When you think about affiliate marketing, you may first think about social media. While social media affiliate marketing has certainly become the predominant form of affiliate marketing for many individuals, email can still be an important part of an affiliate marketing program overall. Here are a few key ways that you can build your affiliate marketing program through email.
Keep Communication Open With Your Affiliates
Using your email inbox to attain communication with your affiliates is a good way to build your existing marketing program. There are two common ways to maintain this type of communication: using encouragement toward your affiliates and creating open communication with your affiliates.
Encouraging your affiliates can help them work harder. You might not be a traditional employer, but you take the form of an employer for your affiliates. According to a Workhuman, performance feedback and recognition programs can make employees feel as though the work they do is meaningful and purposeful and can make it more likely that respondents say they have a positive work experience.
On the other side, neglecting communication is one of the biggest mistakes new affiliate marketers make. When you have an affiliate marketing program, you also need an easily-accessible email address for affiliates to contact, as well as routine quick responses to these emails. This makes it feel as though you really care about your affiliates.
Include Affiliate Information and Content in Your Newsletter
A newsletter can be a great way to create an even better relationship with your affiliates. There are two common types of newsletters that you might want to use to spotlight affiliates, including a general customer and contact newsletter and a specialized affiliate newsletter.
Most businesses already have an email newsletter of some kind that goes out to customers and contacts. You can use this newsletter to highlight wins from your affiliate; spotlight an affiliate perhaps once per quarter, doing a short interview about who they are and what they do. It improves recognition and even advertises your affiliate program to individuals who may want to join.
If you have a good number of affiliates–at least a few dozen–then you can also start your own affiliate newsletter. The affiliate newsletter can spotlight unique ways to advertise, give more in-depth information about a specific affiliate’s wins, and generally give tips and tricks for your affiliates. This ties into the first point: creating an affiliate newsletter can help you ensure more effective communication with your affiliates, helping them feel like you really want to help them succeed.
Additionally, consider leaning on your affiliates to help you write the newsletter in the first place. If you see that one of your affiliates has written an especially good piece of content that has information relevant to your business, then reach out and see whether you can republish it within your newsletter. It shows that you care about your affiliates’ content, helps you talk more with your affiliates, and can even reduce the amount of time you spend on your newsletter.
Provide Email Templates for Your Affiliates
Email templates can be a hugely helpful tool for many affiliate marketers, especially if they do a lot of affiliate work through email. If you find that your affiliates often use email to reach out to new clients, especially if email is a big part of where their customers come from, then why not provide them with an email template that can make it easier for them?
Whether you have an email template page on your website where affiliates can go to use them or you email them out directly–potentially within your email newsletter–providing these templates shows that you’re okay doing some of the work as long as your affiliates show up. That can prompt them to work even harder on their affiliate marketing.
Additionally, you may be able to notice that one of your top affiliates has an email that converts incredibly well with their customer base. You could reach out to them and ask them if you could create a template together, taking cues from that specific template. In your next newsletter, you can share this template, stating that you created it with your affiliate marketer and boosting both of your presences.
Share Tips and Tricks for Better Affiliate Marketing
Finally, it can be a good idea to actively share tips and tricks for better affiliate marketing with your affiliates themselves. Remember, you and your affiliates are working together, and you want to do as much as you can to emphasize this fact throughout your affiliate marketing newsletters, materials, and other forms of communication with your affiliates.
For example, say that you’ve done A/B testing with your customers, showing that certain groups respond better to certain types of emails. Show off that information to your affiliates. It can cut down on the amount of time that your affiliates have to spend doing their own testing, allowing them to move forward with actively trying to convert customers.
The Bottom Line
Email can be a hugely beneficial tool for all sorts of marketing, and affiliate marketing is no different. When you’re trying to reach out to your affiliate marketers using email, there are a few tips that can help you make it go much more smoothly. These tips and tricks can make your affiliate marketing program even better.
