from people they know and trust. So that higher trust factor for email marketing translates into higher income for the affiliate marketer.
But a good part of that increased trust is due to all the rules and security features that have been implemented to protect website visitors and their privacy. These rules and regulations were implemented when marketers and others abused the email system with unsolicited emails, fraudulent activity, and pornography.
The following sections go over some of the important email rules you should follow as an affiliate marketer.
CAN-SPAM
There was a time when the kings of spam marketing sent millions of emails a day. It was the Wild West in the email world, and consumers were receiving hundreds of emails every day. The government received thousands of complaints from angry consumers.
One of the first regulations to be implemented was the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. Most people don’t know that CAN-SPAM stands for Controlling the Assault of Unsolicited Pornography and Marketing (CAN-SPAM). Even fewer affiliate marketers know what regulations the law contains that you must follow. You can be fined up to more than 40 thousand dollars, so this is no joke. We’ve seen tons of marketers who don’t deliver. Ignorance of the law is no excuse. You don’t want to hire an expensive lawyer to defend you. If you sell something, and that is what affiliate marketers do (sell things), you must comply with the provisions of this law.
Even fewer people are aware of the individual provisions of the law that they may be violating. Setting up your emails to comply with the law is not that complex; It just requires a little more time and thought. It’s certainly better than having to pay over $40,000 and the stress it would cause if you committed a violation.
CAN-SPAM Act regulations
Act regulations include the following:
- Make sure the From and To data in the email header is correct.
- Be precise with the topic, don’t mislead him. If your purpose is advertising, say so clearly.
- Identify the email as an advertisement.
- Include a physical address where you can be reached; This is essential. This can be a postal address, PO box, or a registered postal agent who represents you and accepts your emails.
- Clearly tell your recipients how to unsubscribe.
- Immediately unsubscribe anyone who requests it. You must comply with all requests within ten days.
- Be aware of what others do in your name. If you hire an email company that does email marketing, you still need to make sure you comply with the law. Responsibility for compliance with the law cannot be evaded.
What matters is not what you think the intent of the email was; is what the recipient can reasonably conclude was the purpose of your email. The burden of compliance falls on you. Most email software automatically records and timestamps when your visitor enters their email address into your website’s opt-in form or widget. The sender of your email, whether it’s Amazon, Mailchimp, Active Campaign, or another company, may request your subscribers’ timestamp logs as proof that you’re not spamming. Even with that, you may have to argue that you’re not spamming. It’s very easy for a distracted or malicious recipient to click the spam button and send a complaint to your provider.
So if your ESP receives a spam complaint, you, as the responsible email sender, have a defense and can present records to support your defense by emailing your ESP.
Importance of Regulatory Compliance in Affiliate Marketing
Complying (or failing to comply) with regulations can not only have consequences with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), but it can also affect your ability to be a member of an affiliate program and profit from the sales you promote. Many affiliate marketers today indicate on their application forms that you must comply with all legal regulations. They may examine your compliance with government regulations and, if you are a member of other affiliate programs, check to see if you comply with those programs’ regulations before accepting you.
The opt-in
Today you should give your website visitors the ability to choose whether they want more information, newsletters, or emails from you by taking a positive action, such as entering your email and clicking or requesting to subscribe. This method calls for opt-in.
You can’t just sign up everyone on your email list even if they reject it. Doing it that way would generate a lot of spam complaints. People would feel cheated. This method has a high risk of fraud. It generally results in a high percentage of spam and/or bounced emails. This can result in deliverability issues with your ESP. They may lower your reputation, limit your submissions, or even ban you from their system.
The Double opt-in
The double opt-in method is a much more reliable method that reduces the possibility of fraud. Your potential email subscriber comes to your site and fills out your form, entering their email and other information requesting to receive your emails. That is the participation option. In response, your email system sends the potential subscriber a confirmation email with a link they must click to confirm that they wish to be added to the list. That is double acceptance. The potential for fraudulent email addresses is reduced, resulting in a much more reliable subscriber list.
The sender of your email will be vigilant to make sure you comply with CAN-SPAM regulations, so you want to make sure your email setup is the most reliable method with the least chance of fraud. That is the double opt-in method.
Your email software typically keeps track of when visitors choose to sign up and maintains a list of confirmed subscribers and visitors who haven’t signed up. Your email software typically continues to send your emails only to your confirmed subscribers.
Unsubscribing
To comply with CAN-SPAM regulations, you must unsubscribe visitors who request it as soon as possible.
The entire process of your subscriber filling out the form, sending a confirmation email, and confirmations separating your list into confirmed subscribers and pending subscribers is usually handled automatically by your email software. Future emails are sent to confirmed subscribers only. Your email system will typically keep track of your subscribers, when people fill out your online subscription form and when they confirm.
The system also tracks some metrics so you know how you’re doing. It tracks the number of emails successfully delivered, the number of emails actually opened by your subscribers, and, if you have links (such as for affiliate products), your click-through rate. Your email software also automatically tracks who unsubscribes and when. When a person unsubscribes, their name is removed from your subscriber list and they will no longer receive emails from your campaign.
Email Detection and Filtering
The reputation of an ESP is of vital importance to itself. If an ESP were known as a spammy email provider, that would be the death of the business. All email senders have their own screens or filters by which they determine whether an email address is valid. Depending on the rating of the email addresses on your list, you are assigned a “reputation” value.
Each ESP’s criteria are somewhat different and one of your email subscribers that was acceptable to one email sender may not be acceptable to another. Changing email providers is not an easy thing, when you try to move your subscriber list to the new ESP, it is very possible that it will not even accept your subscriber list because its filters could detect the presence of questionable emails.
So you might require paying for an email cleaning service to clean up that list, removing any questionable email addresses, before your new ESP will accept your list. In this cleaning process, you can lose a considerable percentage of your subscribers if the new ESP has more restrictive filters than the previous one. From the above it is clear the need to choose carefully from the beginning an ESP recognized in the market and with good prestige like those we have already mentioned and of which we will give more details below.
Some of those emails may be blacklisted because they are sources of spam email campaigns. Some email providers will even add their own clients’ emails to the blacklist if they have been sending spam. In addition to the email sender blacklist, there are also some industry-recognized blacklists.
Soft and Hard Bounces
A soft bounce is when the destination server recognizes the email address as a valid email address, but due to a temporary situation such as the mailbox is full or the server is temporarily down, the message cannot be delivered correctly. Depending on how you have configured bounce handling in your email system, the email address may be included in the next sending. But if it still doesn’t arrive, you should consider it a bad address and remove it from your email list.
A hard bounce occurs when the destination server does not recognize the email address as valid. Either the email address was misspelled on the form or it is fake. Either way, bounced emails will probably never be delivered successfully.
Beware of Buying an Email List
Protecting your email reputation is vitally important to the profitability of your affiliate business. Although most email senders will allow you to import an email list and add it to your list, some do not.
Never consider purchasing an email list and importing it into your list. These lists are usually full of bad email addresses, invalid emails, hard bounces, soft bounces, addresses that have been spamming, and addresses that have been blacklisted. They can also be the source of many complaints because the party selling you the email list may have collected those emails using automated collection tools and taken them without the parties’ permission to send them emails.
If you try to import a list like that and add it to your list, the email service provider’s filter will prevent the import or the first send will generate so many bad addresses, bounces and complaints that your email service provider can drop its reputation, reduce your sending speed or ban it completely.
Protecting Your Email List: Preventing Spam and Maintaining Reputation
If you have installed the Wordfence WordPress plugin, you will probably be very surprised by the number of criminals attacking your site, trying to log in with false information, etc.
Spammers, blacklisted emails, suspicious emails, and fraudulent email companies often see your email subscription form as an opportunity that will allow them to publish their spam messages on your site. If you don’t protect your email registration form, all of these scam emails will be added to your subscriber list. Then, when you send your own emails, your ESP may say that your reputation has dropped due to a high percentage of bad emails.
The best course of action is to prevent these spammers and bad actors from getting your names on their list in the first place. How do you do that? You can install an anti-spam plugin like Akismet or CleanTalk. These plugins compare the email that is entered against their cloud-based database of bad and spam emails. If that email address is on your list, it will be discarded instead of added to your list.
An ESP may put you on probation due to their poor reputation for sending fraudulent emails. How does that happen? Well, when you allow anyone to subscribe and comment, some of those people may be people who are spamming or have been blacklisted. Akismet is supposed to protect against that but may not work if it is not in the ESP standards in question. Try Clean Talk.
Email Limitation
Throttling means that your ESP temporarily limits the speed at which it can send emails. For example, an email that was sent an hour before you entered probation may now take a day. Probation also means that you are given the opportunity to correct any complaints or problems that your ESP has identified.
What does it mean to be on probation and what does that have to do with limiting email? It means that your ESP is going to limit your sending rate for a certain time (a few months). So instead of my email campaign lasting a few hours, it was spread out over three days. At the end of those months, your shipping speed will increase again.
However, some email service providers, when you first join, reduce sending for the first few months. This limitation doesn’t really matter since your email lists are small to begin with.
Top Email Service Providers – Overview
Our recommendations for ESP include the following requirements:
- Offer an initial free plan so that beginning affiliate marketers don’t incur a charge for their email before their subscriber count exceeds the free account maximum.
- Have the ability to send automated emails.
- Have the ability to make transactional emails.
Mailchimp
- Description: Mailchimp is renowned for its user-friendly interface and comprehensive email marketing tools, suitable for small to medium-sized businesses.
- Outstanding Features: Drag-and-drop email builder, marketing automation, segmentation, A/B testing, reporting and analytics.
- Ideal Use: SMBs looking for an easy-to-use platform for email marketing and automation.
- Free Plan: Yes, up to 500 contacts and 1,000 emails/month.
- Paid Plans: Yes, starting from $13.20/month.
Constant Contact
- Description: Constant Contact offers robust email marketing and event management tools with excellent customer support, ideal for small businesses and nonprofits.
- Outstanding Features: Customizable templates, social media integration, event management, detailed tracking and reporting.
- Ideal Use: Small businesses and nonprofits seeking easy-to-use email marketing solutions with strong support.
- Free Plan: No permanent free plan, but offers a 14-day free trial.
- Paid Plans: Yes, starting from $12/month.
Sendinblue (now Brevo)
- Description: Sendinblue provides email marketing, CRM, and SMS marketing tools, focusing on automation and simplicity.
- Outstanding Features: Email marketing, transactional emails, SMS campaigns, marketing automation, advanced segmentation.
- Ideal Use: Businesses looking for an all-in-one platform for email, CRM, and SMS marketing.
- Free Plan: Yes, with 300 emails/day and unlimited contacts.
- Paid Plans: Yes, starting from $7/month.
GetResponse
- Description: GetResponse offers advanced email marketing features, including landing pages, marketing automation, and webinar hosting.
- Outstanding Features: Marketing automation, autoresponders, landing pages, webinars, eCommerce tools.
- Ideal Use: Marketers and businesses needing a comprehensive platform for email marketing, automation, and webinars.
- Free Plan: Yes, 30-day free trial, up to 500 contacts.
- Paid Plans: Yes, starting from $13.20/month.
AWeber
- Description: AWeber focuses on easy-to-use email marketing tools with automation capabilities, ideal for bloggers and small businesses.
- Outstanding Features: Email automation, customizable sign-up forms, autoresponder follow-ups, analytics.
- Ideal Use: Bloggers, content creators, and SMBs looking for straightforward email marketing solutions.
- Free Plan: Yes, up to 500 subscribers and 3,000 emails/month.
- Paid Plans: Yes, starting from $12.50/month.
ConvertKit
- Description: ConvertKit is designed for creators and bloggers, emphasizing simplicity and automation in email marketing.
- Outstanding Features: Visual automation editor, customizable forms, subscriber tagging, integrations with tools for creators.
- Ideal Use: Ideal for bloggers, content creators, and online influencers looking for straightforward email automation.
- Free Plan: Yes, up to 1,000 subscribers.
- Paid Plans: Yes, starting from $9/month.
HubSpot
- Description: HubSpot offers a comprehensive all-in-one marketing platform, including email marketing, CRM, and automation tools.
- Outstanding Features: CRM integration, marketing automation, social media management, analytics, personalized email marketing.
- Ideal Use: Businesses seeking a complete marketing suite with CRM integration for managing customer relationships and marketing efforts.
- Free Plan: Yes, with basic features.
- Paid Plans: Yes, starting from $45/month.
ActiveCampaign
- Description: ActiveCampaign is known for its advanced automation and CRM integration capabilities, ideal for businesses focused on personalized marketing.
- Outstanding Features: Advanced segmentation, email automation, CRM integration, site tracking, split testing.
- Ideal Use: Businesses wanting sophisticated automation, CRM integration, and detailed analytics for targeted marketing campaigns.
- Free Plan: No permanent free plan, but offers a 14-day free trial.
- Paid Plans: Yes, starting from $15/month.
MailerLite
- Description: MailerLite is an email marketing platform that emphasizes simplicity and ease of use, offering intuitive tools to create, send, and manage email campaigns.
- Outstanding Features: Drag-and-Drop Editor, allows for the creation of visually appealing emails without the need for design or coding skills. Marketing Automation create automated workflows to send emails based on user behavior and actions. Landing Pages, tools to create customized landing pages and subscription forms. A/B Testing, test different versions of emails to determine which performs best. Integrations, integrates with various platforms like Shopify, WordPress, Zapier, and more. Reports and Analytics, provides detailed data on campaign performance, including open rates, clicks, and conversions.
- Ideal Use: Ideal for small to medium-sized businesses, bloggers, and creators looking for a simple and affordable email marketing solution.
- Free Plan: Allows up to 12,000 emails per month and 1,000 subscribers.
- Paid Plans: Start from $9/month and increase based on the number of subscribers and additional features.