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Tips & Guides — 07 Nov 2022

How to Nurture Leads from Partner Marketing with Emails

The Guide to Nurturing Partner Leads with Email Marketing

Sad but true, just a part of users that land on your website buys from you immediately. Many potential customers need to get more familiar with your brand. And the more complex product you offer, the more time it takes — up to ten interactions with a brand.

Otherwise, nurturing leads from partner marketing and other digital marketing channels helps you increase sales and retain customers. Long-lasting relationships with buyers allow you to boost their lifetime value, make marketing cost-effective, and improve your overall business outcomes.

Email marketing is a bulletproof solution to help your co-marketing leads make a purchasing decision. It’s perfect for building close-knit relationships between the brand and its customers. Better yet, email campaigns are more likely to end up with sales — 60% of consumers said they’ve purchased something after receiving a marketing email. 

Thus, email marketing is worth adding to your marketing strategy if you want to convert more leads from affiliate campaigns and partnerships. To reap the benefits of your email marketing efforts and get the desirable results, stick to the following steps.

1. Grab Partner Marketing Leads before They Go

Start with thinking up the tactic to grab leads before they leave your product or landing page. One of the most effective ways to hold potential customers and add them to your mailing list is exit-intent popups. 

Yes, everyone keeps telling popups are annoying, but they do work. According to the Sumo study, exit-intent popups have an average conversion rate of over 3%. The best-performing popups convert 9% of leads to email subscribers. 

Your popups need three key elements to encourage leads to share their contacts. Namely, they are an attention-grabbing headline, a clear and appealing offer, and a strong call to action (CTA). 

To achieve better results, you may offer your potential customers some extra value, such as white papers, free PowerPoint templates, free trials, and so on. eCommerce businesses may opt for offering free shipping or a discount, as in the example below.

2. Create an Email Sequence to Nurture Co-marketing Leads

Once you’ve obtained your potential customer’s email address, it may seem enticing to bombard them with special offers, announcements, and sales. Following this impulse may result in unsubscriptions and further distaste for your brand. Instead, consider getting patient and trying to engage your target audience gradually.

A well-thought-through email sequence can help your potential customers develop a relationship with your company. To craft the efficient flow, try to employ the sales funnel model. To learn more about it, read an article on how to build an affiliate marketing sales funnel

The bottom line is to consistently lead your potential customer through the main stages of a buying decision: awareness, interest, desire, and action. To achieve this goal, consider including several types of emails in the flow. Let’s look through the example of an email sequence built following the sales funnel model.

Welcome Email

Welcome email may be the most important touchpoint with a new email subscriber, as it has the highest open rate. So, the start of the flow is a golden opportunity to introduce a brand to a new customer. 

Present your brand’s values and mission to a new subscriber. You may also provide a guide on your website or product, offer to book a consultation or free trial. If you’ve promised some lead magnet in the subscription form, deliver it in this email as well.

The Retention Email №1

The second email in the sequence aims at encouraging a new subscriber to stay in touch with a brand for a long haul. To nail it, you need to address your subscriber’s interests and needs and offer them some additional value — tips, white papers, checklists, and so on.

Make sure you offer subscribers the relevant content that reflects your business. For instance, if you run an online beauty shop, give tips on skincare or offbeat make-up looks.

The Retention Email №2

Marketers say each following email in the sequence has to provoke more desire to buy from a brand. Thus, the second lead nurturing email campaign may address your subscribers’ pain points. This tactic will help you to nudge the potential customer down the pipeline.

The important thing — you should avoid being too pessimistic about the problems your potential customers face. Otherwise, recipients get frustrated and unsubscribe from you. Instead, end the message on a positive note — give a hint that your clients’ issue can be tackled.

The Retention Email №3

In the middle of the sequence, it’s time to start selling. Thus, you can offer subscribers a solution to the issue you designated in the previous message. 

To create an effective email you may offer free or low-priced products. This tactic is a must if you sell up-market products or services, as it helps prepare subscribers without scaring them away.

Announcement Email

The announcement email is designed to present your main or new product to potential buyers. Try not to make the messaging too pushy, as people hate bold sales. Instead, focus on provoking interest in your product. 

To reach this objective, clearly state what the email is about in the subject line. Present a product to the target audience, describe it, and list the benefits. Finish the email with a clear and strong CTA.

Social Proof Email

After your main product presentation potential buyers may have doubts about it. To nudge those leads down the pipeline, you need to address their objections in a strong but indirect manner. 

84% of consumers trust online reviews as much as referrals from friends. So, social proof emails may be more than persuasive. Better yet, you can deploy various types of social proofs. For instance, small businesses may benefit from customer testimonials or borrowing authority from partners. Meanwhile, for b2b marketing, the ideal solution is to present an impressive case study.

Special Offer Email

By the end of the sequence the potential customer is ready to buy, so make a killer offer they couldn’t resist. It could be a huge discount, a valuable gift, free delivery, and so on. The point is to motivate the subscriber to make a purchase as soon as possible. By the way, the great tactic to create urgency is to add a time limitation to the offer.

The email sequence above is just an example. To drive better results, you may need to create your own email flow considering your business niche, product, customer journey, and so on.

3. Employ Email Marketing Automation and CRM

The automation of routine tasks and processes is a meaningful part of modern email marketing. Employ a tool that allows you to create automated email flows triggered by certain events, such as adding a new contact into a subscriber list.

Luckily, there are plenty of solutions for email automation. When choosing a perfect option for you, pay attention to the integration opportunities it provides. As long as you’re going to use emails to nurture affiliate leads, make sure your email marketing platform works well with your affiliate management system. In this case, an open API comes in handy. This feature allows you to integrate various marketing software solutions seamlessly and with low effort.

4. Remember About Email List Optimization and Segmentation

To boost the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns and nurture leads from partner marketing successfully, you need to segment your email lists. It will help pinpoint subscribers’ interests and pains more precisely and make emails more personalized. This, in its turn, affects conversion rates positively.

On average, email marketing platforms allow you to set any segmentation criteria you want. But, at first, take care of acquiring this information about your subscribers. You can do it by transferring data from your partner management software. For instance, Affise lets you get the following information:

  • Location;
  • Devise type;
  • OS, and more.

Also, optimize your mailing lists from time to time. This practice implies deleting disengaged contacts that affect your mail email marketing metrics — open rates, click-through rate, conversion rates, and so on. Cleaning up email lists improves your email deliverability and reduces the number of unsubscribes.

To Sum It Up

Partnerships and email marketing make a perfect combination. They reinforce each other and allow marketers to effectively nurture leads until they turn into paying customers. Apart from it, businesses can merge these marketing channels to:

Whatever strategy you’ll stick to, you need a seamless integration between email automation and partner marketing platforms. To start with, try Affise — our solution is effective for end-to-end management of partnerships and easy integration with third-party services.

Try Affise today! Submit for a free trial and
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Anna Averianova

Written by

Content Manager

Anna is a Content Marketer with a background in B2B, creative approach, and eagerness for professional improvement. She aspires to produce content that helps achieve business objectives and benefit readers. When she’s not delved into writing another exciting article for you, she’s probably fooling around with her cat.

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