If you are doing affiliate marketing and trying to boost your affiliate income, I can say something about you, even before I’ve met you. And this is because I have personally helped and coached hundreds of affiliate marketers from all niches to boost their profits.
The one thing that has always been true, is that I have never met an affiliate marketer whom I couldn’t help make a ton more money by learning to utilize email marketing better. Whether this is because they weren’t using it at all, or because they weren’t using it to its full potential.
Whichever camp you fall into, this guide will help you boost your affiliate income to levels you couldn’t even imagine before. And as a bonus, do you want to know what the other main benefit is to utilizing more email marketing as an affiliate marketer?
You get a lot closer to that dream of “earning money as you sleep”. And let’s be honest, most people get into online marketing as a way to make money on autopilot. Yet, without email marketing, that goal is a lot further away than you might think.
Why email marketing
In a word, email marketing is still the most profitable channel when it comes to selling anything online. Per dollar invested, email marketing beats everything out there in two ways. First, it is the only channel where you will see numbers such as a return of 3000-4000% in terms of ROI.
The second major benefit of email marketing as an affiliate marketing channel? It is the most established and carries the lowest risk (or rather no risk at all). Not many affiliates get this, but every other channel carries significant risk when using it.
Anytime you do affiliate marketing through any other channel (except your own website or email), you risk losing it all. You can learn more about this shocking fact in our super popular article “Why Email is More Important Than Ever”.
Implement segmentation straightaway
What I find is common amongst affiliate marketers is that most don’t like to do segmentation. In fact, they do very little personalization and they treat entire huge lists as a singular entity in each and every one of their broadcasts.
But wait, scratch that, this is not entirely true. You know who does utilize segmentation in their affiliate email marketing? Hyper profitable email marketers do that. So do affiliate marketers who earn high affiliate incomes. And it is no coincidence that this is the case.
And if you’re like most affiliate marketers who are putting off segmentation, I think I know the reason. Perhaps you think that segmentation has to be complex and involve a lot of complex overthinking.
But this isn’t the case. You’ve only been led down that path because most guides on email marketing are not written for affiliate marketers. They’re looking at big corporations dealing with a completely different business model.
Let me simplify segmentation for you, right here, and right now.
All that segmentation means is that you treat different types of people differently. And with a powerful platform like Emercury this can be anything that you want it to be.
For example, you can have a segment for openers vs non-openers. You can have a segment for people who took a certain action, performed certain events or have certain tags. And then when you broadcast, you can send a slightly different broadcast to each segment.
And notice I said broadcast there. This is because segments are something we use to make broadcasts more personal. We have other ways to personalize email journeys. To learn more about all of these distinctions, check out our guide on personalization as the key to higher conversion.
Strategize and think in terms of the buyer’s journey
Now, I’m not going to sugar coat this and pretend that getting good at email marketing is something that happens automatically, without any effort on your part. If you are coming from other channels, or just new to email marketing in general, you have some foundational work to do.
And one of the big things that you really need to work on is a mindset or attitude shift. You see, the whole secret behind the hyper-effectiveness of email marketing is that it can be used throughout the buyer’s journey.
That is, you can follow and track and respond to your lead or customer based on their actual stage in the overall buyer’s journey. This is unlike with other channels where you just sell based on whatever the content topic is about.
Let me give you an example so it makes more sense
If you do affiliate marketing through YouTube videos or blogs, you will produce content (a video or blog post) that tackles a certain topic. Now, that topic might be associated with a certain stage in the customer journey.
However, it is not part of an overall sequence that you yourself control. The person can view that piece of content out of order, and you’re basically hoping that they see the right content at the right time. Hint, most of the time they do not. In fact, they view your content out of order most of the time, and that creates serious friction.
Email marketing is completely different from any of your other channels as an affiliate marketer. And one of the main reasons is that you can guide the subscriber down the path, and nudge them from one stage to the other.
And the best part is that with modern email marketing, you can make all of this automated. That is, you can create automated email marketing which guides people down a personalized journey. To learn more about doing this, see our guide on converting leads into customers using automation.
Prioritize relationship-building, not selling
Now, don’t get me wrong, we’re all in this with an ultimate goal of selling something to someone. However, selling should only be a natural and logical action that happens at the right time with the right person.
In fact, selling is a whole lot easier when you do it with someone that you’ve built a relationship with. Now, if you haven’t done much email marketing, I can’t blame you for not having a “relationship building” mindset.
With most other channels, building a relationship isn’t even an option. Sure you can produce a lot of great content, and that makes people feel closer to you. But it’s more of an appreciation where they like what you do. It’s nowhere near to the kind of bonding and trust you get as if you were building a relationship by communicating with them one-on-one.
Email marketing is still the only marketing channel where you can get extremely close to reproducing the benefits of talking to leads on a one-to-one basis. And while there are a number of skills you need to develop in order to build a relationship, I would recommend that you start by focusing on personalization.
With personalization you will automatically end up doing a lot of the right things that create a relationship between you and the reader. And that has mostly to do with the fact that good personalization feels as if a caring older brother or mentor is reaching out to them and coaching them on a one-to-one basis. Learn more about this in our guide on personalization.
Utilize the power of automations
The fact is that all affiliate marketers could boost their affiliate income through the roof if they utilized automations, however, most of them don’t and just stick to broadcasts.
Now, I can’t blame you if you fall into this category, for a very simple reason. Most of the guides and information about automation are full of examples and ideas about using automation, for other types of business. You will almost never see guides even mentioning affiliate marketing when they talk about or promote automation.
However, this isn’t because you can’t use automations and journeys in affiliate marketing. This is because most vendors out there aren’t that excited about attracting affiliate marketers. Hint, if you want to get a sense for what it’s like to work with a team that loves affiliate marketers, consider booking a free demo at this special link.
And while automation is a topic of its own, let me just simplify it here for you and give you some sense why and how it can help you as an affiliate marketer. Half of the answer is in the name. Every business process out there can be made more effective, more profitable, and cheaper through the use of automation.
However, if you’re like most affiliate marketers and stuck on just sending manual broadcasts to big bulk lists, well to be fair, there isn’t even anything to automate in your case. This is where the rest of the points in this article come into play. You use automations to automate everything else.
Segmentation is something you can put on autopilot, as is guiding people down a buyer’s journey and tracking said journey. To learn more about automating things, see our popular article – when to use email automations, it includes a bunch of practical examples.
Get a good understanding of “engagement” in email marketing
Did you know that in essence all profit-boosting tactics in email marketing can be tied back to one single thing. That’s right, there is one universal key that sits behind all profit derived from email marketing. And that one special key is a little something we like to call “engagement”. And yes, its also the key to boosting affiliate income as an affiliate marketer.
Most email marketers fail to focus on this one key, for a simple reason. It is a case of missing the forest for the trees. They are too focused on the individual tactics, techniques and methods (trees), not realizing that they’re just a different way to achieve the same ultimate goal (engagement).
To get a better understanding for this, see our guide on engagement as the one secret to all email marketing profits.
Good email metrics = higher affiliate income
If you’re not using email marketing yet, or failing to boost your affiliate income off of it, chances are that you haven’t even considered the importance of email metrics.
This is the one thing that I find gets overlooked the most, and it is because it’s not a “fun” subject like other aspects of marketing. However, measurement is where you find all of the “hidden gold” in business. And the same is true when it comes to email marketing.
Fortunately, with email marketing, the metrics are actually a lot simpler than with other channels. There is basically one thing that you are keeping track of, and that’s engagement.
And how can you tell what your engagement levels are like? You just make sure to monitor your open rates and click through rates. If you want more of a personalized guide on how to interpret these, consider that as an Emercury user you get access to our team for all of these questions. If you haven’t done this yet, be sure to book a free demo with our team.
A partner on your side – we love helping affiliates boost their profits
You know what is the most difficult part of being an affiliate marketer? All of that overwhelm and feeling like you are on your own. It also doesn’t help that most email platforms out there aren’t very affiliate marketing friendly. All you have to do is search “affiliate” on their blogs to find out that they pretend like you don’t even exist.
Emercury is kind of different. In fact, I’m going to share a little inside secret with you about our success. A lot of people think we are successful because of the cutting-edge features or the famous support. If you look at our droves of 5-star reviews you will notice a pattern. People love working with our team.
However, that’s just one part of it. Another big part of our success is the affiliate marketing community. We love affiliate marketing and truly understand affiliate marketing at a deeper level. We’ve used this knowledge to help successful email marketers become even more successful. And it’s a great win-win relationship. Their affiliate income grows, and they get to use more of our services.
I would love to see you become our next affiliate marketer success story. Would you like to book a free demo with our team to get a sense for the Emercury experience? Don’t you think it’s about time you had someone on your side that cares about your success and understands your unique challenges and worries?
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