Guest Post via Sarah Dysthe of Madrivo
Email marketing has become part of nearly every company’s advertising strategy. Consumer inboxes are flooded with newsletters and offers every day, many of which go unopened. Some messages land in the spam folder without ever being seen. When emails are viewed, there’s no guarantee that the content will display correctly across multiple browsers and mobile devices.
Knowing that all the time and effort that goes into creating an email newsletter could be for nothing makes this form of marketing seem like a waste of resources. However, by taking a new approach through an affiliate marketing network rather than traditional email marketing services, businesses can maximize the effectiveness of every message.
Affiliate Marketing: A Targeted Approach
A well-designed affiliate email marketing campaign can:
Create highly visible messages that are easy to read
Increase the number of emails opened
Increase clicks and conversions
Improve campaign ROI
To take full advantage of these benefits, businesses have to rethink the way they send email messages.
Relevancy
An affiliate email marketing campaign may begin with general offers sent to a wide list of subscribers. By tracking which links recipients click on, it’s possible to segment customers into specific lists according to their interests. These lists can then be used in future campaigns to send targeted emails with the types of offers that are most likely to be of interest to each segment. The beauty of an affiliate marketing email expert is that their list segmentation benefits from the analytics of all their sends, not just the sends for one company. Madrivo’s proprietary technology, for example, draws on more than two billion unique data points to help us target emails more effectively.
Sending personalized emails is about more than creating relevant offers. Messages must also contain information that’s of high value to the customer. Sending the same messages in a continuous stream, even when highly targeted, overwhelms recipients and winds up backfiring when they begin deleting offers rather than redeeming them. Consumers are much more likely to open communications from their favorite brands when the design, images, and messaging are fresh and up-to-date.
Better Social Response
Interesting content gets shared across social networks. Including social sharing links in affiliate marketing emails gives businesses the power to leverage this potentially viral form of brand building. When customers like what they read, they’ll tell their friends, thereby increasing the reach of the initial offer. The clicks from these shares provide data about new market segments that can be used when designing future campaigns.
Assured Delivery
Once email lists have been built and divided by interests and purchasing behaviors, affiliate marketing agencies with email expertise can be much more confident that their messages are going to reach the consumers’ inbox and not get filtered as junk mail. Look for an affiliate with strong experience and a proven track record in email advertising. Allowing you to pay them on a cost-per-action (CPA)-basis, shows that they are confident that your message with perform with their targeted audience(s). If they offer a cost-per-impression (CPM) payment plan, be sure that it’s per inbox delivery, so that you’re not paying for half a million messages that never clear the SPAM folder. Note that not every email affiliate will be able to track this stat, but look for those who can – it shows that they’ve invested in the best analytics and that they know what they are doing in this industry.
Getting an affiliate marketing email campaign off the ground takes time and requires monitoring to ensure that messages remain relevant to target audiences. However, the high response rate and an ROI nearly three times that of traditional advertising methods makes email marketing worth the effort.
Madrivo is a proven leader in email marketing, having delivered more than eight billion inboxed messages and 2.5 million sales in the past year for the leading brands that trust us with their email marketing efforts.
