Affiliate email marketing: promote offers by email and track every sale

Email is one of the few channels an affiliate marketer owns. Ads get more expensive, search rankings move, social reach drops, but a list of people who asked to hear from you stays yours. The catch: affiliate emails are easy to get wrong, and the mistakes hurt both your income and your deliverability.

This guide covers building the list, writing the emails, the rules you must follow and how to see which emails actually earn.

Build the list around a topic, not an offer

People join a list because of a problem they want solved, not because of a product you happen to promote. Build around the topic:

• A lead magnet that fits the topic: a checklist, a short guide, a template, a comparison of tools.
• A sign-up form or popup on every page that gets traffic, plus a landing page for paid traffic.
• Double opt-in if you buy traffic or collect sign-ups from many countries. It keeps fake and mistyped addresses off your list.

If you run paid ads to a landing page, record where each subscriber came from. That lets you judge each traffic source by the commission it earns months later, not just by the cost per lead.

Give more than you pitch

A list that only receives offers stops opening. A common rule of thumb is to send several useful emails for every one that sells. Useful means:

• Tips, how-tos and short lessons on the topic.
• Honest reviews and comparisons, including what a product does badly.
• Your own results, experiments and mistakes.

When you do promote, explain who the product is for and who should skip it. Readers trust a recommendation more when you also say when not to buy.

Write the promotion email

A simple structure works for most offers:

1. The problem: one or two lines your reader recognises.
2. What you found: the product, and why it solves that problem.
3. Proof: your own experience, a screenshot, a short case.
4. The catch: price, learning curve, who it isn’t for.
5. One clear link, repeated as a button.

Send from a real name, keep the design simple, and avoid all-caps subject lines and fake urgency. “Ends tonight” only works if it is true.

Follow the rules

Affiliate email has a few rules that are not optional:

• Disclose the relationship. Tell readers you earn a commission if they buy through your link. In the US this is required by the FTC, and many networks require it in their terms.
• Only email people who opted in. Never buy or rent lists. Besides being against most laws and every serious sending provider’s terms, bought lists bounce and complain, and that ends your deliverability.
• Include an unsubscribe link and your postal address in every email (CAN-SPAM in the US; similar rules elsewhere).
• Check the network’s and merchant’s rules on email. Some offers don’t allow email traffic, or require you to use their approved copy or suppression list.

Protect your deliverability

Affiliate emails carry extra risk because filters see a lot of affiliate spam. A few habits make a big difference:

• Authenticate your domain with SPF, DKIM and DMARC, and send from your own domain.
• Avoid public link shorteners. They are heavily used by spammers. Use your own domain or a clean redirect.
• Watch bounces and complaints. Remove bounced addresses and people who never open. Keep spam complaints well under 0.1%.
• Send consistently. Sudden huge sends to an old list look like spam to mailbox providers.

Track which emails earn

Most affiliate networks report sales against a sub-ID you add to your link. If you put an ID for the email and subscriber in that sub-ID, the network can tell you exactly which email produced each sale.

SendCoop does this for you:

1. Add an offer under Revenue → Offers with your affiliate link. Put {sc_cid} in the network’s sub-ID parameter, for example &sub1={sc_cid}.
2. Add SendCoop’s postback URL in your affiliate network. Ready-made setups exist for ClickBank, Digistore24, JVZoo, Hotmart and WarriorPlus.
3. Insert the offer’s link into a campaign or automation email.

When a subscriber buys, the network calls the postback and the sale is credited to the email, the subscriber and the offer. You can tag buyers automatically, so you stop pitching them the product they already own.

If you buy traffic through an ad tracker such as Voluum, RedTrack or Binom, SendCoop can also send the lead and every later email sale back to the tracker with its click ID. That way your tracker shows the true value of each ad, including commission your emails earn weeks later.

The setup guides are in the help docs: Set up conversion tracking and offers and Send postbacks to your ad tracker.

A simple weekly rhythm

• Two or three useful emails a week: tips, stories, reviews.
• One promotion, matched to what you have been writing about.
• A welcome series that delivers the lead magnet and introduces you before the first pitch.
• A look at the numbers each week: revenue per email, unsubscribes and complaints by email.

Done this way, affiliate email builds a list that keeps earning, instead of one that burns out after a few launches.