Affiliate Marketing
Marketing
Maximizing Affiliate Engagement: How to Craft Best Email Templates for SaaS Affiliate Programs
Affiliate Marketing
Marketing
Affiliate programs are an integral part of many businesses. At its core, affiliation allows other businesses or individuals to advertise their services and attract customers, receiving a reward for their work. As practice has shown, 81% of brands use affiliate programs to boost brand awareness and drive sales. Today, we will delve into one of the most important parts of affiliate marketing, namely emails.
This guide explores best practices for crafting affiliate email templates, covering recruitment, engagement, and retention strategies. It will also share insights from a real affiliate manager we talked with. Without further ado, let’s get started.
Recruitment is the first step in building a strong affiliate base to bring your business the desired profits and leads. The main goal is to familiarize the future affiliate with your program, highlighting the benefits and providing instruction on onboarding the program. This type of email can be varied in structure but always has the following key elements.
Let’s discuss each one in detail.
It’s hard to promote the brand if you don’t know how. That’s what the outline is for. It tells the future affiliate about the whole commission structure and how you see your future partnership. It describes how affiliates should promote your brand and bring you new leads.
It’s vital to mention the benefits of the affiliate program for future partners. Your task is to show clearly that this is a win-win partnership, where you gain leads while the affiliate receives a fair reward for their honest work.
Since these are recruitment emails, it’s not necessary to go into much detail, as there are separate email newsletters for a full-fledged onboarding guide, which we will talk about a bit later. It’s enough to show the general steps so the future affiliate can envision the approximate onboarding process. In addition, it will be useful to leave links to materials and resources that will help the affiliate get to know your business better and understand whether they want to promote your products or services and whether they will be able to do so.
Now that you have your affiliate, you must stay in touch with them. Your business is a constantly evolving system with innovations and developments that your affiliate should be aware of. Communicating promotions or updates helps keep affiliates motivated and engaged. Whether it’s a simple privacy policy update or a completely new product in your line, your affiliate needs to know about it in advance so they can properly target their marketing to promote you. Timely and engaging emails that outline promotional offers or new commission structures keep affiliates in the loop.
To make things easier, let’s discuss some tips that will help you craft better promotion update emails for your affiliates.
Update emails should contain all the necessary news regarding your business updates and upcoming marketing campaigns. If you’re planning a seasonal event or campaign, your affiliate should know about it in advance to prepare, and so your joint efforts bring more revenues. The same applies to a new product. The affiliate should know what it is and its benefits so that they know how to promote it and attract new clients to you.
Sooner or later, your partnership with the affiliate will also be updated, namely the terms of the commission. Changes like this represent vital information that should be provided in update emails. Notifying affiliates about changes in a timely manner helps you guarantee high-quality cooperation and avoid unpleasant situations and frustrations. Think of broadcasting upcoming promotions or updates to your affiliates as a quick heads-up to a co-worker—it should be timely, clear, and easy to digest. The goal is not to overwhelm your affiliates with too much information all at once or give them promotions they haven’t had time to prepare for.
Your affiliate will also benefit from any new materials and resources you release or update. Has your business changed the name of any features of products or goods? Alert your affiliates so that they know about the innovations and do not mislead future customers. You get the idea.
Inevitably, some affiliates will stop being active, and the question of re-engagement will arise. Re-engaging inactive affiliates is key to maximizing their potential and keeping your cooperation going. That’s what re-engagement emails are for. Personalized re-engagement emails can reignite the interest of your affiliate partners by offering them new incentives, sharing recent success stories, and providing performance tips.
In order to make your re-engagement emails work, you should stick to several strategies.
The first thing that immediately comes to mind as a re-engagement tool is increasing rewards and bonuses for improved metrics and overall performance. More generous rewards can motivate an affiliate to start working with new focus and motivation.
If during the affiliate’s inactivity, your business has reached a new height or released a new product, it’s time to remind the affiliate about it. You’ll alert the affiliate that your business has new grounds for active promotion and the affiliate has something to work with. Another great strategy is sharing success stories from other affiliates that can remind them that success is still within reach and encourage them to get back on track.
Affiliates lose interest in the partnership due to dissatisfaction with their own results, which is influenced by many factors. In the re-engagement email, it would not be superfluous to throw in a few tips and suggestions for improving performance. You can inspire the affiliate to apply them in practice and also boost metrics. Besides that, re-engaging inactive affiliates is about reminding them of the value they bring and reigniting their motivation. And you better approach them with something personal. Something that shows you’re aware of their efforts and reminds them of their positive impact.
Fair payment is the foundation of all things, but personal gratitude should not be forgotten either. Recognizing top performers with personalized “thank you” emails strengthens affiliate loyalty. Offering perks, bonuses, fair commissions, and recognition makes a lasting impact. To show that you value your partnership and the affiliate’s work, it’s worth considering separate emails with unique “thank you” content. These emails can include:
As we mentioned earlier, onboarding is critical to ensuring new affiliates feel equipped to start promoting. A well-structured series of onboarding emails should provide a warm welcome, clear instructions, and access to essential resources.
Let’s see what exactly should be included in your onboarding emails.
Start with a warm welcome so they know who you are, the main rules in your program, and what’s coming so they are comfortable right away. Once it’s done, grant your affiliate access to affiliate systems. These can include any company systems for running and reporting affiliate businesses, as well as payment systems for partners and affiliates.
Each business is unique, with its own guidelines for affiliate links. Guide your affiliates step-by-step on how to get their referral links set up, how to use the dashboard, and all the practical stuff they’ll need. Just don’t hit them with everything at once. Break it down into manageable chunks, and make sure they’ve got access to all the right resources—banners, email templates, social media content. Providing your affiliates with a comprehensive guide helps avoid any issues and ensures that link performance is transparent for both you and the affiliate.
Additionally, using affiliate management software can make link generation a breeze. For instance, Tapfiliate’s affiliate marketing platform automatically generates affiliate and referral links, which are conveniently accessible on the affiliate dashboard.
Marketing resources include everything that will allow the affiliate to thoroughly know your business and promote it correctly. These can be marketing assets, FAQs, promotional materials, company policies, brand kits, and so on.
Regularly checking and notifying the affiliate about their performance is the main strategy that helps the affiliate work in the right direction, analyze the current situation, learn from mistakes, and get better. Performance updates are essential for engaging affiliates. They provide data-driven insights and encourage affiliates to improve their efforts.
To fill your emails with valuable information, include the following:
It’s about time to talk about tricks that will help you create stunning affiliate email templates.
To create eye-pleasing emails for your affiliates, you should keep in mind several nuances:
After combining all the mentioned tips and creating your email with the email design tool, you can save it as a template for further use or break each element into a module. But what do you get from using modules and templates? Here’s a list of benefits:
Modules will allow you to quickly create new emails for all occasions from the modules you made by simply combining them. And by the way, this approach will speed up the email creation process by 5 times.
Beyond crafting templates, SaaS businesses must consider several other important aspects, like personalization, strong subject lines, and a healthy mix of content to keep affiliates engaged. It’s not obligatory, but implementing one or more of them will make a difference.
According to surveys, 74% of marketers think personalization needs greater focus and support in their organizations. This isn’t surprising because everyone loves to have a personalized experience, and emails are especially important. When it comes to affiliate emails, personalized emails are a great way to show an individual approach to each affiliate partner and their value to you. To embrace personalization, you can do the following:
Segmentation will help you not only see the overall picture of the performance of all affiliates but also understand what email content will work best for which affiliate in an email.
This point is closely related to the previous one. For example, once you identify top-performance affiliates, they will definitely benefit from “thank you” emails mentioning their person-specific achievements. Meanwhile, less successful or even inactive affiliates should be given attention with the help of individual emails with tips on improving performance.
The subject line is the face of your email and the first thing recipients see when opening their inbox. A clear and concise subject line must say what the email is about, especially in communications with your affiliate partners. According to statistics, 64% of recipients decide to open or delete emails based on the subject line, so paying attention to subject line quality is necessary.
To pack your affiliate emails with maximum value, providing exclusive content is a must. This can vary from special marketing access to exclusive insider promotions that can lead to unique marketing approaches by the affiliate. You can also frame these offers as value-adding resources to support affiliate success and bring more value to your email communication.
By using personalized, action-driven email templates designed by template builders, SaaS companies can establish lasting relationships with affiliates, boost performance, and efficiently grow their affiliate programs. Consistent, clear communication through thoughtfully crafted emails is key to maximizing affiliate engagement. We hope this article was enjoyable and interesting to read, as we enjoyed writing it. Have a great day and amazing affiliate performances.
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Anton Diduh
I’m a Content Writer and video Content Creator at Stripo. I am passionate about email marketing and am glad to share insights, news, and guides to help you design better emails that will leverage your marketing campaigns. I do my best to explain complex things in simple language.
Table of contents
Best Email Templates for Recruiting Affiliates
How to Communicate Promotions and Updates to Affiliates
How Do I Re-engage Inactive Affiliates
The Best Way to Thank Top-Performing Affiliates
How to Structure Onboarding Emails for New Affiliates
What Content to Include in Affiliate Performance Update Emails
How to Design Stunning Email Templates
Bonus Tips for Even Better Affiliate Email Performance