One of the best ways to level up your affiliate program and make everyone more money is to help your affiliates write better emails. In today’s episode, I’ll share proven strategies and tips for guiding your affiliates to write compelling emails that actually convert.
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
Get the EXACT Template We Give to Our Affiliates to Get Them to Promote More and Generate More Sales! Click Here to Download it Now!
Links Mentioned in this Episode
Video – How to Use Swipe Copy as an Affiliate
Video – How to SERVE Your Audience by Promoting Affiliate Offers
Podcast – Overcoming the Fear of Selling Affiliate Offers
Article – How to Condition Your Audience
TEXT ME: 260-217-4619
Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below
 |
 |
|---|---|
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy
7 Affiliate Management LIES That Will Kill Your Program
How to Get Hired as an Affiliate Manager
The MASSIVE Shift in Affiliate Programs is Here: Are You Ready?
How to Activate Your Inactive Affiliates (And Make Them Lifelong Partners)
7 Secrets of 7-Figure Affiliate Launches
How to Help Your Affiliates Write Better Emails
One of the best ways to level up your affiliate program and make everyone a lot more money is to help your affiliates write better emails. So in today’s episode, I’m going to share proven strategies and tips for guiding your affiliates to write compelling emails that actually convert. Let’s get started. All right. How to help your affiliates write better emails. Why in the heck are we talking about email? Email? Right. I got Allen Iverson back in practice. We talking about practice? Why are we talking about email? Isn’t social media the king and the queen now? No, I mean, the reality is that email is still king. And remember what I said last week when I was talking about inactive affiliates? All right. It is your job to help your affiliates. It is your job as an affiliate manager to help your affiliates do better.
It is your job as an affiliate manager to help your affiliates write better emails. So let’s talk about that today. Let’s talk about how to help your affiliates write better emails. And there’s three parts to this. The first part is the basics, just providing swipe copy, which we’ll talk about. The second part is the teaching teaching your affiliates how to use swipe copy and how to write better emails. And the third thing is the mindset. And I’m going to bounce around a little bit. The lines are a little blurry.
Okay. With each of these, but I want to start with the basics of providing swipe copy. Now, as an affiliate manager, you know that you’re supposed to provide swipe copy, but maybe you don’t know that. I coach a lot of people, and every week I talk to two or three people who don’t know that they’re supposed to provide their affiliates with swipe copy. Things like that, not knowing are one of the reasons why my number one recommendation for affiliate managers is to be an affiliate, to become an affiliate yourself so that you see what other programs are doing. And I promise you, you will quickly see that Most affiliate programs, This is copy that they can literally swipe and use to guide them to write their own emails. And the thing is, you’ll see that and go, well, I should do that, too.
Need help activating your affiliates? Use my proven email templates for getting inactive affiliates in the game and making sales! Get them here!
So how do we provide great swipe copy? Well, the first thing is not to make the following mistakes. Okay, if you were going to provide great swipe copy, number One, don’t write it yourself. Don’t write it yourself. As a product owner or an employee of the company, you are too close to the product to write great swipe copy. Remember, a swipe copy is a guide for your affiliates to use and it should be written from the perspective of an outsider. Okay? Because your affiliates are outsiders. They’re not someone who’s put their blood, sweat and tears into the product. The second thing is, make sure that you include images. Now, a lot of people don’t include images in their swipe copy. Help your affiliates out.
Include some suggested images. The third thing is make sure you write more than one version. All right? I see this so often that affiliate programs, they’ll provide one swipe copy. Say it’s for a webinar, and they’ll provide one swipe copy. Well, first of all, there are different parts of the webinar. You know, in the sense of there’s announcing the webinar four days out, three days out, there’s, hey, the webinar’s tomorrow, the webinar’s coming up today, the webinar is in 30 minutes.
Those are different versions. But the problem with only having one version for one audience is i assumes that every affiliate has the exact same audience. And the reality is that most products reach different demographics, different avatars. Each of these groups is in a different place in life. They have different struggles, they have different needs, they have different desires. So write different versions for each of those audiences, identify those different avatars, identify those different avatars and say, okay, we’re going to write different copy for different audiences. When we worked with Jeff Goines years ago on his book launch for the Art of Work, we identified four core audiences. We figured out these are the audiences.
Entrepreneurs, stay at home, parents, faith based audience, and what we call dreamers. So we wrote specific swipe copy for each of those audiences. Real quick, just thinking about the images, going back to the images, make sure that you, when you give them good images. Like, one of the things that I found the ones that work best, especially if it’s to send to a video, is screen capture videos. And I love providing images where this kind of goofy, they catch me in kind of a weird, my face is in a weird position or I’m pointing at something weird, or I’m doing something weird with my hands, you know, my face looks like I smell the fart. You know, it’s crazy.
But those actually convert higher. The fourth thing, you know, speaking of different versions, but same kind of thing is that, you know, you only Write one style of email and so you write a long copy email. What about short copy email? You know, what about different styles of email? Like, not everybody likes funny emails. So write different links in different styles. Now if it’s like, hey, the cart’s closing in two hours, there’s only so many ways you can say that you don’t necessarily need five different versions for five different audiences. You know, at the end of a promo, you might only have one.
Make it easy for your affiliates, but early on, when they have more time, give them different versions. You know, the last thing to just avoid is encouraging them to copy and paste it. We always tell our affiliates not to copy and paste swipe copy. It’s unoriginal, it doesn’t work, it’s ineffective, and usually it backfires. I mean, imagine if you’ve ever seen one of those situations where you got like back to back emails or maybe three out of five emails had the same subject line from different people. That is noticeable in a bad way. It’s noticeable in a bad way. So teach your affiliates how to use swipe copy.
And that’s the biggest thing you can teach them. Teach them that one of the biggest mistakes they can make is just copying the swipe copy without editing it. I mean, a lot of times they don’t even read it. That is a big, big no. No. Swipe copy is never written specifically for when I say your, I mean the affiliate audience. It’s never written in your voice. And like I said earlier, a lot of people subscribe to multiple lists and it’s likely that you’ll end up having the same email as someone else. So use it as a guide. Teach them to use it as a guide. And so one of the things that I do as an affiliate manager is when we have our affiliate portal that has the swipe copy, I actually include a
video in there that shows them how I use swipe copy. It’s like a five minute video. It’s super quick. And what I do is I walk them through my process. So I say, okay, I’ll have two monitors and on one screen I’ve got the swipe copy. On the other screen I’ve got the document that I’m writing my email copy in. And let’s say I’m writing email copy promoting a webinar. I’m announcing a webinar and they’ve done a great job with swipe copy. I’ve picked the swipe copy that I think is best for my audience. And they have a specific set of swipe Copy for entrepreneurial audience. I picked that, gone through all that and I’ll look at. They’ll have like 10 subject lines, suggested subject lines.
I will pick one or two that I really like and I will tweak them a little bit. I’ll use them as inspiration and then I’ll have the, the swipe copy as a guide in the sense of I’m using it to make sure I get my facts straight. For instance, the webinar is Thursday at 2pm Eastern. And here are the three things it’s going to cover. Those are facts. I don’t really need to tweak that too much. I might tweak one of the three things to really fit my audience. But I use that to get the facts in the core premise of the email down pat. And then I think of a way to lead into it a story from my own personal life, something that is personal to me, and I think of that and I use that. Now, what I often do with the factual part of the swipe copy is, you know, I’ve created a GPT of mine that I use for my email style.
It has every single email that I have ever written to my list since like So it captures my style quite frankly better than I do. I will sometimes run the factual part through that and just copy and paste that, you know, because again, it’s nailed my style down. And then I’ll write a story and I’ll run it through a grammar checker and we’re good to go, you know, as long as it flows. So that’s the biggest mistake that affiliates make is just like packing it in, not, it takes me seven or eight minutes to do what I just described.
It’s not a, you know, a 45 minute ordeal to write one email. The second biggest mistake is not using the swipe copy at all. You know, there’s a reason why you’re providing your affiliates with swipe copy. It is to help your affiliates. It can help them to overcome writer’s block. It can give them inspiration for their own writing and make sure again that they get that important information correct. So teach your affiliates. Don’t ignore the swipe copy. Read through it. Make sure you refer to it if you need help writing. The third thing you’ve got to help them with and teach them is I sort of touched on this a moment ago, but not getting personal.
They need to make their emails personal. Nothing is worse than boring copy that doesn’t relate to you. Tell your affiliates, like, hey, when you write your own copy, make sure you personalize it. It’s not generic, it’s not lame. And again, I see so many affiliates, they focus so much on the product when they should be focusing on the reader and on their own personal story. As an affiliate, you’re using your personal story as a stand in for the reader’s story. So if you are a single mom who overcame depression and you’re promoting a product that helps people do that, and your audience is single moms, you and your story from nine years ago when you were a single mom, overcoming depression is a fill in for the single mom who’s depressed.
Reading that email, you as a former, say, smoker who is promoting an anti smoking product, your story is filling in for the readers. So remember that. Make sure you aren’t so focused on the facts that you forget to include a good story. I remember years ago, one of the examples, I think I shared this, I shared this like 30 or 40 episodes ago. I can’t remember.
I know I shared it earlier this year where I talked about one of my affiliate promotions that I did and I shared examples of teachers that I had in high school, both good and bad. So I pulled up one of the examples. I was thinking about this episode. I remember this email. And so the email goes like this. Think for a moment about your favorite teacher, one that inspired you. You can probably remember their name and what they looked like, right? For me it was Mrs. Chirpy, my 11th grade history teacher. Just like me. I bet you can also remember something that they taught you, something that stands out after all these years.
And I’m guessing that the way that they taught it to you wasn’t like any other teacher. So think for a moment about why you remember this. Is it because of a hands on project where you actually had to create something? Was it the way that the teacher was able to tell a story and make information come to life? That’s the way it was for me with Mrs. Trippie. She put the story in history. History literally came alive in her class. You felt like you were in the story. And she’s one of the big reasons why to this day I absolutely love biographies. Do you think that anyone else told a story about Mrs. Trippie? No.
I mean, unless that kid Steve who sat behind me in her class was like an affiliate, you know, dude was always copying off me. He was also the same kid who was in he was in my Spanish class and his way of speaking Spanish was just to add the letter O to every word in English, you know, and add l before it. So you know, el buco is el dirty O. Like that is not Spanish, Steve. Yeah, anyway, so but that story guaranteed that even though I started off with the same swipe copy as every other affiliate, my emails would be unique. So start with the story, make it personal again.
Teach your affiliates this. Teach your affiliates how to do this. It’s so, so important. And just as a side note, it is so true. You know, Mrs. Chirpy is the reason why I’m a history buff to this day. I would say 362 days a year I am listening to some sort of a history book, a biography or some sort of historical book. I love history because of her. So Mrs. Chirpy on the one in a million chance that you are listening to this, frankly on about the 20% chance you’re still alive.
And I’m just doing some quick math and you know, she’s pushing her mid-90s right now. She was amazing though. So anyway, so teach your affiliates this, teach them how to use pretty links so that they, you know, if they put their links in the email, it’s not their b*** ugly affiliate link, you know, with all the characters and all that. The good thing about using a pretty link is if for some reason something goes wrong, it’s easily switchable. So if I use a pretty link, you know, mattmcwaims. com forward/ let’s say I’m promoting the book Influence by Robert Cialdini, one of the best books ever, mamma’. com influence and let’s say that for some reason that the link changes, Amazon pulls down that page and the link changes.
I just go to the pretty link and change the link real quick. And now it’s valid. So always make sure you use those pretty links. And then the last thing is just make sure that they are writing to their avatar. You know, I said this so many times, when you try to communicate with everyone, you communicate with no one. And swipe copy is meant for the masses, right? Even if you are writing copy for entrepreneurs and dreamers and faith based and stay at home moms, that’s still only for audiences and that’s a lot. So make sure that they are writing to their avatar.
Get my #1 affiliate recruiting email (the one I’ve personally used to recruit thousands of affiliates in dozens of niches). Grab your copy here!
And one of the little tips that again if you want to help your affiliates. One little tips that I use is I start off every email with my avatar’s name. I address every email if you get an email to you, let’s say your name is
Tom, and it says, hey, Tom, or hey, there. The original version of that email, I said, hey, Pete, because Pete is the name of my avatar. He is my audience. It’s not thousands of people. It’s not my list. It’s not my tribe. Pete is my audience. And I always start off an email with hey, Pete, because it puts me in this mindset that I am writing just to him or her, considering half my audience is female. So those are some tips to share with your affiliates.
Now, how do you write emails promoting affiliate offers without sounding salesy or inauthentic? Now, that’s a question I get a lot. And a lot of what I’m talking about today is based on all these questions that I’ve been getting about emails. And this is one I get all the time, like, how do. How do you promote affiliate offers without being salesy or inauthentic?
And this is one of the biggest challenges that people face when they promote affiliate offers. They. They feel like they aren’t being authentic to themselves and they’re not being authentic to their tribe. They feel that by promoting an affiliate offer, they’re somehow being. I’m using air quotes here. Salesy, or they’re selling out. Or like a Benton Brower back in the day on snl, you know, doesn’t use deodorant or own a toothbrush. Every time I do air quotes, I feel.
If you don’t know the skit, look it up. Chris Farley, one of the greatest skits in the history of snl, you know, they feel like they’re inconveniencing their audience. Nothing could be further from the truth, though, if you’re doing it the right way, so help them understand the right way. At first, it’s a mindset issue. You know, there’s a couple of questions that you need to ask yourself, and you need to ask your affiliates, like, if they’re coming to you and say, well, I don’t feel comfortable being salesy. First of all, what is wrong with being salesy? Now, of course, I know what people mean when they say they don’t want to be salesy, Right? They’re thinking of used car salesman, the shamwow infomercial guy, right? You know, hey, Billy May’s here. But there is nothing inherently wrong with selling. If you’re selling good stuff, you’re hopefully your products are good, right? If your affiliates feel salesy, maybe it’s because your products are crap.
I can’t help you There, but they’re not. I know they’re good. You’re a good person. And so if you’re, if they’re selling good stuff and selling it the right way, then what’s wrong with being a little salesy? I’ve said it before, and I wholeheartedly believe selling affiliate offers is one of the best ways to serve your audience. If you could put your affiliate hat on for a moment, you’re helping to connect your audience to an amazing product that is going to solve a problem for them.
So what could possibly be wrong with selling? So if you have a bad taste in your mouth, affiliate, when it comes to the word selling, let’s overcome that. And your job as an affiliate manager is to help them overcome that perception and understand that selling can be a good thing and it can help their audience when they do it the right way with the right products. And that is so hugely important. I want to include some links in the show notes about serving your audience with affiliate promotions, overcoming fear of selling affiliate offers, because I think there’s things that you can share with your audience that will really help them.
So share that episode with them, especially the one about fear. It’s such a huge mindset shift for them. And then the second question to ask is, well, have you trained your audience to expect the wrong thing? If an affiliate is worried that selling an affiliate offer is going to cut crosses inauthentic to their audience or they’re selling out, have they trained their audience to expect the wrong thing? So I ask affiliates all the time, okay, have you trained your audience to expect only free content? Have you trained them to never expect you to sell anything?
I love what Mark Step, who used to be on our team, he said, I quoted this in my book turn your passions into profits. And he said that one way or another, you were conditioning your audience. One way or another, you are conditioning your audience. And if you are trying to build your following, if you’re trying to grow your business, if you’re trying to make money, then you have to condition your audience to click and buy, not just to expect free content forever.
And so I talk to affiliates about this. I share when I train them. I’m like, if you’re running an online business, you have to say and believe that businesses make money. And if you realize all of a sudden that you have conditioned your audience to expect you to never sell anything you messed up, but you can fix it. And so share with them. I’m going to share a post in the show notes and nine ways to condition your audience to click and buy from your emails. Share that with them.
Teach them how to condition their audience. It is so important for you to do this as an affiliate manager. It is your job to teach your affiliates to condition their audience If their audience isn’t used to clicking, they’re not going to click. And so share this post that I’m going to share in the show notes, make sure you share that with your affiliates. So how do we write emails that are authentic rather than salesy? We’re going to condition our audience. There’s nothing wrong with being salesy, all those things. But we still need to know how to write the correct emails. So number one, teach your affiliates to sell the way that they like to be sold.
You know, when we were growing up, the golden rule, right? Treat others the way that you would like to be treated. Some smart guy said that in the red letters, you know. And the same is true with your affiliates writing emails. They need to sell to their audience the way they like to be sold to. Whether we realize it or not, we attract people that are similar to ourselves. Our audiences are fairly homogenous. Now I don’t mean, you know, that like for my audience, for example, crosses gender against 50, 50 male and female roughly. It’s like typically 51% female crosses ethnicity. I have only like 72% of my audiences in the United States. That’s not what I mean. What I mean by homogenous, they are fairly similar in their life experiences and where they’re at right now.
I don’t have a ton of people that follow me and listen to the blog that are running nine figure affiliate programs. Why they don’t need what I’m talking about. Could they pick up something from today’s episode? Sure. But generally speaking, if they are running a hundred million dollar plus affiliate program, they kind of have it figured out. They don’t need this information. I wouldn’t listen to my podcast if I were them. I mean that’s the reality. Not because I think I’ve had everything figured out, but because I have to budget my time. So our audiences tend to be fairly homogenous in terms of where they’re at in life. So don’t try to write affiliate emails like I write affiliate emails or like anyone else writes them.
Write them to your affiliates. And every affiliate program is different. And the same is true for how they write emails to their audience. Write your emails how you write them in your. This is what you need to tell your affiliates. Write them how you write them in your voice, with your personality and your style. Remember what we just talked about. Use swipe copy as a guide. The second thing that you can help your affiliates do is to get clear on their voice. Yeah, I was talking with a friend earlier. I’m Recording this in the midst of, let’s say in the midst of, like, wow. So basically you’ve recorded this in the last 30 years, Matt, because, you know, there’s a lot of political tension. It’s never been worse.
You haven’t studied the election of 1800 or 1804. Also the election of 1832, the election of 1836. Oh, the one that led to a civil war. That one was kind of contentious, you know, but it is pretty contentious right now and it’s amplified by social media. So when I say these names, some of these might cause a visceral reaction. You know, whether you love them or hate them, people like Howard Stern, Donald Trump, Glenn Beck, Gary Vaynerchuk, whether you like him or not, whether you liked Rush Limbaugh or any of the people like the big voices on the left and the right, whatever, whether you like them or not, I will give them this. They are clear on their voice. You know exactly what you’ll get when you listen to any of them. When Donald Trump speaks today, his style doesn’t surprise anybody.
If you are ready to take your business to the next level and start an affiliate program, start with my free report, Your First 100 Affiliates. This report takes nearly two decades of experience, trial and error, and lessons learned about finding top affiliates in nearly every conceivable niche and puts them all into one report. Grab your copy here!
If it does, you haven’t watched him. It’s a pretty defined style. If you watch Kamala Harris, it’s same thing. I don’t watch her and go, wow, I can’t believe that she talked like that. Nope, I know how she’s gonna talk. They are clear on their voice and their style. They know who they’re talking to, they know what their voice is, and they know how they are going to say whatever it is that they are talking about. Remember, you attract people who like the way that you are in the way that you talk and write. So if you’re funny, be funny. This is me to my affiliates. If you’re funny, be funny. If you’re concise and to the point, well, then be brief in your emails.
Right? Don’t write long winded emails. However you are in your regular emails. Be that way when you’re selling. And so if you read a sales email for me, it should read like my regular emails. That’s our third one. It should read like my regular emails. So teach your affiliates, again, be themselves, be clear on their voice. Write your sales emails the same way that you write your regular emails. A lot of people, they go into like this sales voice. Suddenly when they’re selling, their emails turn into like a monster truck rally announcer. And it doesn’t work.
If you read any of my emails, they all sound essentially the same. They sound like me. I don’t talk to you one way. If I’m going to sell, you know something or if I’m telling you to go listen to this podcast episode, they’re all the same and your affiliates email should be the same too. So tell them to get rid of their sales voice, tell them how they are serving their audience, tell them how to use swipe copy, tell them how to sell the way that they like to be sold, tell them to get personal but to still use the swipe copy as a guide.
All of these things are going to help them write better emails. Which again is your job. Now. Finally, I would say check out my series on closing sales. I will put those links in the show notes. My series on closing sales. Share that with your affiliates. There’s so much good stuff in there about the tactics and the mindset of closing sales via emails. That is, it’s a whole series unto itself.
I’m not going to repeat everything I say, so I’ll put the links make it super easy for you in the show notes. Go check that out. All right, so with that, we’ll wrap up here. Make sure if you haven’t yet that you click subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. It’s going to be a good one. And if you got any questions about this or anything else related to your affiliate program or affiliate marketing, you can text me anytime at 260-217-4619. I’ll see you in the next episode.
See you soon.