If you’re going to be successful as an affiliate marketer, you need to have an audience. That audience could come in many forms. It could be through a social media following. It could be through a website that you’ve created and built with SEO. A popular (and for good reason) method of building an audience is to build an affiliate marketing email list.

It’s important to understand that people’s attention spans are fleeting. Social media posts get mere fractions of a second to impress upon the scroller. Websites are navigated in seconds, maybe minutes at a push. Email, however, is a direct line to a recipient. It’s neither transient nor ephemeral. It’s a way of creating a personalized, sustained method of communication with an engaged audience. The key is to leverage those on your affiliate marketing email list through relationship building.

The list, by itself, isn’t going to help you build your affiliate business. It needs curation and care. It needs to be nurtured so that it’s effective and working together with your campaigns. In this article, we’ll share what a great affiliate marketing email list looks like. Plus, we’ll share how you can build the list further and the best practices to do so.

  • How do you maintain an email list?
  • Are there any legal or ethical considerations?
  • What makes an email list effective?

Affiliate Marketing and the Power of Email Lists

There’s more to an email list than a big group of people’s addresses. It’s not just data. It’s a community. These are people who (if you’ve been adhering to compliance law…) have willingly opted into communication with you. They want to hear from you. Product updates, new releases, information, the whole lot. Whatever it was that they signed up for originally, they want more of it now.

You have their email address. That means you have a direct line of contact with them. If you’re minded to do so, you can send personalized and tailored information to everyone on that list. It will take work and email marketing software, but the payoff will be worth it.

The connection with them allows you to nurture a relationship. It’s a relationship built on trust and, eventually, loyalty. Try to deliver great quality content that’s informative and entertaining. Then, they’ll be left wanting more, time and time again. Once you have that loyalty, conversions are just a step away.

Creating a Thriving Affiliate Marketing Email List

There are four key principles that you need to adhere to if you want to build and care for your list. Follow these, and you’ll find your list growing in both number and loyalty.

Identify Your Target Audience

You need to find out who your people are. Who are the people who aren’t just willing but actively want to hear from you? This will involve some significant market research. You need to understand who you will be speaking to and who you’ll be building a relationship with. Spend time digging into demographics, interests, and the buying behaviors of your audience. 

If you accurately identify your target audience, your email list is populated with people with whom your content resonates. This is why we never purchase email lists. If you do that, you might as well start talking with a brick wall.

Deliver Great Content

In order to gain subscribers legitimately, they have to willingly opt-in to receive your content. That means it has to be great from the start. The very first piece of content that they come across is an opportunity to sign them up. Opt-in methods vary, but most affiliates exchange a piece of valuable content for an email address. That content could be an eBook, a guide, a download, or access to a restricted group.

Collecting subscribers this way isn’t fast. It is, however, both legitimate and a great way of ensuring your list is full of the right people. From a compliance point of view, following this method will help you to abide by both CAN-SPAM and GDPR laws.

Once they’ve signed up, continue to deliver the same quality content. That might mean creating an onboarding set of emails as part of an automated email follow-up strategy. 

Quality Over Quantity

Don’t be mistaken. The more people on your list, the better, but there’s a caveat. They have to be the right people. As mentioned above, if your list is full of the wrong people, you won’t build relationships and achieve conversions in the way you’d hope.

It’s important that you spend time regularly checking your list and maintaining it. Remove invalid email addresses or bouncing accounts. Doing so improves your deliverability rates and helps to prevent emails from going to spam. Whenever you add new emails, make sure you’ve learned how to verify an email manually or with automation tools.

Engagement and Growth

These are your two core focuses. Engaging with your current subscribers is paramount. After all, they are where your conversions will come from. At the same time, you need to be employing a growth strategy that builds your list with more engaged subscribers. It’s a balance and an important one. Strike it right, and you’ll have a dynamic list that is both growing and responsive.

Key Takeaways

Your affiliate marketing email list is a wonderful resource. It’s a direct line of contact to an engaged, responsive audience. It is what you make it. Spend time caring for it and delivering fantastic content to it, and it will flourish.

  • Always consider your audience when developing new content. This will ensure maximum engagement.
  • A smaller, more refined list is better than a sprawling, unengaged one.
  • Aim to personalize your content wherever possible. Consider segmenting your list to achieve this.

List management is made easy with Instantly. So is active email campaign management. Why not see for yourself and get started today?