How to Build an Email List for Affiliate Marketing

Building a targeted email list is an effective way of creating a residual income with affiliate marketing. Smart affiliate marketers use email marketing to reach thousands of people with their offers and promotions. But how do you get started with using email lists?

To build an email list for affiliate marketing, you need a reliable email service provider and an irresistible offer backed by freebies such as eBooks or free trials. Then build enticing squeeze pages to prompt readers to join your mailing list to set the stage for email marketing campaigns.

Getting started with email marketing as an affiliate marketer can be a tad challenging, but the rewards are well worth it. Dig in and discover how to build an email list and use it to boost your affiliate income.

Related Post: What is High Ticket Affiliate Marketing?

Why You Need an Email List

An email list lets you consolidate your readers from all platforms into a single list while giving you total control over the content you serve them.

While you can build followers on Instagram, followers on YouTube, likes on Facebook and Twitter, you’re relying on a third party to make the connection. A quick algorithm change can ruin your marketing efforts and lower your organic reach.

An email list eliminates the third party to give you unrestricted access to your target audience. It allows you to segment your readers and focus granular marketing efforts on the people most interested in a product or service.

An In-Depth Marketing Reach

An email list helps you differentiate between cause web visitors and those interested in buying the product or service. Separating the people with a genuine interest in the product you’re promoting from the rest is crucial to affiliate marketing success.

Building an email list helps zero in on the interested prospects while offering you a chance to ramp up your marketing efforts. The list enables you to convince an interested party to buy the product or service through your affiliate link, making you some money.

build an email list for affiliate marketing

An email list affords you direct access to prospects and allows you to customize your marketing efforts. It will enable you to breakdown the buyer’s journey and then address buyers at each stage of the process.

Someone joins your list if they trust you as a subject authority and would like to hear more from you. With proper execution, email marketing is an excellent way to build trust with your target audience. They will gladly read your emails and buy any products that you recommend.

Building an email list lets you create a massive database of leads hanging to your every word or looking up to you for guidance and advice.

It’s best to start building an email list immediately after the first content pieces are live. That helps you to refine your email marketing campaign and reap the benefits from the get-go.

Get an Email Service Provider

To get started with email marketing for affiliates, you need to pick an email service provider. These are software solutions that let you automate the email sending process to everyone on your list.

While there are numerous providers to choose from, pick the service that suits your needs. Some of the most popular email marketing providers include Convertkit, MailChimp, Constant Contact, and ActiveCampaign.

These services differ on pricing points, setup, number of subscribers, and level of automation and functionalities. Mailchimp is an excellent email marketing service provider for affiliate marketers because it’s easy to set up and free for the first 10,000 subscribers.

The best services offer detailed analytics, A/B testing, different campaign types, message automation, dedicated IP addresses, in-built CAN-SPAM compliance.

Create an Offer

Starting an email list is a simple process that entails building landing pages. These are pages that are designed to collect reader’s email addresses using an ethical bribe.

An ethical bribe refers to offering a promise of value to the reader in exchange for their email address. The readers get valuable information, and you get subscribers.

What Freebies To Use

Most people will readily give their email addresses if you offer them a freebie they deem useful. That could include information that’s likely to benefit and improve their lives or business.

Freebies that help to build an email list for affiliate marketing include:

Videos
Ebooks
Blog posts
Podcasts
Exclusive content
Mini-courses
Free trials

Essentially, you need to give away something that adds value in the eyes of your readers. You can’t go wrong with a freebie that helps your readers reach their goals or solve a pressing problem.

Create a freebie. You can dig into your skills, knowledge, and experience and create a useful freebie. Alternatively, you can outsource the job to a more knowledgeable person capable of creating value for your readers.
Embed a video. You can embed an informative YouTube video into your content and direct the readers to your freebies.
Purchase private label products. Private label rights are brandable products available for sale. The sellers give you the rights to brand the product on your own. Custom, high-quality PLR products help build subject authority and position you as an expert in the field. They also save on time since they’re easy to label and deploy.

Build the Squeeze Page

The process of collecting email addresses isn’t as easy and straightforward as asking readers to fill out a form. Readers need a bit of convincing, cajoling, and enticing before they can part with their private information.

That’s where squeeze pages come in handy.

What Are Squeeze Pages?

A squeeze page is a specially designed page on your website that captures the opt-in email addresses. They have a primary goal of convincing and persuading (squeeze) web visitors to provide a most sought after piece of personal information—the email address.

Creating an Enticing Squeeze Page

A squeeze page is an iron hand in a velvet glove because it uses an intentional yet subtle forcefulness to collect the email addresses—it’s a golden trap. It lures in the prospects and entices them to leave their email address in exchange for some value.

A squeeze page should have only a handful of hyperlinks that could call on the reader to click away and move to a different page. It should serve as an ultimatum for the reader, directing them to snag the offer or leave the page.

A squeeze page should be straight and to the point in directing the prospects towards the offer and coaxing the email address from them. Therefore, keep the content above the fold to a minimum. You don’t want anything to distract the reader before they’ve subscribed.

A squeeze page’s power is magnified if you create a convincing offer, preferably an enticing, shiny, and desirable freebie. The offer needs to be worth the reader surrendering an email, or else, the results might be lackluster.

You have three methods of building a squeeze page:

Build the squeeze page. You can create a squeeze page like any other landing page on your website.
Use a squeeze page generator. Such tools come with templates, themes, and colors to quickly build the squeeze page building process. They also help you breeze through the process of building forms, tracking codes, thank you pages, and even the copy.
Use squeeze page plug-ins. Some WordPress plug-ins provide squeeze page templates to help users create and track these pages. The best plug-ins come with easy signup forms, promotions, and offers.

Types of Squeeze Pages

While you can format your squeeze pages to suit your website and audience, it boils down to using pop-ups or splash pages.

Pop-ups: As the name suggests, you’ll find these pages floating over the content while the reader is attempting to read. Most people find pop-ups annoying, but they are useful in building an affiliate marketing email list with proper execution.
Splash pages: These are custom pages that intercept prospects when they first visit your home page. Splash pages increase the number of people viewing your offer. To some extent, the design, feel, and copy of a splash page should correspond with what’s on your home page. Be sure to add a cookie to avoid serving the splash page to returning visitors.

Launch Your Email Marketing Campaign

An email marketing campaign entails sending out batches of emails centered on your area of specialization. The primary function of the emails is to inform and educate your subscribers.

Start with an onboarding campaign to welcome new subscribers and explain what the site is all about and what you have to offer. Next, create a series of emails to address each stage of the buying journey. You need excellent insights into your subscribers to pull this off successfully.

With the right choice of an email service provider, you can automate the entire email marketing campaign.

Other Ways To Build Your Email List for Affiliate Marketing

To ramp up your email list building efforts to grow your subscribers, grow your revenue, try out these tips.

Create a pop quiz.
Use slide-in opt-in forms.
Encourage readers to share content.
Host a giveaway.
Embed CTAs on social media posts.
Offer a sneak view of your newsletters.
Include social proof.

Check Out My Completely Free High Ticket Affiliate Marketing Course

Conclusion

An email list allows you to ramp up your affiliate marketing efforts by building a large audience of potential leads and improve your conversion rates.

Typically, the process of building an email list for affiliate marketing entails:

Signing up with an email service provider
Creating an offer
Building a squeeze page
Launching the email marketing campaign