The fact that 20% of brand marketers consider affiliate marketing the most important customer acquisition channel, says it all. As of this year, the global market size of affiliate marketing is worth over $17B, of which $8.2B is spent in 2022 alone.
Affiliate marketing works best for both spreading brand awareness and driving sales. More specifically, 16% of online orders in the USA come through affiliate marketing, and 83% of marketers are leveraging affiliate marketing to raise brand awareness.
Being one of the most popular customer acquisition channels, affiliate marketing becomes more crowded every day. Hence, doing affiliate outreach is harder than ever.
So, if you have an affiliate program, keep reading to find out:
- The difference between affiliate marketing and influencer marketing.
- Tips to keep in mind when creating an affiliate marketing strategy.
- Our best-performing affiliate outreach templates.
Affiliate Marketing vs. Influencer Marketing
The biggest difference between both is that affiliate programs are aiming to drive traffic to the brand’s website and entice people to make a transaction. The only way for an affiliate marketer to get paid is when someone purchases a brand’s products from their affiliate link.
On the other hand, by partnering with influencers brands are aiming to establish more long-term KPIs, such as user-generated content, increased brand awareness, clickthrough rates, etc. Brands pay influencers according to the upfront agreed terms, which means their commission doesn’t depend on the sales, but they are paid per post.
However, there is no way to tell if one is better than the other. Both strategies have their own advantages and disadvantages, so your decision depends on your business circumstances and goals.
The image below will help you understand the potential benefits and potential drawbacks of using affiliate marketing for your business.
Anyway, for both strategies comes the biggest challenge: affiliate outreach or influencer outreach. You need to set a solid creator outreach strategy that will help you get replies from creators.
Affiliate Outreach Guide
To make your affiliate outreach successful, make sure to follow these tips:
- Contact potential affiliates via email – Finding the email addresses of potential affiliates is no longer a time-consuming task. We can give you the email addresses of creators that work as affiliate marketers, based on your specific requirements about the niche, location, gender, and 30 other data points.
- Have a clear message – Let the potential affiliate know why you decided to contact them
- Personalize your message – Use a targeted pitch specifically for the affiliate you are trying to hire. Show them you know who they are and why are they a good fit for your affiliate program. You can do this by using account-based marketing which already proved to be one of the best approaches for both B2B and B2C brands.
- Don’t be anonymous – Since the internet is full of scams, when doing affiliate outreach you must use your full name.
- Make sure it’s clear what the commission offer is – You can also consider offering a bonus or special commission rate for the first month to make the offer more irresistible.
- Include statistics – Include statistics in your affiliate program such as conversion rates and average order value.
- Include company information – This is a part when you should convince the potential affiliates that your company is the right choice for them. Include some company information and your mission.
- Follow up – If you didn’t receive an answer after a few days, send them a friendly follow-up email or consider reaching out to them on a different platform.
Email Templates to Help You Reach Out to Potential Affiliates
Below, we share our two email templates for reaching out to influencers that recently turned out to be best-performing in our campaigns. We use them to do creator outreach for the clients using our influencer outreach services and by sending 5 campaigns per month, we have a 46% open rate and 12% reply rate.
So, just customize and personalize them and you are ready to pitch your potential affiliates.
1. Sneak peek template
Best for brands who look for affiliates to promote their new products.
Hello [Influencer Name],
I’m [Your Name] from [Company Name].
Later this fall, we’re going to launch a great new feature to [Your Product] called [Feature Name] that helps creators like you monetize the traffic from social media and [Specify Another Benefit].
I have been following you for a long time now, and I really like the way you’re covering new features and products on your social media/blog, so I wonder if you’re interested in joining our affiliate program by [explain how it’ll be done – in a very interesting way].
As our affiliate, we’ll send you a sample of [Product Name], so you can try it, test it, and send us your feedback. We are sure you’re going to love it as much as we do! 🙂
After that, we can talk and arrange together the details about our collaboration including the commission we’ll offer you for every sale made through your unique affiliate link.
Plus, your insights will help in building such an amazing product that even your audience will love!
I hope to receive a reply from you by [set deadline] so we can send you everything you will need!
Looking forward to this!
Best,
[Your Name]
2. Generic collab email template
Hey [Insert Influencer Name],
I have been following your profile on [Social Media Platform] and really loved your recent post(s) on [Example Post]. [Say something about their feed that adds a human element].
I am [Your Name], and I work for [Insert Company Name]. We [What You Do/Sell].
Since [insert what they are passionate about and works well with your brand], I am reaching out to see if you would be open to joining our affiliate program. I believe we can create great things together!
Let me know if this catches your eye, and I will send more details right away!
Thanks!
[Your Name]
How to find potential affiliates
1. Find Affiliates with Our Data-Driven Strategies
At Influencers Club we have a database with more than 70M creators, and per request, we can provide businesses with creators’ emails at scale.
We always go the extra mile to meet our client’s requirements, meaning we can help you with a lot of different approaches, but here are a few that are most popular among companies that have an affiliate program.
Give you a list of creators that have affiliate links posted on social media
We can give you a list of creators from Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Linktree, and other platforms, that are already a part of some affiliate programs.
All you have to do is share your criteria, such as creator niche, location, following size, etc, and the number of creators you need. Then we will find affiliate marketers that match your criteria.
What makes us different than other data providers is that we do everything to give you data per your requirements. If we don’t have the data you ordered in our database, we are looking for the best data sources and we check even blogs and personal websites.
One example of the many orders we receive and fulfill is giving clients data about creators (freelancers, marketers, bloggers) that have affiliate links in their Instagram bio, Linktree page, or other link in bio tools.
So, no matter how detailed or segmented your request is, we pivot and go above and beyond until your request is satisfied. In the end, you will get a list of affiliate marketers with more than 30 data points, including email addresses.
Find affiliate marketers from your customer’s list
But, picking out affiliates from your customer list can be difficult and time-consuming. So, to simplify the process, we offer brands to use our API to reveal relevant affiliates that already interact with their brand.
2. Reach out to social media creators and bloggers
Both bloggers and social media creators have turned content creation into a business. They already have an audience that respects their work and trusts their judge. So, besides the fact that they will create engaging content around your brand, they can also influence purchasing decisions.
This proves that affiliate marketing and influencer marketing can go hand in hand. So, when choosing influencers for your affiliate program, don’t be blinded by influencers with the most followers. Instead, look at which influencers have an audience that matches yours, what is their engagement rate, etc.
Keep in mind that influencers with fewer followers are usually more focused on a niche, and they have a deeper connection with their followers. Also, you have a better chance they will accept to be a part of your affiliate program because they are more likely to be motivated when being compensated for each sale they help you make.
3. Hire a team to do both affiliates research and affiliate outreach
You can use all the best tools and strategies to find the best affiliate marketers for your brand, Yet, if you don’t know how to reach out to them and entice them to be a part of your affiliate program, you won’t achieve anything.
Although this is the most important part of affiliate recruitment, many brands can’t afford to invest money and time to set up a team that specializes in affiliate outreach.
Luckily, until now we’ve done creator outreach and have sent millions of both personalized and semi-personalized cold emails to creators from every niche, and we know the best secrets for doing affiliate outreach for eCommerce brands, creator economy companies, and marketing agencies.
As we said, we have a massive database of creators with more than 30 data points. That type of data shows us the chances of whether a potential affiliate will accept a collaboration offer or not. Plus, we can find out whether those creators are familiar with your brand or some other brand from your industry.
Next, we will send emails and we can get as detailed or as segmented as you want because of our data. We not only run A/B tests, but also C, D, and E, which means we are constantly improving the outreach strategy until we achieve the desired result.
If this seems like something you need, apply for our partnership program, and our team will contact you to discuss how we can tailor our program to fit your affiliate marketing goals.
4. Invite influencers in your niche to your event
To Sum Up
Affiliate outreach is a very important part of affiliate marketing and it’s the main skill required to succeed at it. Fortunately, you have a few ways of doing that:
- You can spend hours trying to find them manually and then use our templates to reach out to them.
- You can order data from us, with your specific requirements, and then use the templates above to do affiliate outreach.
- You can share your goals and requirements with us and you can let us do both finding potential affiliates that are a great match for your brand + the affiliate outreach strategy.
Are you ready to expand your affiliate network?
