3 Of The Best Affiliate Email Marketing Tools For Affiliate Marketers That WON’T Ban Your Account!
Choosing the right Affiliate email marketing tool for your affiliate business, is a decision you CANNOT afford to get wrong.
Get this wrong and believe me, you’ll be giving yourself a major headache down the line.
It’s always better to read reviews (like this one) that’s based on real user experiences.
Before I get started, I just want to make you aware that this is not an explanation of what email marketing actually is (I’ll be covering that in a separate upcoming blog post), the purpose of this article is to review several email marketing tools that I have personally used in my affiliate marketing business and that I recommend you should use aswell
You do NOT need to use any of the email marketing autoresponder tools that I recommend here on this page.
Ultimately, the tools you use in your business should be YOUR decision to make.
Not mine or anybody else’s.
You can simply go to Google and search for “Email marketing tool” and you’ll find a whole bunch of them to choose from.
But like I said, this is a decision that you need to be informed about, get it wrong and you’ll pay the price.
Sometimes, that price can be severe, as you’ll soon discover.
You’ve heard me talk about the importance of building a relationship with your email subscriber list over and over again throughout this blog, the reason I talk about so much is because it’s so damn important to the success of your business.
Is Affiliate Email Marketing Dead?
I hear this a lot.
In my opinion, in the highly saturated world of the internet, there has never been a better time to incorporate email marketing into your business, especially if you’re an affiliate.
Here’s a quote from Peter Sumpton of Marketing Study Lab
Email will still remain one of the best ways to communicate with those that want to hear from you.
Unlike social media where you can switch between platforms at a moment’s notice; follow / unfollow, like or unlike with one click, email will remain consistent as a platform that allows one-to-one communication to an inbox that is well established and part of your daily routine, both within business and leisure.
– Peter Sumpton. CEO Marketing Study Lab
People are selective these days about who they give their email address to.
If you do it correctly, people will have no problem trusting you with their email address, this means you can send them valuable content and guess what?..
LESS competition!
In short, Email marketing isn’t dead but it HAS evolved.
You can’t get away with sending a “one size fits all” approach.
You need communicate with your subscribers intelligently and as individuals.
Remember there are real human beings on the end of these email and they don’t want to read spam.
People guard their email inboxes vehemently and we as marketers, especially affiliate marketers must respect that.
But, that doesn’t mean we have to sit there and type out each email one by one.
Effective affiliate email marketing, communicates with subscribers efficiently…
There are email tools out there that makes this very simple…
Enter the world of:
Email Autoresponders.
There are a TON of them out there, some are good but most are bad.
The ones I’m going to go through with you here are the ones that I’ve used successfully in the past and allow affiliate marketing.
That’s the crucial part.
A lot of email marketing software services don’t allow affiliate marketing, and whilst they might not explicitly say it upfront on their website (they should do), they don’t.
You’ll usually have to find their Terms of Service and there’ll be some sort of ambiguous blurb in their terms of service (which almost nobody ever reads) that prohibits affiliate links or affiliate marketing.
What happens is people wake up to find their email autoresponder accounts closed and in some cases, their email subscriber lists completely deleted!
Remember at the beginning of this blog post I said that choosing an email autoresponder was a BIG decision, well this is why.
Because…
Choosing the wrong email marketing tool can literally cost you your entire business!
So with that being said, I am going to show you 3 email autoresponder tools that you can use in your affiliate business and 1 that you should AVOID at all costs.
It often comes as “highly recommended” and you’ll see it endorsed a lot, but the truth is it’s TERRIBLE for affiliate marketers, in fact, it could potentially destroy your business.
It’s worth pointing out here, the email autoresponder software services I recommend below, are all email marketing tools I’m either currently actively using or I’ve used in the past.
So keep in mind, anything you read here (as with everything on my blog) comes with a bucket load of personal experience thrown in.
Affiliate Email Marketing Tool #1: Aweber…
So with all this being said, the first one I’m going to recommend is Aweber.
Aweber?? You cry!
Hear me out..
You are quite welcome to go and try the ‘latest and greatest’ email software or something luxurious like Infusionsoft, but the reality is, you don’t need luxury tools.
Aweber, while basic, will serve the purpose for most people just getting started with Affiliate marketing.
It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of other solutions but it is fine if you’re just getting started.
There are multi-million companies still using Aweber. (such as this guy)
And possibly the biggest advantage to using Aweber, is that Aweber integrates with most other SAAS (Software as a service) tools.
That’s a big advantage and an extremely important consideration when choosing your Email marketing software.
Eventually, you’re going to need more email marketing power and you can achieve this using something called AW Pro Tools.
But this is another service that works with Aweber and as such it has it’s own costs.
AW Pro Tools will extend the functionality of Aweber and by that I mean, it’ll make more advanced email marketing automation possible.
eg: you can build more complex automations and automatically move subscribers to a different list depending on ‘tag”.
Aw Pro Tools turns Aweber into an email marketing powerhouse, but it comes at a cost. It’s about $29/month that’s in addition to the $19 /month Aweber costs for 500 subscribers. (they now have a free plan, however the free plan has a few less features, but still very good to get started with)
So, in total, you’ll have an extremely powerful email marketing automation tool for less than about $50 per month in total.
Pretty good.
Email Marketing Tool #2: GetResponse…
Getresponse, like Aweber is another email marketing tool that’s been around since dinosaurs roamed the earth.
The key difference with Getresponse, is that they provide features like these as standard that really ought to be included in Aweber, but for some reason Aweber seems quite happy to let this slide so that’s where Getresponse steps in.
I used Getresponse for email marketing for several years and they served me well.
They’re a great choice for affiliate marketers because, unlike Aweber, they’ll grow with your business.
However, where Getresponse fall short is where Aweber gains.
Here’s why…
Getresponse’s email editor SUCKS!
It’s the one thing I wish they’d improve as it’s buggy as hell, and from what I can gather from other affiliate friends of mine, the email editor is still as bad as it was when I was using it.
I mean, you might get on with it very well, but it drove me up the wall and back down it again.
Getresponse has a whole bunch of email tools including contact tagging and advanced email automation templates, which are super-useful.
Getresponse gives you several automation templates that you can just plug straight in, without needing to learn all the technical aspects.
Setting up email automations are out the scope of this blog post, but just understand that being able to automate your marketing, will give you a massive edge over your competitors.
This is a new feature of Getresponse which wasn’t available when I had it.
Getresponse’s pricing starts at about $15 a month and (unlike Aweber) you don’t need any additional tools or services for email automation.
You also get a higher subscriber limit of 1,000 unique email subscribers compared with Awebers 500.
Both Aweber and Getresponse have good, solid support including 24×7 Live chat available.
Being able to get help readily is vital and you’ll find you’ll use it a lot.
No matter what email software tool you decide to use, always make sure they have Live chat support available.
Email Marketing Tool #3: Mailerlite…
Finally, I’ve saved the best till last.
Drum roll…
Mailerlite!
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UPDATE: I now use Aweber.
Mailerlite have suddenly started clamping down pretty hard on Affiliate Marketing. It’s still a very good email marketing tool, if affiliate marketing is not the main driver in your business., so I’m still going to feature Mailerlite in this blog post.
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It powers the email marketing side of my entire business and I absolutely love it.
Besides powerful features and automation capabilities, it has a super smooth and intuitive email editor with superb tracking capabilities.
One of the most important factors when choosing the email software for your business is the email content you send out to your subscribers MUST look good on mobile devices.
Here’s an article that explains the impact of mobile responsive email content.
As you can see from that article, most of your readers will be on their mobile devices, so your emails must present well and clearly, otherwise guess what happens?…
Yup. Your email never gets properly read, if at all.
As an affiliate marketer, that’s a disaster.
Getting our emails read and acted upon, meaning your subscribers clicking a link and making a purchase is how we make an income, so if your emails look bad on a mobile device, that’s pretty much game over.
But that’s where Mailerlite is king of the pack.
I’ve tried probably close to a dozen email tools and Mailerlite is by far the best when it comes to mobile responsiveness.
However, when it comes to segmenting your subscribers, Mailerlite does things a little different.
Instead of “tags”, Mailerlite users “groups” or “grouping”.
This is useful because it automatically organises your subscribers in a clear and concise way, as opposed to tags which typically keeps all your subscribers in one group and you then have to manually search based on the tag.
Believe me, once you start building a sizeable list, this will get messy. Very messy.
Mailerlite keeps it simple.
There’s a ton of other features built into Mailerlite such as landing pages and surveys and polls.
And it’s surveys and polls that I’m going to touch on now.
Surveys are a great way to get real time customer feedback from your list.
Eg: you are thinking about running a new affiliate campaign to your fitness list.
Using the power of surveys, you could ask your subscribers what there biggest goals are.
You’ll get responses, you can then match up a suitable affiliate product to what your email subscribers have told you they are interested in.
Guess what happens?
Your sales go through the roof!
This is where the REAL power of Mailerlite comes into play.
With nearly all other email marketing solutions I’ve used in the past, the process usually looks like this:
- Pay for a separate survey tool (usually about $30 bucks a month).
- Build the survey
- Link to the survey from your email
- Login to the email survey tool to check your responses.
Ughh!
That’s a lot of expense and inconvenience just to survey your email list!
With Mailerlite, you can build your email survey right within your account and embed the survey directly within your emails!
And it doesn’t stop there, you can see the results of your survey in graphical representation, DIRECTLY inside Mailerlite.
All this is included in the price, which by the way, is very affordable.
Mailerlite do have a free plan.
However, their free plan has no LIVE chat support.
In any case, in my opinion, you might aswell go for one of their budget friendly paid plans which starts at $10 /month for up to 1,000 subscribers.
So as email marketing software tools are concerned, Mailerlite is extremely good value for money and I highly recommend you at least try them out.
Final Words…
At the start of this blog post, I said I’d give you my email marketing software recommendations aswell as ones to avoid.
The goal for this blog post was to give you the best possible footing for choosing an affiliate email marketing company for your affiliate business, having been through the experience myself, so this isn’t going to turn into a bashing companies post, that isn’t the idea.
However, it’s my duty to help you make as much of an informed decision as I possibly can.
So with that being said, there are really only 2 email marketing software tools that I recommend you avoid, but different reasons for each.
Email Marketing Tools To Avoid…
The first one is, MailChimp.
You’ve probably heard of them, they get recommended a LOT.
Usually because they have a decent free plan.
But in my experience, just because something is free, doesn’t mean it’s something you should use.
Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE free tools, I list a lot of them that I use here.
But MailChimp really is one to avoid for us affiliates marketers.
MailChimp hate affiliate email marketing, they take an extremely hard line against anybody caught using MailChimp for affiliate marketing.
I’ve heard people say it’s a myth about them hating affiliate marketing but I’ve heard and seen enough proof that my belief of their disdain for affiliate marketing is true.
Here’s an excerpt taken directly from Mailchimps own terms of service about Affiliate Marketing with Mailchimp:
Well that’s just about as clear as dishwater!
On the one hand, they are saying Affiliate marketing is and I quote “prohibited”, and the literal definition of prohibited is, as described by Dictionary.com as:
Which as you can see, it’s literally forbidden.
BUT…
In the same sentence, they also say Affiliate links ARE allowed.
What they actually say, is “usually fine”.
Now, when I see the word “usually” it usually means NEVER.
So in Mailchimps case, that “usually fine” is usually NEVER and “we’ll ban your ass if we catch you”..
And quite frankly, I don’t see how you can prohibit affiliate marketing but allow affiliate links.
Last time I checked, you definitely cannot do affiliate marketing without using affiliate links…so go figure.
Bottom line is, regardless of what Mailchimp say…
I’ve heard of people’s accounts being shut down and in one case, a list of over 10,000 subscribers was completely deleted and she wasn’t given a back up of her list either.
MailChimp just deleted it without warning!!
10K plus subscribers gone.
I really don’t want you to be on the end of that kind of action, so that’s why I’m warning you now.
At the end of the day, whatever email marketing software you choose, ultimately it’s your business and your decision.
Here endeth the lesson with Mailchimp.
Moving on…
The second Email Autoresponder tool I’m going to suggest you avoid is Infusionsoft.
Now known as Keap.
(In full disclosure, it’s been a long time since I last used this, so the following may well have changed).
I’m basing this purely on my personal experience of it.
Infusionsoft is expensive.
Their cheapest plan at their current pricing is about $79 a month.
Which is cheaper than when I had it, I was paying $199 a month on their lowest plan and at the time that was considered cheap (!).
Infusionsoft DO allow affiliate marketing with no problems there.
That’s not why I’m telling you to avoid it.
I’m telling you to avoid it because a) it’s expensive and b) it’s complicated.
When I say complicated, as far as affiliate email autoresponders go, Infusionsoft is (by far) the most complicated of the lot.
You practically need a PhD in computer science to damn well use it and the learning curve is steep.
When I say steep, think of trying to push a wheel barrow full of concrete up a hill that’s almost vertical.
It’s horrible.
And beside it being more complicated than trying than trying to build software from scratch, whilst blindfolded, it’s way too overkill for most people.
Infusionsoft wasn’t really designed for affiliate marketers, it’s aimed mainly at business’s who are selling to other business (B2B), not affiliate marketers.
It’s full of features of which you’ll only use about half of them (generously) and it’s certainly just about the most anti-beginner Autoresponder tool I can think of.
So for those reasons I wouldn’t recommend Infusionsoft, however they DO allow Affiliate marketing, so it might be an option for you if you like geeky stuff and don’t mind the learning curve that’s attached to it.
So that wraps up this blog post, I originally sat down to write this as a quick article, but it’s turned into something of a half-marathon, but that’s really because I wanted to give a full picture so that you can make an informed decision.
Because as I’ve already said, choosing an email Autoresponder tool is a massive decision.
Once again, you don’t have to use any of the ones I’ve mentioned here, but these are the ones I’ve used personally and can give you a full honest review.
Quick recap:
The best affiliate email marketing tools I recommend:
Aweber (I use this one myself)
Getresponse (I use this too)
Mailerlite
Not recommended:
MailChimp
Infusionsoft (now known as Keap)
