So email isn’t as ‘cool’ as many of the mediums in the affiliate marketing mix, but it is without a doubt one of THE most effective ways to boost your affiliate commissions.

But how do you craft the perfect newsletter that stands out in an inbox and inspires action? We’ve pulled together some of the key ingredients required to help you rock your newsletter...

Be Useful/Relevant

No-one wants to read a boring newsletter. Make sure if you’re saying something it’s relevant. And don’t bombard your audience, whilst it’s tempting to stay in constant contact, non-stop emails will just stop them being read. 

Think about it from your subscribers perspective - what would get your attention - what would be of interest. A well timed newsletter promoting a DC Live event coming up or a new product release might be the ticket. 

The absolute best way to build trust with your audience is to provide them with useful information that helps them in some way. Pack all your emails with valuable content and don’t be overly salesy.

TIP:

Think of your email newsletter like having a conversation - look at what you’re sending, is this something you’d say to a friend over a drink? If the answer is no - scrap it and start over.

For example, if you are a designer perhaps your email newsletter explains to the recipient why you’re excited about this new DC brush set that’s just launched and oh hey by the way there’s a free live session that shows you how to create a baby panda with it on Thursday so go and sign up if that sounds like fun - the email provides the affiliate link for individuals to go and check out the product for themselves and sign up for the live session. This is definitely something you may tell a friend over a drink (assuming they were interested in design too). 

Use stories

Don’t just tell your readers how great a DC product is, tell them how you or someone else you know was helped after buying it - perhaps it reduced the amount of time the project took them, perhaps it helped overcome an issue in your design process that you’ve had for years. 

You want individuals reading your newsletter to identify with what you’re saying and see themselves in the story and understand that this solution could work for them too.

Build relationships first

Whilst we want you filling your bank account with commissions, you shouldn’t always sell in every single email you send out. 

Any email marketing strategy should be more about building relationships than sales - because ultimately better relationships result in more sales. A great rule of thumb is 80/20 - 80% valuable useful content and 20% selling.

Incentives should come first

Since you want to capture your audience’s attention right away and get them to want to click and open your email, highlighting any special incentives can be really effective. A contest, free samples of a pack, or a special promotion can motivate readers more than usual, so you want to make them immediately aware of these things. 

Dropping these types of incentives into emails sporadically can keep your subscribers engaged and ensure they keep clicking.

 

Choose your subject carefully

The subject line is the first thing that will be seen in the inbox, so make it count. Any great subject line should communicate the essence of the newsletter - which hopefully will be something appealing/useful to your readers (otherwise you’re doing it wrong and go back to the start of this post).

Alternatively, you might decide to thank your subscribers, ask an interesting question, or include a call-to-action in your subject line. 

Depending on your readers level of commitment, personal life circumstances, and other factors, many will often make the decision whether or not to open your email based on the subject line alone! A/B testing subject lines is a really good way to find out what does and doesn’t work for your audience - we’ve covered this further on.

Including the name of your brand/blog (or some reference to it) can make your newsletter more easily identifiable amongst an inbox full of offers and other messages too – it can also create consistency if your subscribers are on the look-out for your emails; which hopefully they are. 

The greeting

The email greeting is a perfect way to personalise your newsletter – most email marketing services have built-in methods for adding subscriber-specific content to your campaigns. Make sure where you can, you include your subscribers’ names as a minimum for personalisation.

The bulk of the newsletter

Just because a subscriber has opened your email doesn’t mean they’re going to read the whole thing, so make sure the most important information is at the beginning; you want your audience to know right away that your email is worth reading!

Respect the time of your readers and cover all the main points as concisely as possible, remember you’re building a relationship with each reader so you want to make a positive (non-salesy) impact. 

Concise doesn’t mean vague - if there’s more information to share, which is more than an email’s worth, simply link to a post or somewhere they can go if they are interested in learning more. The worst thing you can do is tease interest and then not follow through with enough information, this will simply leave your reader frustrated. 

Direct contact information

One of the most important aspects of your newsletter is direct contact information, which enables your readers to easily get in touch with you. Email, social handles, etc. When your readers know that you’re reachable and reliably there for them if they need support, they are more likely to keep coming back.

Consistency

Whether you're sending an email every few days or once a week, creating consistency is key. A great way to do this is with a series, such as 'Tutorial Tuesdays' delivering content your subscriber will look out for.

Other Example Newsletters

 

 

 

A few other things to consider when implementing email marketing…

Use lead magnets

There’s so much to learn about growing your email list and the art of a really good lead magnet we’ve created an entire course on it, which you can access here, but for the purpose of this lesson we’ll cover the basic idea.

Lead magnets are incentives provided to your audience in return for their email address and are the best way to build your list. 

The best lead magnets help your audience solve their problems or achieve their goals. For example, a beginners guide to Procreate would appeal to people interested in Procreate, while a free digital toolbox of watercolor products to hone your skills would appeal to those trying to improve their digital watercolor painting. 

If you can provide your audience with something useful for free, you will begin building trust while getting their permission to send them emails.

Don’t be afraid to automate

Whilst you definitely do not want to remove the personal touch, try to automate as much of your email process as you can. 

Things such as automated subscribe forms that make it easy for your audience to ‘opt-in’ (and download lead magnets), auto-responder campaigns that trigger following a new sign-up and deliver a welcome series of scheduled emails to new subscribers are great places to start.

Automation can help free-up time and allow you to focus on more important business tasks. However, like most things in life it’s a balance - try to send out one-off emails every now and again too so you don’t just feel like a machine to your subscribers.

Segmentation is important

We all know that no individual is the same which is why segmentation makes all the difference. Whilst unrealistic to send unique emails to every single person on your list tailored to their own needs and interests you can go part way with good segmentation.

Segmentation is simply grouping people based on certain characteristics - which in marketing we call ‘personas’. This basically means splitting your list into groups of individuals who share similar traits; this may be interests, skill levels, content type, etc.

For example, you may have one segment who are interested in events and live tutorials and another who only want content relevant to lettering. Finding out your audiences preferences can be done in various ways and you can find more information about how to go about this in our email marketing course here.

Segmenting your audience will dramatically increase your opt-in, open and conversion rates so it is worth doing.

Testing, testing

Split testing emails is something you should do. This means creating two separate variations of an email (also known as A/B testing), sending each out to a portion of your subscribers and tracking/measuring success to understand which performs better, then taking the winner of the test and sending that to the remainder of the list. 

Testing is a brilliant way to improve the impact of your email marketing over time. There is no limit to the things you can test in your emails and you can constantly vary elements and improve results.

Email is actually one of our favourite activities that we encourage all affiliates to do, it is the one channel which allows you to drive the conversation and actively engage a warm audience without algorithms limiting your visibility.

It's Worth Your Time

Every single person on your email list saw your content and voluntarily gave you their email, so you get to drive the conversation with people who are already interested in your niche, content and business. Please don’t ignore this channel because it’s not the ‘latest’ tactic. And if you remember to ‘share’ rather than ‘sell’ you’ll soon become its biggest fan.

Jem Pennick

About The Author

A self-confessed Marketing geek, Jem Pennick is our Senior Marketing Manager at Design Cuts. Having worked in Marketing for nearly 20 years and with some of the world's biggest brands; including Fila, BRITA, Virgin  Media and Hachette Book Group to name a few, Jem has a wealth of knowledge and experience.