Email Marketing As An Affiliate | List Building Without A Product

One of the most common advertising platforms across every industry, Email marketing.

So why wouldn’t you be using it for your affiliate marketing business?

One of the main reasons I see new affiliates skip this step is because it requires some extra work and some additional tools are required to do so.

So how do you start email marketing as an affiliate?

First things first, you’ll need to build an email list.

This can be one of the most complicated parts of being an affiliate marketer because you don’t have anything to give in return for someone’s contact information.

You can usually create some type of lead magnet that entices someone to give you their contact information or create a bridge page that redirects them to an affiliate offer after collecting their email address.

How To Start Email Marketing As An Affiliate?

Ultimately this can be broken down into a few steps.

If you’re looking for a quick overview, I’m going to cover that in this section.

But I will be going in-depth and taking you through the entire process throughout this post.

Steps:

Have a place to collect contact information. A simple landing page, bridge page, or even a Facebook group.
Have some type of lead magnet or bonus stack to encourage people to give you their email address before purchasing.
Follow up with referrals with similar promotions
Continue focusing on building relationships with customers through email to build your brand
Don’t spam or send the same product over and over again!

Keep in mind that when I’m talking about adding a lead magnet or a bonus stack, it doesn’t have to be something physical or that costs you money.

Something as simple as a PDF, CheatSheet, or something that you can find online that has perceived value work perfectly.

Related Post: The 5 Best Alternatives To Clickfunnels

Building Your Email List

Well, you can’t implement email marketing campaigns into your affiliate marketing business without a list of contact information.

And one of the best parts about being an affiliate, in my opinion, not having to brand / source your own product or service also becomes the most challenging obstacle when getting ready to start email marketing.

Unlike a brick and mortar store, or even an E-commerce store you don’t have the option to offer significant discounts on products, ask if they’d like to subscribe to your email list when they’re purchasing so you can notify them when a similar product goes on sale because as an affiliate, you don’t own rights to the products that you’re promoting.

So how do you actually start email marketing as an affiliate? What is the key to building your email list alongside your affiliate promotions?

The Bridge Page

An industry term or tech jargon for a landing page, sales funnel, or website.

A very simply designed site with minimal distractions. Usually just consisting of a brief description of the product, whether that is in video form or text.

Then space for them to enter their email address in and upon doing so they’ll be redirected to your actual affiliate link/offer.

The Benefits Of Using A Bridge Page For Affiliate Marketing

Paid Advertising – It is actually a requirement to have some sort of bridge page if you’re doing pay per click advertising to affiliate products, as it is against terms of service to run paid advertising to a domain or website that you do not own the rights to.
The Bonus Stack -Using one will give you the ability to create your own offer on top of what the company you’re an affiliate for is offering. Making you stand out from other affiliates and even at times have a better deal than the company who owns the product.
Collecting Leads – Getting contact information and building a brand will give you the ability to monetize off each person more than once, if they believe in you, they’ll believe in a product you promote to them. This also plays into the Bonus Stack, say I was promoting an Email Marketing Software, Would you rather sign up for a free trial and be left to figure out the tool by yourself or sign up through my affiliate link and then be sent an entire training to your email address?

The process of A bridge page looks like the image below:

The Picture Below Is Specifically about promoting ClickfunnelsWith Facebook Adverting, but the same principals can be adopted throughout every platform or product.

Check out another one of my posts! How To Start A Blog With WordPress | Easy Step By Step Guide For 2020

Facebook Groups

Social media platforms are great places to build an engaged following.

Creating a Facebook group based around your industry or niche is an amazing way to network with like-minded affiliates and collect contact information in the same process.

Using a Pre-screening for everyone who wishes to join your group will give you the email address and find out exactly what type of products they’re looking for.

Follow The Step By Step Guide Below:

From your Facebook Group, head over to the membership sections question and click.

Then you’ll be taken to a page where you’ll create your pre-screening questions and can ask for an email address.

This can be a very powerful strategy for a few reasons.

The first being, it will weed out anyone who is looking to join your group and spam their affiliate link or promote sketchy stuff.

Another, being you can have people who join your group tell you exactly what it is they’re looking to learn or get, which can then be used to craft an offer for them or find an affiliate product that suites their needs.

The Lead Magnet

Similar to the bonus stack on your bridge page, but you aren’t restricted to using this method solely on your sales funnels.

A lead magnet is just something of perceived value that someone will be willing to give you their email address in exchange for.

It doesn’t have to be anything that costs you money, extravagant, or something you even created.

For Example:
Every lead that I’ve gathered for my email list was through 2 different lead magnets.

Which you can have a copy of to use as your own email magnets below, and no, I’m not going to ask you to give me your email address!

Both of these are in the make money online industry, if you’re not you could still use the email marketing templates, you’ll just have to edit them to your audience.

You can implement the lead magnet virtually anywhere online, your blog, website, social media posts, or profiles.

Start Email Marketing As An Affiliate

Now that you’ve started building your list, you’re ready to start implementing your marketing campaigns.

Depending on what platform or software you’re using the exact methods can vary, but the following principles will always apply.

Create Automated Workflow – This will assure that all of your subscribers are taken through an entire process that evolves and changes based on their interaction with your campaigns. Everything from scheduled sending to redirecting them to an entirely different email sequence if they don’t open the email. This is quite an advanced email marketing technique, but I cover it in another one of my posts you can read here.
Produce Great Content – Don’t fall into the habit of just promoting affiliate product after affiliate product, you’re going to come across as a salesman and ultimately lose subscribers. The more natural your interaction with them seems, and genuine it is the better off you’ll be.
Make It Personal – Use the recipient’s name at the beginning of the email, keep it informal, we live in a time that everyone is getting thousands of emails to their inbox every day and you want to stand out
Don’t Spam- Now I know it can seem appealing to send out multiple emails a day, or even ones that have performed well for you before, but in the long wrong, it will hurt your list and cause everyone in it to engage with your content little to none.

Keep in mind that you can automate almost all of this process and your email marketing campaigns. If you haven’t chosen a software yet, check out one of my articles where I go over the best options when it comes to “Which Email Marketing Software Should I Use?”

How To Start Email Marketing As An Affiliate