Up to this point, most new affiliate marketers will likely go the PPC (pay per click) or blogging route when starting up your campaigns, what will give your marketing efforts a boost is a pretty simple technique, but one in which many marketer screw up. Here’s some tips to emailing.

–

This is a continuing series of “Affiliate Marketing Tips” posts to share marketing and promotion strategies for affiliate marketers. If you’re new to the series, you might like to check out the first in the series “The Industry and Getting Accepted”

–

Unless you’re a weird technophobe, you will have an email account, likely at least 5 or 10 of them. So the concept of mass mailing prospect (people who land on your landing page/sales page) in the hopes of converting them into leads or customers will seem pretty intuitive – just send them the offer, then keep sending them the offer every 1-2 days until they opt-in, pass on, or report your email as spam and send you to the Spamhaus blacklist directory.

If you’re already getting very decent ROI from your PPC campaigns, you might wondering why you want to mess around with emailing, especially since it might “lower conversion rates” because of the additional hoop of jumping through an opt-in process.

First off, not every affiliate or CPA campaign will benefit from incorporating an opt-in into the process – you need to look at the campaign and see if it makes sense. Primarily because most of the email/zip submit CPA offers are already opt-in offers themselves (before the lead gets hit with 10-20 pay-per-sale/rebill offers).

Instead of being only offer-focused, think of the audience demographic – someone restructuring their finances, someone learning to play golf.

Think of their needs and a suite/bundle of products and services they would need.

• Someone with financial needs might require a credit report, apply for a short term loan, require financial restructuring services
• Someone who’s a new golf player might need to get some information on finding a golf club and golf pro (local lead generation), buy golf clubs and clothing, maybe even take a golf vacation somewhere

If you’d like to look at effective demographic-based marketing, look at the BoomJ social network, which is focused on babyboomers – providing a suite of services that are relevant to the demographic.

–

So the first step to being able to incorporate emailing into your campaigns is to think “multi-offer” versus “single offer”.

Next, you’d need to identify their burning needs and problems – then create a solution – whether a PDF report, MP3 recording, information kits to partially or fully solve their problem. Inevitably some of your targeted and relevant affiliate offers would be part of the solution.

–

Some other points to note about emailing: In marketing terms, there’s a “7-exposure” theory, which says that a person needs to be exposed to something new about 7 times before they make a buying decision.

So if you see a weird jalapeno-flavored soda on the market, you might see it in the store and think “how weird”.

Exposure #2: You see a friend drinking it, and ask “Doesn’t it taste weird?”. “Nope” he says.

Exposure #3: You see a banner on a popular entertainment website

Exposure #4: You hear a radio spot during your favorite talk radio program… and so on.

…

Exposure #7: You think, ok, I’ve seen this thing on so many places, it might not be so bad, so you decide to try it.

.

Within the emailing context, email is just the technology, which lets you establish contact with the prospect multiple times, to provide useful information and pre-sell them on the service.

My preference is to identify circumstances that the prospect can identify with, empathize with them, provide information/analysis, and explain how the product is relevant to solving a problem.

If your prospects are solutions-focused, versus just seeing how much the product is going to cost, your battle is already half-won. Ultimately, prospects sell themselves on your service.

–

A couple of things to note about email/autoresponder services –

They come in 3 flavors:

• Desktop-based: which is software you install on your computer and it’ll send email via your ISPs SMTP server (unless you get a 3rd party SMTP service)
• Hosted: Which is a web-based and is operated by a service provider
• Self-hosted: Which is a software script that you install on your own server and you maintain or hire a server admin to help you maintain

Desktop-based is not recommended because there’ve been more than a few cases where ISPs have shut down internet access plans due to spamming complaints.

Self-hosted is probably the best solution, especially if you’re a high volume emailer – you’d need to be pretty savvy about maintaining and keeping your systems running.

For newer emailers, a hosted service is probably the best option because then you’re focused on your marketing efforts. I like Aweber and GetResponse for smaller scale lists (up to about 25,000).

–

Do you have questions about emailing? Post them below.