Email Marketing is a system of gathering contact information of a website's visitors such as their email addresses and telephone numbers for further correspondence with them through auto-responders or email newsletter series. Email marketing is very vital to the profitability of any affiliate program; this is because an overwhelming percentage of visitors to a website do not immediately make a buying decision, and the only avenue to make such visitors responsive to the offer on the site is through email marketing.

This strategy enables you to create a huge list of potential buyers of your affiliate product, through provision of informative newsletter series to new subscribers who become potential buyers, and provision of new offers to old customers. Without email marketing, an affiliate marketer will lose out on the opportunity to eventually make sales to visitors who fail to buy on first visit, and also lose repeat patronage to new offers by old customers. Some of the ways to build a huge list of subscribers, and to retain existing customers are as follows:

1. Provide Valuable Information:

In order to build a large subscriber base and retain them as well, an affiliate marketer should endeavor to provide them with newsletters containing valuable tips that can assist them to find solution to their need. For instance, if you're making an offer to a niche on Parenting, you can supply tips on how parents should guide their teenage wards to keep good company and also to be sexually responsible. Another way is to provide them with free stuffs like bonus e-books and useful reports on their area of interest; through this technique, you can build a large list that will continue to be loyal to your offers, this helps you make more money with your affiliate program.

2. Avoid Lengthy Messages:

No one likes being bored with lengthy piece of information, and sending out email messages that are too long may end up defeating the purpose of your email marketing campaign. In order to attract maximum attention of readers to your messages or newsletters, try to ensure that your newsletters are concise and straight to the point; instead of presenting your readers with lengthy essays, try breaking it down into shorter paragraphs. This will get your readers to be more interested in your messages and prompt them to follow or click on the link to your affiliate program offer.

3. Know What Appeals To Your Subscribers:

For your email marketing campaign to be effective, you need to take advantage of the appropriate tools and machinery that will supply analysis on what appeals and what doesn't appeal to your subscribers. You can effect this by making use of an auto-responder service that will be able to provide you with a clear statistics of the open and click through rate of your various email messages. This will help you to get proper analysis of messages that appeals more to your readers interest and the ones that don't. Newsletters or messages that get high open and click through rate indicates that they contain what your subscribers need. This will enable you to know the area of your subscribers need that you should focus on so as to boost the money making potential of your affiliate program.

4. Constantly Send Messages:

An important factor to consider in order to carry out an effective email marketing campaign is the frequency and consistency of delivering newsletters or email messages. Experience shows that an affiliate marketer will hardly make a sale by just sending one or two email messages. The only proven way to lock in sales using email marketing is by constantly delivering messages which contains information that is of interest to your readers; this will make your readers to look forward to subsequent messages from you since they're certain of getting such messages. An affiliate marketer is therefore advised to provide constant, timely and useful information for his subscribers. Generally, the minimum message or newsletter series that can trigger a buying decision from a subscriber is between 5 to 12; therefore to achieve good result and make more money with email marketing, your newsletter series should be up to, or better still exceed these figure.