Forex affiliate marketing can be a valuable source of income and the perfect opportunity to extend your influence and build your business. As you look for ways to grow your affiliate network outside of your website, don’t underestimate the power of email. Below, we’ve outlined six email marketing tips to establish more meaningful connections with prospects and earn more affiliate sales.

1. Provide Value

Traders today are overwhelmed with choices—and emails. To be successful, you need to differentiate yourself, build trust, and establish meaningful relationships with your subscribers. Rather than sending out an impersonal, mass sales email, think of ways to provide value to your audience. What are the challenges they face? How can you help solve those challenges? As you craft your email marketing strategy, think about what content resources you can share to help them understand, contextualize, and solve their problem.

If you don’t have time to write and publish your own content, your broker’s blog and resource library are great places to look for shareable resources. In addition, take advantage of any free marketing collateral that your broker offers to affiliate partners.

Rather than making a hard sales pitch in the first email you send, structure your email campaign as an ongoing conversation, broken up in a sequence of three to six emails. In the first email, introduce yourself and try to offer value to jump-start traders on their Buyer’s Journey.

As traders begin to compare different brokers and affiliates, sharing a video where you walk them through the product you’re promoting is more compelling than simply linking to the demo account page. When they’re getting ready to make a purchasing decision, offering a short, personal consultation on features that are most relevant to their goals is a great way to lock in the sale. For the best results, wait to share your affiliate tracking link until you’ve earned their trust and confirmed that they’re ready to open an account.

That said, beware of sharing too many links in one email. Doing so can make it harder for your message to load and difficult for your recipient to know what action to take. When in doubt, keep things simple and spread out your content resources over a few different emails.

2. Use an Email Marketing Platform

Along with streamlining the email send process, an email marketing platform will enable you to personalize emails, schedule emails in advance, and track key metrics to measure the performance of your efforts. There are a variety of free email marketing tools available to help get you started, including HubSpot, Wix, and MailChimp.

3. Consider Timing

When it comes to timing your email, there’s no magic bullet. The most optimal day and time to send your email depends on your industry, the type of email you’re sending, and who you’re sending it to. That said, here are some general rules to keep in mind:

• Emails that feature business-related content typically earn greater engagement during the work week as opposed to the weekend. This is especially true if you’re sending emails to work email addresses.

• Avoid sending emails too early in the day or too late at night. When you’re scheduling your emails, consider breaking out your recipient list by time zone so that you can optimize send times for each location.

• 10 a.m. has proven to be a peak send time and can serve as a good starting point. As you track email engagement stats, test out different timing to determine the most optimal send time for your subscriber base.

• Consider your audience. What times are they busiest? When are they most likely to give your email their attention? If you’re targeting end-of-day traders who have full-time jobs, for example, it may make sense to send an email in the evening when they’re laying out their trading strategy. For day traders, sending early morning emails before the markets open or at points throughout the day may be an effective strategy.

• Most people are wary of receiving emails every day. For the best results, establish a more reasonable and natural cadence. Sending one email per week will keep your correspondence top of mind without inadvertently distancing your audience or breaking their trust.

4. Use Rich Text

Sixty-four percent of people favor emails that use rich text like HTML. Using rich text means that you can send more visually appealing emails that use special characters, colors, fonts, or content formats. This format also allows you to include things like gifs, tables, and pictures in the email body and format them in line with the text. Most online servers can process rich text and automatically convert it into HTML code, the default format for the two most popular email servers, Microsoft Outlook and Gmail.

5. Be Personal and Concise

Getting someone to click on your email is only half the battle. Along with personalizing the subject line, include personalization tokens in the email itself and make sure the content you share is relevant to your recipient’s unique needs and position in the Buyer’s Journey.  

To hold their attention, keep your message clear, relevant, and concise. If you find yourself writing paragraphs of text, consider how you might break up your message into a few different emails. If the helpful content you’re trying to convey doesn’t fit well into an email format, get creative and make a how-to video or a weekly newsletter that you can link to in the email body.

6. Optimize as You Go

To get the most out of email, you need a reliable means of evaluating your performance. Using an email marketing platform, look at key metrics like open rate, click-through rate, bounce rate, and the sharing/forwarding rate for each email in your marketing sequence. Compare those numbers to industry benchmarks to identify where you’re struggling and how to tweak your strategy moving forward.

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