Frequency, Relevance, Variety
Affiliates have agreed for years that a small investment in email marketing often delivers a huge return on affiliate profits. Read on for tips on how to maximize conversions and repeat customers by fine-tuning affiliate opt-in mailing lists and creating efficient email campaigns:

Frequency
If one email promoting a discount or special promotion makes a sale, why not send five quickly after? But with email marketing, more is definitely not better. Potential customers quickly get burned out when their email inboxes are flooded by offers, and rather than increase sales, an affiliate’s email barrage usually results in much lower click-through rates and higher unsubscribe requests.

The best way to gauge how frequent your mailings should be is to simply ask. When customers opt-in to an affiliate mailing list, include a section that allows subscribers to choose how often to receive mail, plus the ability to change that preference at a later date. Constantly evaluate response rates for several mailing frequencies, searching for the mailing pattern that delivers the best results.

Relevancy
If you make sure to capture customers with relevant content, worries about frequency become less of a concern. Segmenting content to the unique needs of a customer will improve sales, and starts even at the most basic level, with subscribers divided up by gender, age, location, household income, click-through and conversion rates, first-time or repeat buyers,  purchase frequency and average purchase amount, plus unique factors linked to an affiliate’s marketing niche.

For example, an affiliate focused on pet supplies who’s promoting a free weekend shipping deal should still try to send different email messages to their 40+ female Siamese cat owners compared to the 20-something iguana owners. Creating micro-targeted mailings for these different segments builds relationships and emotional ties with readers, and prevents customer burnout.

Variety
Just as a good affiliate’s site includes both unique informational content plus marketing material, so should an affiliate’s email campaigns. Most subscribers prefer a variety of content sent over time to their inboxes, from straightforward promotional offers such as rebates or free shipping, on to individual product highlights, follow ups about customer satisfaction and even helpful articles or resources related to subjects linked to their buying history. At the end of the day, it’s content with a relationship building focus that builds long-term sales and profitability for an affiliate.

By working smarter with this relatively inexpensive marketing method, email can definitely pay off for affiliates! Be sure to re-evaluate the frequency, relevancy and variety of your email list management and email campaigns on a constant basis to find the formula that delivers the best affiliate marketing results.

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