marketingexperts
New member
Affiliate marketing is all about making the most of the strategies available to you. This enables you to maximize your reach and, as a result, your profits.
However, there are plenty of sales-boosting strategies that many marketers – perhaps even you – fail to utilize.
Email marketing is one such strategy that boasts many benefits, including the building of relationships and the nurturing of sales leads. And with the right guidance, email marketing is relatively easy to implement and leverage.
In this post, we’ll first discuss email marketing and why you should consider adding it to your affiliate marketing strategy. Then, we’ll show you how to leverage email marketing to maximize sales, including using the Easy Affiliate plugin to optimize your approach.
Let’s get started!
Why Email Marketing and Affiliate Marketing Go Hand in Hand
Email marketing is the process of sending email campaigns to potential customers in the hopes of convincing them to purchase your product or service.
This is a great business-building strategy for affiliates, especially considering its various benefits. For example:
It builds relationships. If you can get into the inboxes of potential leads, you can build meaningful relationships based on their trust in you. Trust directly correlates to sales.
It creates a ready-made list of potential sales leads. You don’t want to oversell to your subscribers, but an email list gives you access to ready-to-buy leads. How effectively? Just take a look at Bryan Harris. Even with a tiny list for each of his three launches (25, 575, and 1,200 subscribers, respectively), he still managed to make a respectable amount from his email sales campaigns.
The above example wasn’t affiliate marketing specific, but as you’ll see below, the sales process is the same whether you’re selling your own product or an affiliate product.
How to Leverage Email Marketing to Maximize Affiliate Marketing Sales
With a better understanding of email marketing and its relationship to affiliate sales, it's time to implement this strategy for yourself.
Step 1: Build an Email List
Your email list is the bread and butter of your email marketing strategy. While building this list will require some work, the reward will be worth it in the long run.
Fortunately, there are a few list-building strategies which you can apply to your affiliate site immediately. Let’s take a look at three of the simplest.
Landing page. With a specific goal in mind – collecting emails from site visitors – landing pages are the easiest way to begin growing your email list immediately.
Content upgrades. Think of these as extensions of your site content. These are free, but they require an email for access.
Freebies. Unlike content upgrades, freebies aren’t linked directly to any content. However, they offer their own value and can be anything, including e-books, e-courses, and guides.
Now that you've got the subscribers, how can you better target their needs to maximize affiliate sales?
Step 2: Segment Your Email Subscribers
Since each subscriber will be at a different stage of the sales cycle, it’s vital that you target each subscriber at their level. To do this, you’ll need to understand segmentation and how to do it.
In simplest terms, segmentation is the process of breaking your email subscribers into themed groups. These groups may be based upon demographics (including gender, age, and location) or behaviors (such as previous purchases, previous site views, and link click-throughs).
So, how can you go about segmenting your subscribers to ensure you’re sending each one the best message for their stage in the cycle?
Collect demographic data. Tools, like Google Analytics, enable you to collect the information you need – such as gender, location, and career – in order to better target your email subscribers.
Use behavioral data. With tracked affiliate links (more on that in Step 3), you can segment users based on previous purchases, webpage visits, and even email click-throughs.
With this information, you can now focus on targeting each subscriber group specifically. This includes defining your data points, selecting your segments, and creating specialized content to send.
Step 3: Track Affiliate Links with Easy Affiliate
Now that you have a solid following, it’s time to use your list and the segmentation you’ve implemented above to maximize sales. You can do this by incorporating affiliate links and tracking them with the help of Easy Affiliate.
This is an important step, because it tells you two major things. First, what are your customers interested in? Does your segmentation data line up with reality? Second, how is each current link placement working?
To start tracking links, the first step is to create them. The great thing about Easy Affiliate is that each generic affiliate link is automatically converted to a unique link for each affiliate.
Now, once the links have been created and you and your affiliates have had time to use them, you'll want to take a look at stats. Navigate to the left-hand side of your WordPress dashboard and go to Easy Affiliate > Reports > Clicks:
What do the stats say about your email-specific affiliate links? What about your affiliates email-specific links? With this information, you can now continue to make improvements to your strategy, and increase sales.
Conclusion
As an affiliate marketer, it’s good to utilize a variety of strategies in order to boost sales. Email marketing is one such strategy, and its use can mean great things for your business.
In the above post, we explained why you should consider email marketing and how to get started using it to maximize sales. To recap, you should:
Build an email list.
Segment your email subscribers.
Track affiliate links with Easy Affiliate.
However, there are plenty of sales-boosting strategies that many marketers – perhaps even you – fail to utilize.
Email marketing is one such strategy that boasts many benefits, including the building of relationships and the nurturing of sales leads. And with the right guidance, email marketing is relatively easy to implement and leverage.
In this post, we’ll first discuss email marketing and why you should consider adding it to your affiliate marketing strategy. Then, we’ll show you how to leverage email marketing to maximize sales, including using the Easy Affiliate plugin to optimize your approach.
Let’s get started!
Why Email Marketing and Affiliate Marketing Go Hand in Hand
Email marketing is the process of sending email campaigns to potential customers in the hopes of convincing them to purchase your product or service.
This is a great business-building strategy for affiliates, especially considering its various benefits. For example:
It builds relationships. If you can get into the inboxes of potential leads, you can build meaningful relationships based on their trust in you. Trust directly correlates to sales.
It creates a ready-made list of potential sales leads. You don’t want to oversell to your subscribers, but an email list gives you access to ready-to-buy leads. How effectively? Just take a look at Bryan Harris. Even with a tiny list for each of his three launches (25, 575, and 1,200 subscribers, respectively), he still managed to make a respectable amount from his email sales campaigns.
The above example wasn’t affiliate marketing specific, but as you’ll see below, the sales process is the same whether you’re selling your own product or an affiliate product.
How to Leverage Email Marketing to Maximize Affiliate Marketing Sales
With a better understanding of email marketing and its relationship to affiliate sales, it's time to implement this strategy for yourself.
Step 1: Build an Email List
Your email list is the bread and butter of your email marketing strategy. While building this list will require some work, the reward will be worth it in the long run.
Fortunately, there are a few list-building strategies which you can apply to your affiliate site immediately. Let’s take a look at three of the simplest.
Landing page. With a specific goal in mind – collecting emails from site visitors – landing pages are the easiest way to begin growing your email list immediately.
Content upgrades. Think of these as extensions of your site content. These are free, but they require an email for access.
Freebies. Unlike content upgrades, freebies aren’t linked directly to any content. However, they offer their own value and can be anything, including e-books, e-courses, and guides.
Now that you've got the subscribers, how can you better target their needs to maximize affiliate sales?
Step 2: Segment Your Email Subscribers
Since each subscriber will be at a different stage of the sales cycle, it’s vital that you target each subscriber at their level. To do this, you’ll need to understand segmentation and how to do it.
In simplest terms, segmentation is the process of breaking your email subscribers into themed groups. These groups may be based upon demographics (including gender, age, and location) or behaviors (such as previous purchases, previous site views, and link click-throughs).
So, how can you go about segmenting your subscribers to ensure you’re sending each one the best message for their stage in the cycle?
Collect demographic data. Tools, like Google Analytics, enable you to collect the information you need – such as gender, location, and career – in order to better target your email subscribers.
Use behavioral data. With tracked affiliate links (more on that in Step 3), you can segment users based on previous purchases, webpage visits, and even email click-throughs.
With this information, you can now focus on targeting each subscriber group specifically. This includes defining your data points, selecting your segments, and creating specialized content to send.
Step 3: Track Affiliate Links with Easy Affiliate
Now that you have a solid following, it’s time to use your list and the segmentation you’ve implemented above to maximize sales. You can do this by incorporating affiliate links and tracking them with the help of Easy Affiliate.
This is an important step, because it tells you two major things. First, what are your customers interested in? Does your segmentation data line up with reality? Second, how is each current link placement working?
To start tracking links, the first step is to create them. The great thing about Easy Affiliate is that each generic affiliate link is automatically converted to a unique link for each affiliate.
Now, once the links have been created and you and your affiliates have had time to use them, you'll want to take a look at stats. Navigate to the left-hand side of your WordPress dashboard and go to Easy Affiliate > Reports > Clicks:
What do the stats say about your email-specific affiliate links? What about your affiliates email-specific links? With this information, you can now continue to make improvements to your strategy, and increase sales.
Conclusion
As an affiliate marketer, it’s good to utilize a variety of strategies in order to boost sales. Email marketing is one such strategy, and its use can mean great things for your business.
In the above post, we explained why you should consider email marketing and how to get started using it to maximize sales. To recap, you should:
Build an email list.
Segment your email subscribers.
Track affiliate links with Easy Affiliate.
