In affiliate email marketing, success is achieved when a user clicks on a link, lands on the product or service page, and makes a purchase. Several elements are crucial for conversions, including the authority of the email sender, the content of the email, and the product itself. However, no campaign can succeed without building an affiliate marketing email list.
This article will explore the importance of building an email list, identify which leads should be targeted for inclusion, and outline the necessary steps and best practices for developing and expanding it.
Spoiler alert! We will also introduce the best email marketing software for affiliate marketing.
Understanding Affiliate Marketing Email Lists
Affiliate marketing email lists are collected by affiliate marketers to send specialized material either containing affiliate links or links that lead to the affiliates’ web pages or the resources with affiliate links. The popularity of email affiliate marketing is the result of a conjunction of two effective strategies:
- Email marketing: Emails have proven to be an effective marketing tool for many decades now, offering cost-effectiveness, worldwide reach, and one of the highest deliverability rates.
- Affiliate marketing: This advertising strategy allows advertisers to pay exactly for the goals they anticipate while content creators can choose products that align with their specialty perfectly.
Benefits of Email Affiliate Marketing
Email and newsletter affiliate marketing is embraced by every second affiliate. The only trend surpassing it is the widespread adoption of AI tools for content creation. Interestingly, these AI tools are integrated into all affiliate marketing channels, including email.
Emails bring the following benefits to affiliate marketing:
- Direct communication with the audience: More than just reading the content, emails give readers the feeling that the content creators address them directly and would risk their reputation by offering low-quality products.
- Top-level targeting: If everything’s done correctly, businesses should already partner with affiliates who represent the audience that the products will resonate with. However, emails allow further segmentation by offering exactly the right products to the right leads. For instance, a fitness brand can partner with affiliates who have followers interested in health and wellness. While general affiliate marketing has smaller chances to reach narrow-niche consumers, the affiliate can further segment its audience by sending yoga products to subscribers who have shown interest in yoga and weightlifting gear to those interested in strength training.
- Cost-effectiveness: Emails are inexpensive to send and typically consist of relatively short content requiring less time from content creators. These characteristics make email channels a cost-effective solution for affiliates to reach the audience swiftly. Consequently, email affiliate marketing emerges as an affordable but effective option for advertisers.
To take advantage of this highly effective technique, advanced email marketing tools are crucial. Such tools must use data from various sources to update the lead profiles and use their email addresses to build affiliate marketing email lists.
As part of its comprehensive suite of solutions, Phonexa offers E-Delivery – a specialized bulk email and SMS automation software.
E-Delivery allows the automation of bulk email sending and personalization of emails based on various recipients’ information, such as the source of the lead and previous history. Additionally, it uses information attached to the lead with the help of other marketing channels, including click and call tracking.
To learn how Phonexa can enhance your affiliate marketing through email list management, embark on a product tour or book a demo to verify the flawless integration of multiple marketing automation solutions in a single dashboard.
Why Building an Affiliate Marketing Email List Is Crucial
It may be tempting to buy email list for affiliate marketing. Yes, this method is easy, not expensive, and, most importantly, quick. However, the results are incomparable to those generated by custom-built affiliate marketing email lists. For affiliate marketers, cultivating an email list isn’t just an option—it’s a strategic necessity. Despite the initial challenges, the rewards are unparalleled:
- Quality over quantity: Organically building your affiliate marketing email list ensures that you attract subscribers interested in your content and are more likely to engage with affiliate links.
- Customization and personalization: You have greater control over segmentation and personalization if you prioritize it during list-building than attempting to segment the purchased list.
- Long-term engagement: Subscribers who voluntarily join your email list are more likely to remain engaged over the long term, providing ongoing opportunities for revenue generation.
- Cost efficiency: While buying an affiliate marketing email list seems like a shortcut initially, the return on investment is often lower considering the inclusion of uninterested and inactive email recipients.
How To Build an Email List for Marketing
Identifying Ideal Customer
You must identify your customer persona to create an affiliate marketing email list. This is important for two reasons: first, you’ll be able to define which affiliate products might interest your target audience and, therefore, have success during email affiliate marketing. Second, learning about customer behavior will help you better prepare for each of the next steps in the campaign, from creating a lead magnet to choosing a tone of voice in emails.
Designing a Lead Magnet
To motivate users to share their email addresses, you have to offer them something in exchange. Often, a subscription to your newsletter is not enough. On the contrary, users may feel that notifications in their mailboxes are annoying or intrusive.
A lead magnet is a value that you offer to site visitors in exchange for their email addresses. Typically, it is your unique product or information that will be useful to the user, but its significance is lower than that of the products you sell or advertise.
Here are some effective lead magnets to consider:
- E-books
- White papers or reports
- Templates
- Webinars
- Video tutorials
- Coupons and discounts
- Email courses
- Free consultations
When designing the lead magnets, ensure that the reward you offer is valuable to potential leads, cannot be easily found elsewhere on the Internet for free, and aligns with the email marketing strategy you will use to advertise the affiliate products.
Capturing Emails With Opt-in Forms
Catching the user address requires building an opt-in form with at least one input field. However, you may also require additional information from users in return for a valuable lead magnet. This information will help you:
- Create compelling and personalized emails
- Offer affiliate products that will resonate with the leads
- Include user email in multiple lists
Test different opt-in forms to find the most effective email address retrieval methods. Closely watch the dependency of a number of fields and form submissions. Also, check which fields participants hesitate to fill out, they may be too personal.
Finally, A/B-test different form placements and timing. Consider popups, one of the most popular opt-in layouts.
Testing Different Pop-ups
A pop-up is a generative name for the data display method when, instead of appearing on a separate page, it is displayed in a design element that is visible on top of the current page content. The pop-up may appear when the user wants (such as by clicking a button with the text that explains its function) or independently of the user (triggered by predefined website rules).
Pop-ups are highly effective for building affiliate marketing lists, focusing user attention, and delivering CTAs. Automating pop-ups allows for attracting the right users at the right time, increasing the likelihood of conversions.
| Trigger Action | Examples | Advantages | Disadvantages |
| Click |
| Works with highly engaged users who are more likely to convert; popups can request more user details. | Requires user interaction, which may limit the number of popups triggered. |
| Time delay |
| Targets users who have spent time on the site, indicating interest in specific content; allows targeted popups. | May annoy users if the delay is too short or appears too frequently. |
| On scroll |
| Allows precise targeting with different pop-ups on different pages based on user scroll behavior. | May be ignored by users if they scroll quickly without noticing the popup. |
| Exit pop-ups |
| Targets users who are about to leave without disrupting their browsing experience | May be intrusive if set up incorrectly |
The style of pop-ups greatly influences their effectiveness as well as how site visitors perceive them.
| Popup Form and Style | Explanation | Advantages | Disadvantages |
| Full-screen | Completely covers the screen and disappears after a user clicks CTA or the exit button | Has the strongest focusing capability | Considered the most intrusive |
| Modal | Typically appears in the middle of the screen, partially blocking the content and requiring the user to click CTA, exit button, or pop-up background to continue browsing | Less intrusive than the full-screen popups with strong focusing capability | Annoying if used multiple times across the website |
| Bottom bar | Often used for privacy policies and age verifications, sometimes only closes when the user agrees | Doesn’t block main page content, and most users are accustomed to it, so they tolerate it | Not very popular for email list generation; may be ignored by users |
| Side pop-ups | Takes part of the screen space; usually doesn’t block content, allowing users to continue browsing | Doesn’t interrupt user experience | Less effective than full-screen and modal pop-ups, often considered to be advertising |
Adopting Squeeze Pages
Squeeze pages are landing pages that specialize in capturing user emails. They may include various content, such as attractive images, product descriptions, user reviews, and CTAs.
In essence, squeeze pages function like full-screen pop-ups with the sole purpose of acquiring a user’s email address. However, unlike pop-ups, squeeze pages can appear organically in search engine results or through ads. It’s beneficial to create multiple squeeze pages tailored to different audience segments. Capturing the same number of users across various pages provides more detailed information about them, enabling better targeting for affiliate emails.
Creating a Thank You Page
After the user provides an email address and submits the form, you can assemble your affiliate marketing email list. However, additional actions can be taken to increase the targeting precision of email campaigns or even present the user with affiliate products immediately.
It is common to navigate users to a Thank You page after they submit the form. In practice, this page can be a separate page on the website, the final page in a multi-step pop-up form, or a page displayed in a new pop-up.
The primary goal of a Thank You page is to show the company’s appreciation to the user. However, it is well-suited for many other reasons. Skillful marketers take advantage of the fact that the form appears in front of proactive users loyal to the brand and adjust the page’s content to increase user conversions. A Thank You page may:
- Provide a link for downloading the promised lead magnet
- Offer users to visit the company’s social media pages
- Gather additional information about the user
- Display affiliate links
Source: Teachable
The Thank You page in the above example includes a form that accomplishes two separate goals: it offers to provide a friend’s email who may be interested in the subscription, and it asks the basic personal information about the user, such as first and last name. With this information, the email affiliate campaigns will receive some degree of personalization. Asking these questions before the user submits the email makes the opt-in form larger, decreasing the chances for submission.
Updating information about leads is crucial for the optimization of marketing strategies, including email affiliate marketing campaigns. However, it’s a complex task requiring reliable and customizable automation tools.
Phonexa’s Lynx allows you to accurately track and analyze the user journey from the first touch point to conversion across multiple platforms. Apart from following individual users or specific demographic groups, it can measure the performance of your specific offers, campaigns, and marketing channels.
To confirm how Phonexa tools accomplish designing marketing strategies while offering a modern and intuitive interface, book a demo or take a product tour today and leverage your future campaigns.
Applying Double Opt-In
For high-conversion affiliate marketing, build an email list using the double opt-in method. With this approach, users receive an email with a confirmation link. Once they submit the opt-in form, their address is confirmed only after they click the link.
The extra step may discourage some users from submitting their email addresses, resulting in an overall decrease in the size of an affiliate marketing email list.
However, by filtering out bots and users with little interest in your content, double opt-ins lead to more engaged and higher-quality lists. For email list affiliate marketing, this means that it may take longer to gain the required number of addresses, but the quality of leads will result in increased conversion rates.
Other benefits of double opt-ins include:
- Better campaign analytics: A reduced number of low-quality leads will enable more precise analytics of your target audience.
- Improved deliverability: Engaged subscribers are less likely to mark your email as spam, which improves your sender’s reputation and deliverability.
- Increased time efficiency: With a high-quality affiliate marketing email list, you will spend less time and resources on uninterested leads.
- Enhance brand trust: Double opt-ins demonstrate your brand’s commitment to engaging with motivated users while respecting their privacy and preferences.
- Reduced bounce rates: Thanks to keeping inactive addresses off the email list, affiliate marketing bounce rates will decrease while campaign statistics will improve.
Experienced marketers understand the importance of high-quality email lists for their campaigns’ effectiveness. 47.8% more affiliate experts use email marketing than beginners. Phonexa’s E-Delivery allows further refinement of the lists based on various recipients’ behavior data points, ensuring your messages are delivered to your target audience.
Discover how Phonexa can elevate your affiliate marketing efforts through effective email list management by taking a product tour or booking a demo.
Building Automated Email Sequences
Once you know how to get an email list for affiliate marketing, ensure your email marketing software is capable of building automated email sequences and customizing affiliate marketing email templates for your audience. For instance, E-Delivery allows sending emails on demand, by schedule, by event, and as auto-responses, and each of the trigger types can be further customized.
While the availability of many options may seem unnecessary to novice marketers, they all have specific goals necessary for complex and result-oriented campaigns. For instance, the following email affiliate marketing funnel scheme features a sequence of four emails.
The first email is triggered by the event of subscription form submission. The following emails are delivered by schedule at pre-set intervals. If the recipients send a message with requests, the system will launch an auto-response immediately, notifying them that their requests have been received and the tracking numbers assigned. Finally, if we wish to contact users outside the email marketing campaign, we’ll send emails on demand.
Leveraging Phonexa to Enhance Affiliate Marketing Emails Effectiveness
Affiliate marketing with email list optimization is a fruitful strategy that requires managing various processes. These include creating event-triggered email campaigns, analyzing partnerships with affiliates and advertisers, tracking customer journeys, using real-time customizable reports, and more. Phonexa is a highly regarded brand among professional marketers that offers a complete suite of digital marketing automation solutions.
| LMS Sync | Lead tracking & distribution |
| Call Logic | Call tracking & distribution |
| E-Delivery | Bulk email & SMS automation |
| Cloud PBX | Cloud phone system |
| Lynx | Click tracking for user journey control |
| Opt-Intel | Suppression list management |
| HitMetrix | User behavior recording & analytics |
| Books360 | Automated accounting |
Take a product tour to discover methods for enhancing the efficiency of email list marketing campaigns, or book a demo to delve deeper into Phonexa’s offerings.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the differences between general email marketing and affiliate email marketing?
It’s essential to generate email lists for both general and affiliate email marketing. However, these marketing channels differ in the goals they chase. The first one has a broader goal of increasing the target audience and nurturing users, while the latter one aims at more practical goals, such as selling a product or other predefined conversions. Additionally, for affiliate marketing, emails may include affiliate links or lead recipients to the pages where such links are.
How to build an email list for affiliate marketing
The best way to build email list is by acquiring subscribers through opt-in forms. This method ensures the audience is highly targeted and engaged, while form fields allow sourcing additional information for audience segmentation.
How to write an email for affiliate marketing
While the email content and style largely depend on the audience you address and the affiliate products you advertise, the following best practices apply to all cases. Compose concise, engaging emails by addressing the audience’s needs, highlighting affiliate products’ benefits, and personalized messages. Utilize compelling subject lines, CTAs, and visually appealing layouts to maximize impact and drive conversions.
What is the best email marketing software for affiliate marketing?
One of the best email marketing software is the E-Delivery by Phonexa. Its advantages for affiliate marketing include the following:
- Advanced automation features for email and SMS campaigns
- Generating affiliate marketing email lists according to detailed advertisers’ requirements for improved conversions
- Flawless integration with other marketing channels, affiliate tracking software, user behavior analytics, lead tracking, and accounting solutions
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