How to email affiliate links in emails?

[DutchPassion]

I design and create a landing pages. These landing pages will pre sell whatever affiliate offer I am promoting. My landing pages contain a form, and depending on the users choices the user will be referred to an appropriate affiliate offer. If it's any use I promote energy suppliers.

So far this works great, but I don't actually collect any information from the user. They complete the form, my code decides the best energy supplier, and they get redirected.

Instead what I would like to do is collect the users email, and email them their "result". By result I mean the best match energy supplier based on their form inputs.

Implementing this is easy for me, but my problem is what email provider can I use for this? I will be sending an affiliate link in the email.

But, I also know affiliate links in emails are either a) not allowed by mandrill b) will not inbox. So I had the idea of cloaking with a domain name ... but in this day and age it's not uncommon for bots to follow redirects, even meta/js redirects. Right?

And if that isn't possible I though about sending them back to my domain, with a page that says something like "We managed to save you $200 a year. Find out more ...". And then they press a button to be redirected to the affiliate link.

Aside from that I'm out of options. Can anyone chime in and offer some advice on the best way to do this? I feel like I'm losing a lot of money by not collecting the users email and profile.

 

[Graybeard]

Most affiliate programs have restrictions on email campaigns.
Why not render a page dynamically as a *results* page on your server with affiliate links?
------------------------------------
Name's CHOSEN RESULTS:
...........................................
1 program URL text description [click here]
2 program URL text description [click here]
3 program URL text description [click here]

I recommend you detect for ad blockers so the affiliate links will load.

Yes, curl -I "URL" will usually show the 301 and the Location: rather trivial -- phantomjs will follow a JavaScript redirect. Whether or not large email clients like gmail would bother to follow these links I really don't know. You would have to experiment but the source and the heuristic scanning of email content, as well as links in it, will have a greater influence I think.

I am interested in lead gathering for solar energy -- is that what this is about? Or, non-utility energy delivery?

1st post -- welcome to Affiliatefix

Graybeard, Feb 16, 2018

 

[eMonetize]

Aweber and getresponse are probably the two most well know ESPs that allow affiliate marketing.

You can easily set up what you want using either of them.

 

[Brenda R.]

Building an email list is something I strongly advise affiliates to do.

The average affiliate is not be able to own the relationship or continue communication with buyers of the products they are promoting without building an email list. Much of the long term profits that come about from affiliate marketing can be attributed to email promotions.

That said, here are a few pointers

1. Send all your paid traffic to a lead capture of some sort. There are multiple ways to do a lead capture that can range from passive to aggressive (not in a negative way)
2. Segment your email list as much as possible. This enables you to send more relevant emails to your subscribers. A few things you can segment on are age, gender, geographic location, engagement (opens, clicks), buyers/non buyers, interests via surveys before or after the optin. Additionally, you can also work with email append services that can fill in the gaps for you. You will want to include this in your privacy policy.
3. Build a relationship with your list. Provide quality content that informs, entertains and educates. By taking the time to provide this value upfront, it's easier to convert subscribers into buyers when you promote affiliate products and services
4. Invest in the time to build out an auto res-ponder (drip) sequence of messages. Track the performance of these emails (you can use our Prosper202 tracking software for this) and replace messages that are not converting. If a standalone email blast works very well, make sure to add it your sequence.
5. For non automated emails and newsletters, you should always resend the same message to everyone who didn't open and or click your last email. This isn't always accurate, because email open tracking doesn't work if someone has images disabled. But doing this usually gets you an extra 20-30% boost. I usually test out a totally new subject line on the resend. You can also rewrite part of the email with a different angle.

This has been a quick overview. If you'd like to learn more about tracking and optimizing your affiliate emails feel free to check out Prosper202 Self-Hosted Affiliate Tracking Software & Apps