Email Marketing for Poker Affiliates
This article was provided by Kevin of DownloadablePoker.org.
Are you capturing your visitor’s e-mails? E-mail capture and newsletters may be one of the most overlooked marketing methods in the gambling affiliate industry. Although I have seen lots of gaming affiliates begin capturing e-mails, the majority still don’t. With the search engines acting strange lately you almost never know when one of your main sites might drop (or even disappear) in the SERPS, and having a list to market to is important.
I will admit that it is some added work, but I am very happy I have started using this marketing method and I will no doubt be continuing e-mail marketing. Below I will go over some tips and information on e-mail marketing that I have picked up in my short time (about a year) implementing it.
The first thing to look at is how will you capture the visitor’s e-mails. Personally I use Aweber (affiliate link) and, like most people, am extremely happy with them. After signing up for an account you will be taken through the steps to get your campaign set up for your site, and they even have pre-made templates for their “web forms” where the visitors will enter their e-mail and whatever else you want to collect (I usually just do first name and e-mail).
There are many different routes you can take for capturing e-mails. The two I am most familiar with are “inline” forms found built into your content or template, and “pop-up” style captures. I know a lot of webmasters won’t put a pop-up form on their site, as many see it as spammy, but I have a lot of success with conversions rates on my pop-ups. With any site that I am capturing e-mails I almost always have a pop-up plus a form within the content or template somewhere. If the user doesn’t sign up right away via the pop-up there is a still a chance that after reading your content (even more so if it is quality and interesting content) they will submit their e-mail through your inline form.
Tips: Although the standard templates are fine at Aweber, I usually put a custom header image in and sometimes even a custom submit button, which have both increased conversion rates.
There are a couple landing pages that you will want to work on after you have your campaign set up – confirmation page, success or thank you page, and already subscribed page. When I first started e-mail marketing I was just using the generic Aweber pages and realized in order to build trust with your members it will be better to send them pages on your site.
I suggest creating a custom confirmation page telling visitors to check their e-mails and click on the activation link to confirm their e-mail. I also suggest that after they have clicked that link you have a custom “thank you” landing page that lets them know they have successfully signed up (Tip: I usually include links to some of my websites pages. For example – “Thank you for signing up for XXXX. If you are interested in sharpening up your poker skills I recommend you read our articles listed in our Poker Strategy section, or if you are looking for an online poker room to play at check out our Poker Review section.”). If you are giving away a free eBook or something similar to sign ups you will want to make sure you have an “already subscribed page” with a link to that eBook (or whatever) because some people who have already signed up will want to get a hold of that item again. If you want a live example of these techniques I don’t mind if you sign up to my Sports Betting Tips newsletter list and go through the steps so you can see how I have done it.
Ok now you have a list starting to build up, so what’s next? You want to start to build trust with your list or members. Right away most affiliates will probably start sending dozens of poker bonus offers, clickbank eBooks, etc, but that’s not the best way to do things. You want to gain a bit of trust from your members, and you want them to start to like you. A good idea may be to set up an auto responder where every couple of days after they sign up you send them some really good content, maybe a few great poker strategy articles for example – the important part is not to include any affiliate links. Just give them great and interesting content and they will start to like you.
After you have gained a bit of trust you can then hit them with an offer, and you will get a way better conversion rate then you would have if you just hit them with that offer in your first e-mail. I have heard as a rule of thumb that you should be sending out about 4-5 value newsletters in between every offer related e-mail – this builds a relationship and more trust, etc.
Tip: Be personal. I always use my first name in my e-mails and talk like I was sending it to a friend. I close with things like “good luck this weekend” to my football bettors, and I try to connect with them a little bit. I was surprised I started getting e-mails from people back where they say things like “Hey Kevin great job on your picks this weekend”, etc, etc. Relationships + Trust = Money.
So what are you waiting for… get your ass in gear and start building a list! I hope this article helped you and I hope to see a couple more affiliates use this technique for increasing their income!
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