Affiliate marketing has become much more prevalent in recent years–And with it the need for email templates for affiliate marketing. With the boom of social media influencers and bloggers, sharing coupon and discount codes with audiences in exchange for commission is a high-ROI marketing strategy.
For those with established affiliate programs, it means more people will join them as affiliates, promote their products or services, and increase business revenue. However even for those just starting out, there’s an infinite supply of affiliates, and if your product/service is worth promoting and you build a worthwhile affiliate program, people would love to promote your brand.
Affiliate partners can become lead magnets for your brand, referring new customers and driving customer acquisition at a lower cost than paid advertising. Overtime, you can arm your marketing team with the tools to optimize affiliate marketing across social media platforms.
How does it work and what are some email marketing templates to communicate with affiliates?
Don’t worry, we’ll dive in below! Including email templates for affiliate marketing that you can steal.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a marketing strategy for people who promote businesses’ products and services for a commission. These people can be business customers or professional influencers (like Instagram influencers or niche website owners).
For online businesses, reaching a high quality target audience through marketing campaigns can be tough. Referral programs with customers, and influencer programs with affiliates for commission rates are a great way for small business to make money online. Often times, you can set-up your affiliate offer, collect their contact information on a landing page, and set your program to autopilot with the help of automatic payouts and automations.
How do you find affiliates? In our “how to find affiliates” guide, we shared the eight most effective ways to find quality affiliates for beginners. More than half of those methods included reaching out to potential affiliates.
Another popular question is, how do you reach out effectively? More precisely, how to outreach such that you get a high response rate and potential affiliates to brand affiliates conversion rate? Well, one of the primary elements you need to nail is your outreach message. That’s why we’ve shared email templates for affiliate marketing below.
Example of affiliate marketing in action
What are the benefits of affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing accounts for 16% of the online sales in the US and Canada. And that’s the most obvious benefit of affiliate marketing – more sales. But there are even more practical reasons to create an affiliate marketing program, or at least add it to your marketing tool arsenal, like:
Low-cost marketing channel
Affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing channel — meaning: you only pay your affiliates for valid sales, and that too after you’ve received the money from the customer and the return period is over.
Access to the target audience
Another benefit of affiliate marketing is that you will be able to tap into your chosen affiliate’s audience. Simply by making sure that your affiliate is a person of influence in your industry, you will have access to your target audience. Customers who are referred by an affiliate typically have a higher conversion rate than other newly acquired customers.
Free brand awareness
Affiliates want to earn as much commission as possible, and hence their goal is to drive traffic and sales to your site. For that, they take their audience through the whole sales funnel. And the first stage of any sales funnel is awareness!
How do you write an email for affiliate marketing?
How you write an email for affiliate marketing similar to how you’d right a sales email, but you also need to send emails after someone joins your program.
Outreach to individual affiliates
Once you discover affiliates you want to reach out to, you can write personalized emails to each affiliate that asks about their interest in joining your affiliate program. These are the types of email templates for affiliate marketing we’ve provided below. It’s always best to include key pieces like your company name, commission rate, and if you have specific affiliate products you’re looking to promote.
Transactional emails for your affiliate program
These emails are important to those who join your affiliate program. For example, email and SMS communication to collect their commission payouts, or a welcome email. If you’re looking for templates, we’ve created free Klaviyo email templates you can use for affiliate marketing. All you have to do is sign up for Social Snowball for 30 days free and you’ll receive a link to access the templates.
Can email marketing do affiliate marketing?
Email marketers can do affiliate marketing, especially to existing customers. If each customer joins your affiliate program and has a unique code generated, you can include the unique code in the welcome email or other emails you send to everyday customers.
Do you need an email list for affiliate marketing?
You can build an email list for affiliate marketing by discovering a list of affiliates you’d like to outreach on a 1:1 basis to. Or, you can turn your customers into affiliates by automatically creating an affiliate account whenever a purchase is made and automatically enroll them into your affiliate program.
If you have a landing page for your affiliate program, you can build a list by sending it out to your existing email list and gathering their interest in being an affiliate. Or, using SEO optimization to have affiliates find your landing page organically.
What is the purpose of affiliate marketing email templates?
The purpose of a template is to help you get started, but always keep in mind this is a cheat sheet and should be applied to your specific business. Templates won’t work for everyone! Specifically, know that:
There are many aspects to getting a high open rate, high response rate, and high conversion rate. For example, your lead list quality, email subject line, message timing, follow-up message quality, number of follow-ups, etc., all affect the key metrics.
Potential affiliates/influencers prefer getting contacted a certain way for “partnerships” queries. So look out for instructions first. For instance, if they have mentioned an email address for brand queries, do not DM them.
Outreach direct messages (DMs) should be short and concise. After all, no one reads a lengthy Instagram message from a stranger.
Outreach emails can be a bit in-depth but shouldn’t be too long. So, don’t share the details they don’t need to know. For example, you can skip mentioning how and when you payout in your first email.
Whether it’s email or DM, the message must include two things: 1) A short intro to you and your brand, and 2) Why the influencer/affiliate marketer is a good fit for joining your affiliate program.
Last note: To show you the email templates for affiliate marketing in use, we’ll take the influencer example we discussed in the how to find affiliates article:
We’ll suppose Lauren, the founder at Mountain Moverz — a company that sells baby jewelry, among other things — is sending the affiliate program outreach DM and email to Jordin Ibrahim, an Instagram influencer with a relevant following.
Noted? Let’s get to the outreach templates.
Which template is best for affiliate marketing?
Here are the best email templates for affiliate marketing outreach. Tweak the DM template depending on the platform you are reaching out on. For instance, an Instagram DM can be more casual than a Linkedin DM.
The template:
Hey [Influencer First Name],[Your Name] here.
I am [Your Job Title] at [Your Company Name] – [A short intro to your brand]. [A personalized line that shows you have done your research] or [A vaguely personalized line that feels personal to a segment of affiliates/influencers]. [Introduction of your affiliate program].
[Invitation to your program]
– [Your Name] (optional)
P.S. [A tempting offer] or [A recent news of affiliate success or something new you are doing] or [Another CTA] (optional)
Template in use:
Hey Jordin, Lauren here.
I am the founder of Mountain Moverz – a mom-and-pop e-store selling apparel and jewelry for babies and moms. I just saw your profile and your cute feed , and I feel you’d like to collaborate with us (at least, we would).We recently launched our affiliate program (that pays 12% per sale!), and I want to invite you to join it.
Would you be interested in becoming a Mountain Moverz affiliate?
– Lauren
P.S. If you’d like to see our products first, I’d be happy to send over a free sample
Email Template for Affiliate Outreach
You can use the DM template in email as well, but let’s go a bit in-depth for the email, shall we?
The template:
Hi [Influencer First Name],
My name’s [Your Name], and I am [Your Job Title] at [Company Name]. [A short intro to your brand]. [A line mentioning how you found them]. [A personalized line that shows you know what they do] or [A vaguely personalized line that feels personal to them and the segment of affiliates/influencers they’re part of].
Coming to the point: [Introduction of your affiliate program]. Would you be interested in becoming a [Your Brand Name] affiliate? I’ll get you set up right away!
[Your Name]
P.S. [A CTA that asks them to do something between joining the affiliate program and completely ignoring your email, in case they are hesitant to join right away]
Template in use
Hi Jordin,
My name’s Lauren, and I am the founder of Mountain Moverz. We are a small mom-and-pop e-commerce store selling apparel and jewelry for babies and moms.I was looking through #babyjewelry on Instagram and found your profile. After looking through your cute feed, I felt you’d like to collaborate with us (at least we would love to see your Alèah (the baby’s name) wearing a Mountain Moverz bracelet!).
Coming to the point: We recently launched our affiliate program (that pays 12% per every sale the affiliate brings!), and I’d love to have you on as a Mountain Moverz affiliate.
Would you be interested in becoming our affiliate? I can get you set up right away!
Lauren
P.S. If you want to see our products first, I’ll love to send a free sample
P.P.S. Have any doubts about what an affiliate program is or how it works? I’d be more than happy to get on a call and explain it further.
So, it might look like:
Summing It Up
There are four steps to affiliate marketing success:
Step 1: Create an affiliate program
Step 2: Find quality potential affiliates
Step 3: Properly reach out to them and convert the potential affiliates into affiliates
Step 4: Motivate your affiliates to bring you more sales and never leave you
In this article, we shared a couple of affiliate program outreach templates that’ll help you with the third step. If you’re looking to create your program, access transactional email templates or payout affiliates easily, try Social Snowball for 30 days for free.
