Best email marketing platform for affiliate marketing in 2019.

News of email’s death as a marketing tool is greatly exaggerated. It is still one of the most reliable tools for getting web traffic and when used effectively can lead to strong results for your campaigns. There are some tools that can work well for affiliate marketing, and others that just don’t work at all.

In this short blog I am going to concentrate on four main and well-known email mailing list providers, being Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, Aweber and GetResponse. I’m assuming you want to build a strong marketing sales funnel to offer products and services for which you affiliate. Email is a great way to build rapport with your audience and increase overall traffic to your website and other channels.

Now, through some mail platforms you are able to affiliate market directly to subscribers (through direct links in your email) and through others you are not. Mailchimp, one of the best known email marketing platforms, expressly says in their terms and conditions that you cannot affiliate market through their platform. Now, from personal experience, I can say that you don’t want to break their terms – you will lose access to your account and your email list along with it. Though potentially you can use mailchimp, say to publicise your site or new youtube releases I recommend you steer clear of it as there are other platforms that offer the same services without the risk of loss of business.

ActiveCampaign has similar limitations to Mailchimp with their terms and conditions, so, as for Mailchimp, affiliates beware.

And now, for the good news…

That leaves two good alternatives left. Aweber is far more Affiliate friendly than either of ActiveCampaign or Mailchimp. Of course, like all email platforms there are regulations against spam (I touch this in more depth in my article on email platform compliance upcoming), Aweber doesn’t explicitly regulate against affiliate marketing but any affiliate links must be contextual. This is inline with an important Affiliate Marketing tenement – always add value. There’s no point in simply spamming your subscribers – nobody likes a poorly worded and valueless communication trying to pressure sell you something you don’t need. You need to fire your audiences desires by showing them just how valuable the product you are offering is, and by continually directing them to your content. An engaged audience will always convert better than a disparate one.

This leads us to what I believe is the best email marketing platform / autoresponder available for the modern affiliate marketer. Getresponse is an excellent tool which offers comprehensive cost effective solutions for anyone who wants to affiliate market through email. Depending on the pricing level you select, autoresponders, crm, landing pages, webinars and many other features are available for the astute affiliate marketer. Best of all you can sign-up for free for the first 30 days.

So, as I’m sure you can tell, I’m a huge fan of Getresponse, closely followed by Aweber, with daylight to Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign, which should not be used for Affiliate Marketing. Of course email addresses should be collected properly, especially in view of regulatory changes such as GDPR. I will have a more in-depth look at GetResponse and AWeber in an upcoming blog.