Everyone knows e-mail marketing is highly profitable, cost effective and essential to any online business. And affiliate marketing and e-mail marketing has always gone hand in hand since the very beginning.
Email marketing allows you easy access to communicate and affiliate marketing allows you to quickly showcase what your readers want without having to handle the said product. It’s a match made in heaven guys. That’s why I will be going over 13 email marketing tips for affiliate marketing today.
I went over the basic numbers of how profitable an e-mail list is to any business here. You should read that article if you’re still not convinced on how important email marketing is.
So assuming you already have a list, you need to achieve two things now. First, get your reader to click into your email and second, to click through to whatever link you sent them. All 13 email marketing tips for affiliate marketing below will focus on increasing either one of these two actions.
Short subject lines
The subject line is the first point of contact to persuade your subscriber to open an email from you. If you are looking to increase your open rate, then a short subject line is shown to be the most effective.
Short subject lines that are vague and don’t let the reader know what the content of the email will be about, get the highest click open rates.
The big reason for this is because of curiosity. Obama famously raised $60 million with his short and simple subject lines.
Some examples are: “Hey” “Hey again”
Long subject lines
Short subject lines are great to get people to click open your email, but long subject lines are the best to get people to click-through on your links. When you have long subject lines, you will obviously provide some detail on what the email will contain inside.
Anyone who decides to open your email, is already more receptive to your message and call to action.
One study on email marketing noted that subject lines over 70 characters long saw a spike in conversion rates.
Short emails that are to the point
How many of us check our emails in the morning? Almost all of us right, it’s a chore we do instead of something we enjoy like, instant messaging for example. We try out best to get it done before we even start our day properly. So the last thing we want to do is to go over long emails that we don’t have to actually read.
Cut the crap and keep your emails short and to the point. You don’t want to ramble and clutter your message because your reader is going to click off, or skim and miss your point.
Send them out on weekends
Common sense tells you Mondays and Wednesdays are the best time to send out emails and many people ignore the weekend because a lot of people only check emails for work related reasons.
That can’t be further from the truth. The well established Monday and Wednesday doctrine of email marketing has made these two days the worse days to send emails out. Everyone is sending their emails out during these two days and also at very similar times of the day.
MY common sense tells me… that is way too much competition. Why are you making your life harder? Don’t fight as hard to grab your reader’s attention. Talk to them when everyone else isn’t. The weekends. The fact is, most people check their emails everyday, without fail. It’s a habit as much as it is a chore.
Send them out at night
This goes along with the same logic as the above tip. The established rule of thought was, emails sent during normal business hours are opened the most, 11am being the best time to send your email out. However since, EVERYONE knows this by now, you have everyone sending their emails at the same time.
What does this mean?
I can personally get up to 50+ emails within one morning. What do I do? I skim over the subject lines and ignore the majority of them. The only ones I do open are the most important and personal ones. Email marketing campaigns get ignored and I know my behaviour is not abnormal. It’s the norm.
(skim, skim, skim…skim some more)
To get the best chance of grabbing your readers attention, you need to catch them when they aren’t already use to skipping, skimming and ignoring. Sending your emails at night can prove to be more effective because they are checking their emails for more personal reasons.
Make your emails mobile friendly
Internet use on mobile devices is only going to increase. It’s important your emails are mobile friendly. You want to make sure the layout and the look of your email is aesthetically pleasing so they’re just as effective on mobile as they are on desktop.
Emails that look weird on mobile will instantly hinder your ability to get your reader to convert properly. In the worse case scenario, they might unsubscribe from your email list all-together.
People don’t have a lot of patience so your email needs to do the job right and well, each time, no matter how it’s being read.
Your email list needs to be niched down
This tip should really go on the top of the list. This is the upmost basic best practice of email marketing. Your email list should already be niche specific and if it’s not, you need to begin to niche it down. Identify your target niche and make sure the people on your list are consumers of that niche, be it content or products.
The next step is to make sure the emails you send out are relevant. Sometimes this can be harder said than done, but if you keep your email content relevant then that alone will see your open rates and click through rates increase. People are more likely to read and buy what they’re already interested in.
Frame your e-mail to address a pain point
As a marketer, your job is to present products and services that your audience already wants. And people want things for reasons, no matter how silly the reason is, it’s still a reason.
Your job is to then identify that reason and then connect the product/service to the reason. This is all about addressing pain points to encourage your readers into converted customers. They need to understand what you’re presenting to them is able to address their reason.
Set trigger e-mails based on behaviour
Trigger emails are emails that are automatically sent out depending on the person’s behaviour. An example is for follow up emails to be sent to people who fail to open the initial email you sent out. This way, you can encourage people to interact with your content better.
They didn’t open your email? No problem, set a trigger email to follow up on it.
They didn’t sign up to something? No problem, set a trigger email that outlines all the benefits on a later date.
They didn’t buy the product that’s on sale? No problem, set a trigger email to remind them the sale isn’t going to be around forever.
There’s a lot of ways to use trigger emails, but they all aim to do the same thing. Increase interaction automatically. Watch the below video for an example of how email marketing service providers help you do this.
Provide an additional bonus or freebie
Asking a person to buy something through your affiliate links just because it’s from you, isn’t a very convincing argument. It’s not even convincing when you address their pain point with the tip above. A lot of people need extra encouragement.
That’s where a freebie comes in. Providing a bonus to your readers who do buy the product/service you promote, tends to be the cherry on top that most people need to make a purchase. The freebie doesn’t have to be complicated or extravagant, but it does have to be useful and relevant.
A clear call to action
Many marketers that are new will hesitate to make the call to action very obvious. For some reason they think it’ll annoy the reader. It’ll look too spammy and no one likes a hard sell.
I completely understand, I was like that at first as well, but there’s a big problem because a call to action that isn’t made clear is just ineffective and confusing.
Make sure your call to action is visibly clear in your email. It should be easy to locate and obvious to your reader. They should know what to click the instant they open the email. People don’t have a lot of patience and if your email isn’t clear without reading every word in your email, they’re just simply not going to bother with it.
Plain text emails
Plain text emails are emails that are just text based. There’s no complicated layouts, graphics, colour schemes or images. It’s just the type of email you create when you write an email yourself.
The reason why text emails can perform better than fancy newsletters is because it’s more personal. It doesn’t feel like a big company talking to a faceless reader on a database. It’s like talking and communicating between friends, and the most effective form of marketing is friend and family referral. So anything that helps you build that important relationship with your readers as something more than a business transaction is vital.
Especially since, you aren’t a big company. You are small, you are personable and you do want to build that relationship with your readers.
Use P.S at the end
This is my favourite tip on the list. It doesn’t matter how rushed the person is reading your email, or how badly they are skimming. They will always read the top line and the bottom line.
Adding a P.S at the bottom is the perfect way to get your reader to read a one liner that is straight to the point.
You want the P.S to include a link to what you what them to read, buy, sign up for etc and you want it to make sense as to why they should do it. The more precise you make this one liner, the better your chances of catching your readers.
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This Post Has 3 Comments
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Nice article on Email marketing. Thanks for sharing.
I have been following Robert Kiyosaki on having a email business. I like the way this article is composed it’s to the point Thank you for sharing.