How to Build an Email List for Affiliate Marketing or Anything Else

It is commonly stated that people need to interact with a brand 7 times before they are willing to make a purchase. If you are looking to build a sustainable business online, you will want to continuously interact with your customers and get in front of their eyeballs. Therefore, it is a good idea to build an email list and other controllable assets like a Facebook group. Below, we will explore how to build an email list for affiliate marketing or anything else.

1. Organic Traffic

Assuming you already have some organic traffic, A simple tactic that you can use to get more email signups is to put an opt in plugin on your website. You can test various ways of displaying the opt in and various email baits to optimize conversions, but a simple bar at the top of your website like the one we have on our website is better than nothing. If you are looking for ways to grow your organic traffic with blogging, check out this article.

2. Remarketing Ads

While your website opt ins may be strategically placed, some people may have not been interested in opting in when they visited your website. That’s okay! You can retarget them on platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn by putting a retargeting pixel on your website. In the retargeting ad you can use some kind of email bait. For example, before our free on-page tool was released to the public, we offered it to only a select audience who were willing to opt in to our email list to receive a secret link. If possible, when running these ads, try to set the targeting to exclude the people that have already opted in to your list.

3. Cold Traffic Ads

You can run cold traffic ads to blog posts on your website that have opt in forms. If they do not opt in at that moment, you can then put them into your remarketing loop to hopefully convert them in the future.

4. Your Current Followers

You want to try your best to direct traffic from your other channels into your email list. You can do this by continually mentioning the existence of your list and can incentivize people to join with some kind of bait. For example, you can state that you release exclusive content to your email list, thus incentivized your subscribers to join.

5. Cross Promotion

If you know someone else with an email list in a niche similar to yours, you can work out a deal with them to cross promote your content and get you more subscribers. This is generally a good idea because you can assume that people on one email list are more likely to join another.

6. Forums, Blog Commenting and Facebook Groups

You can join forums related to your niche and provide value, linking to your opt ins where it makes sense and is allowed. Most forums will allow you to have a bio, so you can put a link in there.

What You Can Do with an Build an Email List:

1. Build Deeper Relationships

As mentioned above, most people don’t make a purchase the first time they interact with your brand, so you will want to use an email list to build deeper relationships with them. We recommend leading your emails with value by sending people the latest content you are releasing or special discounts that are exclusive to your list. Then, after building some rapport, you can send them a more salesy email, like one that puts them onto a webinar where the intent is to sell them a course. Generally, you increase your chances of people buying from you or clicking your affiliate links with longer email drip campaigns and by providing more value.

2. Have More Control and Consolidate Your Audience

Yeah, sure, you can have subscribers on YouTube, followers on Instagram, and likes on Facebook, but you do not control these platforms. Those platforms can easily change their algorithms whenever they want, which might increase or lower your organic reach. Email lists allow you to consolidate your audiences from all the platforms into one list and therefore allow you to control what content all your audiences see.

3. Boost Your SEO

While this is not the primary reason for why most people build email lists, sending email referral traffic may boost the SEO of a post on your website or video on your YouTube channel.

4. Build Social Proof

It can sometimes be difficult to build out an initial audience on a new platform or to get early engagement on posts. Sending your email subscribers to interact with something, like your new Facebook page for example, can create social proof in the beginning so that you can more easily expand in the future.

5. Segment Your Audience

Good marketers will segment their audience and deliver each segment customized content based on where they are in a sales funnel. This is done by setting up conversion tracking where, for example, you track subscribers who have purchased from you or who have made multiple engagements with your brand. In this example, to the people that have purchased from you multiple times, you can deliver a somewhat more sales focused message, while to new subscribers you might want to send some more value posts before sending them an offer.

6. Send Updates

Let’s say you have recently released a course and would like to notify your audience that it is available. You could do this by creating a video on your YouTube channel, but your whole audience may not see it. An email list allows you to send updates to your entire audience, letting them know that things are available.

7. Control Organic Search Traffic

While platforms like YouTube or Facebook may have built in ways for people to follow you, and to some extent, to get notified of your new content, the traffic reaching you from search engines, like Google, need to be notified of your new content via other means. Email fills this role.

8. Get an Edge over Other Advertisers and Marketers

Marketing beginners ignore the concept of 7 touches, so they run paid traffic directly at affiliate offers. While this can work from time to time, many times it will not. A smart marketer understands that acquiring an email address is a lot easier than making a direct sale, so they will run paid traffic to gather emails and nurture each lead with an email sequence before trying to make a direct sale. This ultimately leads to more sales and gives marketers who take the time to build out an email list an edge over those who think more short term.

9. Optimize Your Funnel

When you are testing various drip feed campaigns, email software like MailChimp or Aweber can provide you with data on how many people are interacting with your marketing funnel. You can then use this data to create an optimized funnel.

10. Create Passive Income

Once you have created an email drip campaign that converts, and you know your average conversion rate, you can mostly leave it alone and concentrate your efforts towards getting more people to join your list. This is unique to email marketing because emails are sent privately to one person, so other people can’t see that you are simply rehashing old content.

How to Build an Email List for Affiliate Marketing Conclusion

Building an Email is a great way to expand your business, get an edge over other marketers, and build deeper relationships with your audience. Let us know your thoughts about this article or anything else in our Facebook Group.