It’s well-known that email marketing is a supremely powerful tool. Perhaps no collection of professionals recognize this more than affiliate marketers, a group whose entire business plan can depend on having a winning return on investment. So what steps can the average affiliate marketer take to ensure they are maximizing their email potential? The MailCon team paired down a few of our favorite email marketing tips.
Effective Email Marketing Tips for Affiliates
1. Avoid Making Every Email a Sales Pitch
People are getting sold products and services nearly every waking minute of the day. The last thing most email subscribers want is to be on a list that is constantly giving them a hard sell. Savvy email marketers know that there is a give-and-take to working the recipients’ list.
Having said that, you don’t need to be an email marketing veteran to get this balance right. Think of counting down to your “sell” email on your hand. It takes four fingers—four content or non-selling emails—before you count down the thumb, which is your sales pitch email. One, two, three, four: sell.
To help remember, you could even call it a great “rule of thumb.”
2. Cultivate a Quality List
While many may focus on the number of email subscribers they have amassed, it remains worth it to focus even more on the quality of your list. The first step is knowing what a quality email marketing list looks like. To start, subscribers should be receptive to your emails and responsive to your content. If you have some 50,000 email subscribers but less than 2% open your emails, is that really so impressive?
Take care of collecting email addresses by putting good content out on the web and getting referrals from your most engaged subscribers. Solicit questions from your recipients and respond quickly when they do reply. Building a relationship with your subscribers will give you a much stronger asset than a massive list of email recipients that could care less about you or your content.
3. Simplify!
When it comes to emails you have only a snapshot of your recipients’ attention. Every so often you may be able to send a lengthy email of substance, but for the most part, you want your emails to be short, simple, and to the point. All of the text of the email should be breezy and lead directly to whatever your call to action is. If you find yourself with thick paragraphs of text in your email messages, try putting your main points as a bulleted list and cutting everything else out.
4. Use Space Wisely
We’d all like to think that people are sitting down at their computer to read our emails, perhaps with the television off and a nice cup of Rooibos tea to help them focus. But in reality, people check emails on their mobile devices standing in line for coffee, waiting for a train, or bored on a conference call. It’s important to use space in your email message so that people can quickly identify the main point you’re trying to get across. Separate your greetings from your other content, and make sure your call-to-action can be identified nearly instantly. Doing so will make your email marketing efforts more effective.
5. Become Valuable
Any list of email marketing tips wouldn’t be complete without a simple and fairly obvious piece of advice—and that would be to become a valuable resource to your subscribers. Of course, this is easier said than done. In order to do so, it is very useful to know your audience and your industry. Having insight into topics or utilizing and sharing outside third-party content that you know your audience would appreciate can be a significant boon to your email marketing efforts. Connecting with your subscribers and proving that you can help them will make you a more effective affiliate marketer. Don’t forget to follow MailCon on Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter for all new announcements on ticket deals, sponsorship & exhibitor information, and speaking opportunities. We also promise to pepper your feed with practical industry tips and the latest email marketing news. MailCon is the industry’s premier email marketing conference.
