During the recent Affiliate Summit West, I met Justin Premick who’s Education Marketing Manager at email marketing solutions company Aweber.

I think I’m doing more than 90% of the affiliates out there when it comes to incorporating email marketing as part of my SEO-based marketing campaigns, but some of the tips that Justin shared with me during the few minutes we talked before the Blue Man Group performance at the Affiliate Bash at Tao gave me a couple of ideas to test out in my campaign.

So I was looking forward to chatting with Justin when he agreed to come on as a guest on this week’s Friday Podcast. Some of the ideas and behind-the-scene stuff that goes on at your autoresponder operator will surprise you, and I uncovered some killer tips to use autoresponders to enhance conversions in your affiliate AND CPA marketing campaigns.

It was definitely worth waking up at 3am this morning (3pm EST Tuesday) to chat with Justin and the interview will be posted this Friday.

If you aren’t already using email marketing in conjunction with a PPC or SEO marketing campaign, you could be leaving quite a bit of cash on the table…

Here’re some tips which will help you get started:

• Content is and should be packaged differently across multiple platforms

Seems obvious, but you need to tailor your content to suit the medium you’re publishing the content on.

On a website you have the benefit of space and the ability to use multimedia generously (audio, video, graphics), while in the context of email marketing, people are used to seeing bite-sized chunks of info.

So unless it’s very compelling, it’s generally not a good idea to send out a 5-page email. Even if it does get read, you can expect to see a dropoff if you consistently send out long emails.

• Permission-based marketing

This was one of the major points during our discussion – email marketing is very much “relationship marketing” which plays by a different set of rules when compared to pricing/bidding strategies of PPC or the search engine algorithmn trustrank/pagerank strategies of SEO.

“Permission Marketing” by Seth Godin is a great primer. To check out 4 free chapters, visit Seth’s blog.

The reality is that even if Continue reading →