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See FeaturesAffiliate email marketing: Top strategies & programs for 2025
Affiliate email marketing has quickly become one of the most powerful strategies for generating online revenue.
By leveraging your existing email list, you can introduce your audience to other valuable products and services, increasing brand trust and expanding your business’s profitability.
In this article, we break down our top strategies and programs for email affiliate marketing. From the best affiliate email practices to top tips for launching a successful campaign, you’ll discover how affiliate email marketing can boost your business earnings, potentially earning 20% to 40% per referral.
What is affiliate email marketing?
Affiliate email marketing is a strategy where you promote another brand’s products or services in your emails in exchange for a commission on sales.
Affiliate marketing emails allow you to earn passive income while improving overall communication targeted to your audience’s niche interests.
The strategy differs from traditional email marketing in a few key ways. Whereas traditional email marketing is designed to nurture connection and communication with your existing customers, email affiliate marketing targets a broader audience through strategic partnerships with other businesses.
The potential benefits of affiliate email marketing include capturing engaged subscribers and improving your conversion rate and organic traffic.
You can also boost your sales without the need for expensive advertising while generating passive income from an engaged audience.
Benefits of using email for affiliate marketing
Although SEO and social media marketing are everyone’s go-to tools tools to leverage, affiliate email marketing brings its own benefits.
Affiliate marketing emails allow you to curate targeted email lists to market affiliate products to past customers, benefiting from direct and personalized access to your audience.
Email lists therefore help you engage your audience and actively drive conversions. In fact, brands using Omnisend on average make $68 for every $1 spent, and consumers are three times more likely to make a purchase from email compared to social media marketing.
Typically, people on your email marketing lists are interested in your niche. This means it will be easier to convert sales on the service or product your brand is promoting — especially compared to conventional affiliate marketing.
How to launch a successful affiliate email marketing campaign
Let’s consider the steps to launching a practical and profitable affiliate email marketing campaign:
Choose an email service provider
You can’t launch a successful affiliate email marketing campaign without a reliable email service provider (ESP).
An ESP is essential for building and maintaining a strong email list, the backbone of successful affiliate marketing. With the right tools, you can nurture lasting relationships with your audience, engaging them at every stage and increasing your chances of higher conversions.
Omnisend simplifies this process with features tailored for ecommerce, like automated workflows, advanced segmentation, and easy list management, ensuring you consistently deliver valuable, trust-building content.
Choose which affiliate links to promote
Effective affiliate email marketing should be profitable, so it’s worth estimating the ROI of each promotion to ensure it’s a good investment with strong earning potential.
While high-commission affiliate programs can be tempting, consider programs with lower commissions but higher conversion rates, which often lead to more sales.
Since your email list consists of engaged subscribers who opted in, focus on promoting products and services that truly align with their interests and address specific needs. Build trust by pacing your content — avoid placing affiliate links in the first email of a sequence and keep your newsletters balanced.
This approach builds a relationship with your subscribers, keeping them receptive to your recommendations without feeling overwhelmed.
Prepare and send your email campaigns
A successful affiliate email marketing campaign should provide customers with relevant content. By promoting useful and appropriate affiliate products and services, you’ll be positioning yourself as an authority and building trust with subscribers. Higher trust is more likely to translate into higher conversion rates.
With this in mind, segmentation and personalization are essential for successful affiliate email marketing.
Email segmentation will ensure that your affiliate emails are targeting customers based on their specific interests, leading to increased engagement. There’s no point promoting an affiliate product or service to a customer who has no need for it.
Once you’ve segmented your audience, you can make use of email personalization. Sending personalized emails to subscribers leads to higher engagement, click-throughs, conversions, and ROI. This translates to higher affiliate commissions for your business.
Best practices for sending affiliate marketing emails
These are our five top tips on email marketing for affiliate marketers:
- Take advantage of holidays and other seasonal events: Major holidays mean customers are more likely to be on the lookout for the top deals and discounts. It can be sensible to leverage these holidays to your advantage by optimizing affiliate marketing emails.
- Make use of customer testimonials: If you can make use of customer testimonials and case studies, this can advantage your affiliate email marketing. By implementing social proof, you’re demonstrating the value of whatever you’re promoting, as well as building brand trust.
- Minimize overwhelm: Don’t try to oversell your customers with affiliate products and services that don’t correspond to their interests. You’ll overwhelm them, potentially inciting email unsubscriptions.
- Re-engage leads: Segment your audience with the lowest engagement rate. Then, send them emails again to entice them back and improve your conversion rates.
- Avoid emails that read like spam: Customers are digitally savvy, and if you overstuff your emails with affiliate email marketing, this will read like oversell. Avoid repetition or spam that might put potential consumers off their purchase and even lead to email unsubscriptions.
How to choose an affiliate email marketing program
An easy way to select the perfect email marketing affiliate program for you and your brand is by choosing one that makes it simple to promote and earn commission.
Doing so requires joining an affiliate email marketing scheme that aligns with both your own business goals and the needs of your wider audience.
Here are some pointers to keep in mind when choosing your affiliate program:
- Does the program have a good or established reputation?
- Does the product match your niche?
- Does the program have an excellent conversion rate?
- Can you get access to the program’s unique tools and techniques?
- Can you track sales in the program?
- Does the program boast a good cookie life?
In addition to these factors, look at the program’s payout frequency and the minimum threshold to receive a recurring commission to ensure that it aligns with your cash flow needs.
Remember that you can always launch a small-scale affiliate email marketing campaign to start. This allows you to evaluate the program’s effectiveness for your business based on metrics like affiliate revenue, interaction, and conversion.
Have a plan readily in place to successfully launch your email marketing for affiliates, and be prepared to adjust your approach accordingly.
The best email marketing affiliate programs
- Omnisend — Best for beginners looking for comprehensive support
- Moosend — Best for affiliates looking to earn lifetime commissions
- Kit — Best for YouTubers and bloggers with a large audience
- HubSpot — Best for affiliates looking for a low payout threshold
- GetResponse — Best for affiliates who want a generous cookie shelf life
Omnisend — Best for beginners looking for comprehensive support
The first on this list is the ecommerce marketing automation platform Omnisend. If you want to drive better revenue and generate organic traffic while providing a top-notch solution to your audience, Omnisend is the way to go.

- Your commission: 20%, monthly, recurring
- Time to get payout: 30 days
- Dedicated account manager: Yes
Omnisend’s affiliate email marketing platform allows affiliate marketers to earn at least 20% monthly recurring commissions for each new referral that joins the platform on a paid plan.
The affiliate email marketing program also offers the following:
- A dedicated account manager that will provide materials and priority support
- Ready-made packs of banners, ads, and other types of content that you can share in your campaigns as soon as you start
- Above-average ratings from users on popular review sites testify to Omnisend’s credibility, fostering confidence in the company and prospects’ willingness to do business with them
Even better, affiliate marketers can also benefit from Omnisend’s partner program, which comes with such perks as new revenue share opportunities, including bounties, percentages, and potential one-time bonuses and access to value-added services.
Use our email pricing calculator below to quickly compare costs and features with those of other top platforms. Input your desired number of contacts, choose up to two other email marketing providers from the list, and see how Omnisend stacks up against them.
Quick email provider pricing comparison
Quickly and easily compare the top email marketing providers so you can find the best platform for your ecommerce store needs.
prices for:
You can compare Omnisend and 2 more providers at once.
- Omnisend
- Klaviyo
- Mailchimp
- Drip
- Moosend
- Active Campaign
- Get Response GetResponse
- MailerLite
You can compare Omnisend and 2 more providers at once.
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Try out the full version of this calculator
Moosend — Best for affiliates looking to earn lifetime commissions
Moosend, a leading email marketing platform, offers an affiliate program that allows creators to earn a steady stream of passive income by building a strong audience base and mastering email marketing skills. The process of joining Moosend’s affiliate program is straightforward and helps you connect with an engaged audience.

- Your commission: 30% to 40% recurring commissions
- Time to get payout: 20 days
- Dedicated account manager: Yes
Moosend’s affiliate program stands out for its attractive commission rate, which ranges from 30% to 40% and is paid as a lifetime recurring commission. Moosend also offers a 90-day cookie duration, which means that affiliates will continue to earn commissions for 90 days after a referred customer signs up.
The payout method for Moosend’s affiliate program is through PayPal and Stripe.
One of the best features of Moosend’s affiliate program is the opportunity to earn up to 40% lifetime commissions. Signing up for the program is free and can be done by visiting the Moosend Affiliates website.
In addition to the commission rate and cookie duration, Moosend’s affiliate program offers bonus benefits such as a dedicated account manager, promotional and educational materials, and real-time reporting and analytics. These resources will help you effectively promote Moosend and earn more commissions.
Kit — Best for YouTubers and bloggers with a large audience
Kit is another leading email marketing platform that helps creators earn revenue by building a diverse audience base and strong email marketing skills.

- Your commission: 10-20% recurring commission (50% for the first 12 months)
- Time to get payout: 30 days
- Dedicated account manager: No
The joining process of Kit is simple, and it helps you connect with an engaged audience. The revenue sharing is stricter than Omnisend’s, but it’s still appealing and stands out as one of the top email or autoresponder affiliate programs.
Kit will send affiliates a 50% commission for every person who signs up to Kit through your affiliate link. This 50% will be paid monthly for up to 12 months, with 20% thereafter for Gold partners, 15% for Silver, and 10% for Bronze.
Kit offers a training course for those new to affiliate marketing, as well as graphics and videos for affiliates to use when creating their own content.
HubSpot — Best for affiliates looking for a low payout threshold
Another popular platform among marketers is HubSpot. This state-of-the-art platform offers a combination of incredible marketing tools to enhance your outreach.

- Your commission: 30% recurring commission
- Time to get payout: 60 days
- Dedicated account manager: Yes
HubSpot allows you to earn a good passive income. Affiliate marketers can stand to make substantial earnings since HubSpot’s plans reach up to about $4,000. Like Omnisend (and unlike Kit), HubSpot offers free resources to affiliates that they can use in their affiliate email marketing campaigns.
However, there is something important to consider. Namely, HubSpot’s 30% monthly payouts only extend for up to one year, assuming the referral remains a paying customer for that period.
GetResponse — Best for affiliates who want a generous cookie shelf life
Another comprehensive email marketing platform that offers one of the best email affiliate marketing programs is GetResponse.
The well-known platform helps businesses of all sizes create effective email campaigns and grow their audience.

- Your commission: 33% recurring or an upfront fee of $100 or $150, depending on the product
- Time to get payout: 30 days
- Dedicated account manager: No
Like others in this list of the best affiliate email marketing programs, GetResponse offers both upfront and recurring commissions. Affiliate partners can get a continuous commission of 33% monthly with the recurring program or an upfront flat commission of $100 for email marketing products or $150 for content monetization products.
GetResponse also offers a 120-day cookie policy, longer than most other affiliate programs, including Moosend and HubSpot.
The platform also offers support through content, tools, and selling guides. However, unlike Omnisend, no dedicated account manager or priority support can guide you through the process.
Wrap up
Affiliate email marketing is a powerful way to generate passive income by promoting products or services that align with your niche or target audience.
From the benefits of affiliate email marketing to our top strategies and programs, we’ve comprehensively broken down how email affiliate marketing could help you maximize your earnings.
To launch a successful affiliate email marketing campaign, choose profitable and relevant products, leverage website triggers, and personalize your emails to build trust with your audience. By following best practices and partnering with the right affiliate program, you can drive sales and earn a steady income through affiliate email marketing.
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