web forms. Once you establish what individual readers want, you can segment them into groups based on their interests. which will  help you send relevant messages to each person.  Campaigns that have a consistent look and feel will be more effective in helping your prospects absorb information, but consistency doesn’t exclude creativity and mixing things up occasionally, as long as you maintain brand standards in design, tone, and personality. 

 WHAT ARE THE ADVANTAGES OF EMAIL MARKETING IN AFFILIATE MARKETING?

A good well run and maintained email list, can grow your reader loyalty, especially When customers hear from you repeatedly with good content they are reminded of your value. Where they take your advice on board and discover it works for them it develops trust.  The obvious reason why most affiliate marketers will cite for using email marketing is because it is profitable and low cost. If you need to you can get a message out to your entire list very fast. The ease of email marketing is another beneficial attribute for both you and your reader. For your marketing to be a success it has to be easy for the recipient, but it helps that email marketing is easy for you too as it means you can do it yourself.

‘Push’ is another attractive attribute. While websites and RSS are “pull”, in that the visitor has to come to you, with email you can send your messages out, reminding and re-engaging readers. The more information you collect, the more personalised your email marketing messages can be, and can be tailored and customised. Email  has the particularly special ability to segment, meaning you can split people off into smaller, more focused lists. It can also be potentially viral as it is easy for people to forward your message on to others, spreading further than you could alone.

Email marketing software usually has detailed tracking tools to show how many emails were opened, through to each individual link click so you can refine your techniques and improve performance. You can test different subject lines, calls to action, use of images, and so on, to further improve your results. Email marketing is an excellent compliment to your marketing and sales strategy which combined with multiple tactics can build very profitable marketing campaigns. 

DOES EMAIL MARKETING DIRECTLY INCREASE SALES?

Most email marketing has an impact on sales which isn’t quantified if your email marketing strategy isn’t connected to your sales and marketing processes. The measures commonly used to determine the success of email marketing have little relevance to sales. Email marketing should be connected to sales if measured soundly. Open rates, click through and response rates are the main means by which the success of email marketing campaigns are evaluated.

These measures are then used to justify marketing time, expense and future actions. The popularity of these measures, is derived from the fact that they are easy to measure.  However will merely examining these statistics give you a full picture in evaluating your email marketing success.When looking at response rates for different campaigns ask yourself  What proportion of those prospects who responded to each campaign match your Ideal Customer Profile. One campaign might have a higher response rate but you may not know anything about whether these people are more likely to buy from you than the people who responded to a different campaign.

It is also a good idea to question whether those who responded to a campaign rated the quality of your offer and what impact it had on their propensity to buy from you. A strategic approach to email Marketing only becomes useful if it plays a role in the overall objective of increasing sales. The goal of email marketing is therefore not just to identify prospects who are responsive to your campaign but to educate them so that they become more receptive to sales. Receptiveness is important because you can only sell to receptive buyers. A more superior measure of email marketing success might be the number of positive receptions received by sales or telesales discovered upon follow up of a campaign. Receptiveness and propensity to buy are clearly related, but inherently more  difficult to record than Response Rates.

They are worth investing time and effort in as they are far more important measures, as they will encourage the allocation of resources to marketing activity better aligned to the selling process. Response rates, which only track a single campaign, don’t necessarily provide marketers with the big picture. Yet frequently response rates alone are used to determine the efficacy of email marketing. In many companies design is a major focus taking priority over all else including content of an offer.   But if you asked the email recipient what they value most and what is likely to influence their future responsiveness to your campaigns it may not be design but the content of the offer that they attach the most value to and which motivates them. 

 Good email design, as measured by high response rates, may encourage a high number of click throughs in the short term but if your prospects find that the content fails to match the promise contained within the email, buyers will be reluctant to respond a second time, resulting in lost prospects. As it is more difficult to measure the quality of the offer as perceived by the email recipient than to measure response rates, less attention is often paid to content than design. as determined by the email recipients than it is to measure response rates, less attention is often paid to content than design.

If you want your email marketing to have the best impact on sales then there is a solution. Expand your marketing measures so that you can quantify the contribution of marketing to increasing sales beyond narrow email marketing measures of open rates, click through and response rates, which cannot be directly related to sales. You may integrate your telesales and website with your email marketing campaigns to achieve this. Email Marketing when conducted as an isolated activity will rarely lead to an increase in sales, especially if you are promoting complex rather than commodity products.  Link your emails with the next logical stage in  sales and marketing process, which might be a phone call. For instance, you have sent out an email which the prospect opens or better still responds to. Schedule a phone call to be made the next day to the prospect.

Likewise you can integrate your website tracking to improve the timing of your emails. The timing of most email campaigns revolves around the marketer not the prospect. Typically, email campaigns are sent out monthly as part of an ongoing marketing program. This timing might be convenient for the marketer, but not necessarily timely for the prospect. Instead of a monthly schedule it would be preferable to send out most of your emails when they are likely to be most relevant toeach of your prospects. Assuming a prospect searches for your type of product on Google, finding you on Google via Google Adwords and follow the link to your website,

Where they return to download something from your website they are clearly displaying interest in your products and/or services.  So it makes sense to put the prospect into a series of email campaigns more frequently at this particular point in time. Such an approach when implemented has been shown to increase response rates by as much as 27% in a sample size of 300. It is well worth the effort if you have the capability of integrating your website with your email marketing engine.

Prospect Profiling is a long established marketing process  used to better match your product and marketing messages with your prospects. Profiling requires that you ask questions and  respond with appropriate actions. Email Marketing can use survey questions attached to the bottom of registration forms to ask profile questions. This approach has been proven to work extremely well as profiling allows you to better segment your prospects and target them with more relevant communications which in turn helps you to educate and influence them.

The above represents a more sophisticated more nuanced alternative approaches to measuring the impact of email marketing campaigns in your affiliate marketing than using response rates alone.

USE A REPUTABLE EMAIL SERVICE PROVIDER

Using a reputable email service provider like Aweber or GetResponse will assist you in streamlining your email marketing processes to help you make money online from affiliate marketing. 

CONCLUSION

Email marketing software or autoresponders are a powerful way of conducting your email marketing effectively and generating sales from affiliate marketing. Such software sends email or a series of email messages to someone who requests it based on a defined schedule. It tracks when messages should be sent and other analytics without you having to do anything from your end apart from setting the schedule. It automates the process of sending emails to everyone on that list either through a sequenced distribution or via broadcast on a specific time and day. There are products claiming to help you build your “goldmine” if you start to use it to make money online on autopilot! 

In the next part of this series we will go through the software in more detail, however it is important to remember that there is no magic bullet to increasing sales through email marketing, and like everything else it takes effort, careful thought and perserverance. Making money with an email list is not as easy as you will read on many reviews and you should understand that it is a long learning curve. Growing your subscribers is not always easy and can be a