As an affiliate marketer, why is it important to build and collect an email list?

Email lists play an important role in making more affiliate sales by raising trust and building familiarity. Many successful affiliate marketers make virtually all of their affiliate income by promoting products to their email subscribers. Email lists are a reliable traffic source and solve many problems relating to affiliate marketing.

Let’s explore more.

Here are five reasons email lists matter in affiliate marketing.

1) Email lists draw return traffic to a website and create more repeat visitors and fans. Usually, affiliate marketers just want more and more visitors discovering the site, but email helps you keep in touch with super fans, ideal customers who visit your site and buy products repeatedly. Fewer, more loyal visitors is always preferable to hordes of strangers who don’t stick around.

2) To get more clicks to the affiliate links, and ultimately get more sales, email lists are incredibly direct. Just write a good email that naturally leads in to selling a product and have them click a link to check it out. No directing them to a middle-page required. I wouldn’t do this all the time, but you can use it fairly often.

3) With email lists, affiliate marketers can conduct surveys and poll their audience so that they come to know their prospects in a better way and serve them with better products and deals. For most people who succeed with affiliate marketing, their biggest roadblock was picking a product that people actually wanted.

4) To make your target audience learn about your business and products in a better way, email lists give you total control. You can include a welcome series that explains who you are, why you do what you do, and warms up new subscribers to buying a product at the end. It helps in building trust off the bat, and in affiliate marketing, more trust equals more sales.

5) With a good number of active subscribers, dependency on other traffic sources gets reduced. I always recommend investing time, effort, and possibly money into long-term, passive, and consistent forms of traffic, and to take any temporary or non-passive traffic strategies (PPC, social media) as your budget allows to grow the passive stuff. The reason being is that stuff like email lists will last and continue to make money for you, as long as you keep sending emails and maintain that relationship. It makes sense to keep that going in the long term and feed it, as early as possible into the business’s creation.

In general, with affiliate marketing, it’s a good idea to use whatever marketing and promotion strategies are working online for the businesses whose products you are selling. You’ll often see successful businesses with a detailed email funnel model, which gets customers with a lead magnet offer and then has lots of upsells, cross-sells, new products launched regularly, and a community driven by events and a shared purpose. Do you have to do all of that? No. But the more of it you try and take seriously, the better your chances of getting a lot more sales.

The surprising thing is, many affiliates put in almost zero effort to build an email list. Some are even still trying to use ready-made lists, which is an awesome way to get banned and doesn’t work anyway. Maybe people don’t want to get into the headaches of list building, and I totally relate. I was like that for a long time.

Whatever reason you might have for not getting into email yet, building an email list from scratch does not have to be difficult. You just have to do it in the RIGHT manner.

To finish up, here are some do’s and don’ts with email lists and marketing:

Don’t buy an email list.

Do create a simple signup page.

Don’t create irrelevant/low-quality lead magnets. Ideally, the lead magnet should be something you made, even if it’s just a little 15-page PDF. Just make sure it offers something of value to your audience.

Do keep your message short and have a clear CTA

Don’t irritate the email subscribers by selling too much. Keep it 80/20.

Do get personal. Send birthday messages, festive greetings emails, organize events, ask questions, and respond back to people who answer, there’s so much you can do that doesn’t really take much time or effort.

By the way, if you are looking for a method teaching you how to build an email list in a way that costs nothing or little to nothing and adds up quickly, then I would like to recommend the List Warrior (LW) method.

To sum up, as an affiliate marketer, one can get more sales with a list, and building up a huge one isn’t really necessary if you have a good business model and send consistent high-quality emails. As a successful affiliate marketer, I always make use of email lists to promote my products.

Please let me know if you need any clarification.

Good Luck!

Thanks,

Cleo