Many people are talking about how important email marketing is and that you should build an email list as soon as possible.
You don't often hear about how to automate your email marketing completely. This would free up your time. You could stop marketing products around the clock manually. And you could sell more without manual effort.
Email marketing is widely regarded as one of the most powerful tools for optimizing ROI. Just take a look at how it performs compared to other channels:
Email helps you squeeze the maximum profit from every prospect you add to your list.
For every body spent, you can generate in revenue — that's huge! Using email marketing in your affiliate business means you're working at maximum productivity.
Why affiliate marketers should use email marketing
Affiliate marketers often prefer building small, simple setups that generate commissions with minimal effort. This is why many resort to spamming their affiliate links all over the internet — it's quick and easy, but lacks long-term value.
...but it doesn't work as well as one might think.
Affiliate marketers now face more challenges when it comes to promotion. In the past, simply posting comments with affiliate links on relevant websites could drive commissions, but those strategies aren't as effective as they once were.
As an affiliate marketer, you often need to go the extra mile to earn commissions. While this requires more effort, it can lead to a more stable and sustainable affiliate income. One particularly effective strategy is using email marketing for affiliate promotions.
Imagine you've built an audience that subscribes to your email newsletter. You can send them valuable information and promotional emails whenever you choose. With just one click, hundreds or even thousands of emails are sent out to people who have already shown interest in the topic your newsletter covers.
That's not just a dream — it's a reality.
But that's not all. Email marketing can be fully automated using follow-up email series. This is something I highly recommend, especially for beginners, as it helps grow and automate your affiliate business with ease.
You set up a small email series for a specific target audience and let them subscribe to your list. Once they subscribe, they automatically receive the entire series of emails over several days, with no manual effort required on your part. The emails in the series can include a mix of informational content and promotional material.
This is where many marketers take a different path — they opt for manual email marketing. While there's nothing wrong with this approach, it limits the scalability and automation of the entire affiliate business.
Email marketing the manual way
Many email marketers send emails manually. They create a list, build it, and then send new emails to all subscribers up to several times a week.
That's completely acceptable and effective, as long as the recipients are interested in the messages.
I do it often.
The problem is that it can't be scaled up. It depends on your time, so if you don't invest your time, the whole email system stops working.
We're affiliate marketers, so this is bad.
We want to increase the amount of money we make. Ideally, to do this, we need to be able to make more money without increasing our working time.
We want automation so we can free up our time to focus on more important things that improve our lives.
Manually creating email marketing campaigns is not a bad idea, but it's not the best approach for a marketing business that aims to grow though.
Automation in email marketing
The smarter way of doing affiliate marketing is by using all available automation tools available.
When we started email marketing, we had only the so-called follow up autoresponder option when creating an email marketing campaign. Nowadays, there are much more automation tools available, like connecting the email system directly with the online shop and automating the complete customer relationship building.
However, using classic follow up autoresponders, it's all about planning a series of emails which are sent to each recipient in the order you add them to the series. You even can define the interval the emails are sent out.
The sending is always relative to the specific time the recipient has subscribed the email service. For instance, someone signed up at 6pm today. This person receives the first email today, and the gap between the first email and the next one is 1 day.
Based on the fixed interval, the next email is sent exactly at 6pm the next day — automatically.
A simple autoresponder series could look like this, which is more tailored to sell a specific offer:
With each email, we add trust, remove obstacles that are preventing us from selling our offer, and increase the chances to successfully sell.
However, autoresponder is not only about selling...
It can be used perfectly to just deliver value to the recipients. This helps to build trust, and on some point, when we decide to promote something, we will have better chances to successfully sell.
Conclusion
Email marketing is incredibly effective — just look at the ROI mentioned earlier in this article. No other promotional channel comes close to the power of direct email communication with your audience. It even allows you to use paid ads and still make the campaign profitable in the end.
That's truly powerful!
Email marketing needs to be done with a strategy and clear goals. Do you want to build trust? To sell something? Or to combine trust building with selling?
Both work.
I'm thankful that we have these automation tools because they help me create highly effective email campaigns where I can both deliver high value to my email recipients and promote something useful when it makes sense.