Want to know one of the secrets of growing your email marketing ROI?
Affiliate sales.
If you’re not familiar with affiliate sales, it’s a way for companies to “hire” independent publishers to sell their goods and services. Affiliate sales is commission-based sales – every time you mention a product or service, if your mention of it sells the product, you as a publisher earn a percentage of the sale.
Here’s the power of affiliate sales programs when it comes to your email marketing: virtually every email you send has the ability to include some synergistic offer for a related product that you can earn a commission on with little extra work. Let’s use one of our clients, True Citrus, the maker of the True Lemon and True Lime products. They have a wonderful newsletter called The Main Squeeze that contains all of the different ways you can use their products.
In their newsletter, they feature the Salmon and Spring Lettuce Salad. Notice that they provide a great recipe for the salad (which looks very tasty, doesn’t it?). Here’s the affiliate marketing opportunity: many of the ingredients in their recipe can be bought from a site like Amazon.com, which has the Amazon Associates program. Signing up for the program earns you referral fees between 4% and 15% depending on your volume.
Let’s go back to the Salmon salad. True Citrus could link to frozen salmon filets available for sale on Amazon and a small percentage of their readers would likely purchase the salmon filets as they were reading the recipe. Likewise, they could link up the dijon mustard to an organic dijon mustard, as well as the olive oil, etc.
It may not seem worth doing – after all, 4% of a $45 salmon steak is a mere $1.80. However, the power of great email marketing is that you can reach millions of people with your content. Small referral fees multiplied by massive audiences turn into real revenue.
Let’s look at another example of how this might work. Let’s say you had a million subscriber list, a 10% open rate, a 2% clickthrough rate, and a 25% conversion rate for your main product, automobile insurance. You know by default that the people on your list either have or will have a car very soon.
Let’s say you find a Bluetooth headset for hands-free driving (safer!) for $100 on which you earn $4 of commission. In addition to the income you’d earn promoting your automotive insurance, you’d earn an additional $2,000 in referral fees with those same email marketing metrics by offering the headset beneath your product in your newsletter. Best of all, you haven’t had to stock any inventory, handle any purchases or returns, or deal with the headset manufacturer. You’ve simply provided a link that adds relevant value in your newsletter.
Now multiply that $2,000 times your monthly newsletter and suddenly your newsletter has added $24,000/year to your bottom line with very little extra work on your part.
Where would you go to get started with affiliate programs as an email publisher? Take a look obviously at massive retailers like Amazon.com, but also look at networks like Commission Junction, Shareasale, Linkshare, and many others. (Note: WhatCounts is not affiliated with any of these companies yet. If you work for one of them and would like to talk about email marketing, you know where to find us)
Sign up for programs that offer relevant, timely, valuable products and services that synergize well with your own products or services, and you’ll increase the income that your email marketing delivers to your company, boosting your ROI.
Christopher S. Penn
Director of Inbound Marketing, WhatCounts
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