Best Email Affiliate Programs

Introduction

Although some people believe email marketing is dead, it is still a potent weapon in any company’s arsenal. The general rule of thumb is that a subscriber on an email list should be worth roughly $1 per month in sales.

In order to simplify the process of sending emails, you will need to have some form of email marketing software.

In this article I will explore as many of the options on the market as possible. You can then pick both the best one to run your business and also the best one to recommend. Ideally these will be one and the same.

ActiveCampaign

Active campaign will pay out between 20% and 30% depending on the level of business that you refer. They have a very generous cookie length of 90 days and you can promote using their $1, 14-day trial. Their service starts from $29 per month for 1000 subscribers.

Activetrail

An inexpensive solution with plans starting from as little as $8 per month. Also a little uninspiring as an affiliate product given that they are only paying 15% commission.

Automizy

Also offering a 14-day trial although in this case it’s free is Automizy. They also offer a generous 60-day cancellation policy for any of their paid plans which start at $29 per month for 1000 subscribers.

You only have a 30-day cookie length. You do get 90% of the first month’s payment and then 40% recurring payments as long as the user remains with the service.

Autopilot

These guys do seem to be a tad expensive given that their basic plan is $49 per month although this is for 2000 subscribers rather than the usual 1000.

You could earn commissions of 30% but unusually they also require you to be a user of the software in order for you to receive your commission. That may prove to be a stumbling block for some who already have email marketing software that they are happy with.

Aweber

Aweber is one of the most well-known email marketing solutions. The software has a raft of features to help you promote your products and services using automated email sequences. The affiliate program is run both in-house and by CJ Affiliate. If you choose to sign up using CJ Affiliate then you only have a 45-day cookie life. You will earn 30% recurring commission on any of their paid plans.

Benchmark

Benchmark offer a free plan with a limit of 2000 subscribers. However, the limit of 250 emails a month is likely to be more of an issue. Limiting your marketing efforts to only one email per week would mean you would only be able to use their free plan for around 60 users. This makes the free plan a little unappealing except to beginners who have very few people on their subscriber list.

They do charge a reasonable $22 per month for the first 1000 subscribers and they offer their affiliates a 25% commission.

BigMailer

Another provider offering the traditional 30% commission however, this is only on the first 12 months payments. Clearly this is a less attractive option if you are looking to build a number of assets to promote the product.

They do offer a free tier for a limited number of contacts. Their cheapest paid offering starts from $10 per month.

Builderall

Strictly speaking this is an all-in-one digital marketing solution and it does a lot more than just email. Yet, given its pricing structure it might be worth a look since it offers a hell of a lot of bang for its buck.

Unfortunately, there are a number of indifferent reviews of its email functionality on the web.

ConstantContact

Constant Contact also helps to manage Facebook and Instagram advertising. It also has all the usual email marketing features. It can even handle e-commerce abandoned carts.

As an affiliate you can earn $5 for everyone that signs up for their free trial and $105 commission when someone actually signs up for a paid account.

ConvertKit

One of the companies that have started offering a free tier of membership with limited functionality. Their cheapest paid plan is $29 per month for the standard 1000 subscribers. You are able to offer a 14-day free trial as part of your promotion and you receive 30% commissions recurring and have a 90-day window to make the sale.

Email Octopus

A new entrant into the marketplace and one that I believe uses Amazon technology behind the scenes. You can get 1000 subscribers for only $20 per month.

You only get a 30-day cookie with Email Octopus and commissions are only paid for the first year at a rate of 30%.

This is a product that looks better to potential email marketers than it does to affiliate marketers.

E-Goi

This solution goes beyond the basic email automation options to include e-commerce, SMS and voice. You can earn 30% recurring commission.

They also offer multi level commissions. If someone you have referred decides to become an affiliate then you will earn commission on any of their sales as well.

Their free plan allows you to schedule posts on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and it also has email marketing.

The cheapest plan that they offer is only $7 a month but that only allows you 500 subscribers.

SMS costs do tend to mount up quite quickly. You’ll need to bear that in mind whichever platform you choose.

Getresponse

I am currently a subscriber to Getresponse. At the time I was looking for an email solution, this seemed to be the best combination of price and performance. Since then, a number of platforms have started to offer free packages for people with a small number of subscribers. If you are starting out and have yet to build up much of an email list then you would probably be better off starting with a free plan. This will save yourself money for other areas of your business.

Getresponse will give you the choice of either a recurring commission of 33% of the monthly fee or a one-off payment of $100. You have the benefit of a 120-day cookie.

Gist

Affiliates of Gist will receive commission at 40%. Their cheapest plans start at $34 per month for 1000 subscribers so they are not really among the cheapest options. You would certainly want to have a reasonable number of subscribers to justify paying that sort of monthly fee in my opinion.

They do offer a 21-day free trial so you can use that as part of your promotional strategy along with a number of email swipes and banners that they provide.

One additional bonus with Gist is that they also offer chat functionality, which few of the other email service providers do. If that is a part of their system that you would find useful it may be worth paying the extra.

Groupmail

This pays out a healthy $139.99 per sale. You will need to sign up to the affiliate program via cleverbridge. Their pricing starts from £99.95. This is a one-time fee rather than a monthly recurring charge. Based on the current exchange rate one would assume that the lowest tier does not attract any affiliate commission. The payout would be more than they are receiving.

Klaviyo

This claims to be a more up-to-date product than your run-of-the-mill email automation software. It is designed to help you better target your customers with the right emails to help your conversions. Affiliates can earn a 15% recurring commission with their plans starting at $30 per month for 1000 contacts. Additional costs would apply to include SMS functionality.

MailChimp

MailChimp does offer a referral program, however, the payments are in the form of credits to your MailChimp account. If you are already a MailChimp user and have no plans to move then it would seem to be a no-brainer to sign up for their referral program. Even if you only managed to cover your own costs for your subscription.

Mailerlite

Offering excellent value for money for the end user. It costs only $10 per month for 1000 subscribers, although you are limited to 12,000 emails per month. However, I think anyone sending out tons and tons of emails to prospective clients is quite quickly going to get unsubscribed. The potential of up to 12 emails per month on their basic plan is probably well within what you are likely to want to use.

They will pay 30% of the monthly fee.

Mailgen

This is a tool designed to help you communicate with your customers via email or social media. As an affiliate you could earn $2 when someone just signed up for Maligen and up to $50 if they purchase one of their paid plans.

Mailjet

With over 130,000 users, Mailjet is clearly doing a lot of things right. It offers a free plan that allows a generous 6000 emails per month. The cheapest paid plan that they offer starts from just under $10 a month and allows you up to 30,000 emails. Although that doesn’t allow automation. You would need to upgrade to their premium plan if you wanted to have their automation features.

They have a number of affiliate or reselling opportunities but pay 15% commission for referrals.

MailPoet

Offering an attractive free for life basic plan, MailPoet will pay out a 20% commission on its paid plans but only for the first 12 months. You can sign up through ShareASale if you would like to promote this offer. It is particularly targeted to WordPress website owners and its pricing plans are fairly cheap. It includes a number of features to link to WooCommerce.

MarketHero

The CEO of market hero is Alex Becker, affiliate marketer and YouTube star. You can earn 30% recurring commissions with this product, which is claimed to be the best email marketing tool for those using Shopify.

They offer a free trial and their paid plans start from $19 per month.

This might be a particularly good way to go if you are planning on having some form of Shopify promotional content. You could then recommend market hero as the email marketing platform to tightly integrate with the store.

Moonmail

This product is used by large companies such as Amazon, Nespresso and Warner Brothers so it has an excellent pedigree. It also has pricing to match with the starter version costing $149 per month, although there is a lite version for $21 per month.

Moon mail goes beyond just email and allows you to connect with your customers via WhatsApp, SMS and voice as well.

They have a 14-day free trial for the light version which you could use to promote and they also offer a 30-day refund policy for anyone who is unsatisfied. Affiliates would earn 25% commission on their paid plans. Given the cost for their standard plan any potential users would need to have large email lists in order to justify that sort of cost.

Moosend

Another provider offering a very low-cost solution with plans starting from as little as eight dollars per month. As an affiliate you would earn 30% commission.

Omnisend

This product is targeted at e-commerce users. In addition to email it also uses SMS.

Their affiliate commission is a one-off payment of between 100% and 300% of the fee to the user. This could be as much as $1200. Note that you only have a 30-day cookie.

Omnistar Mailer

Quite an expensive product with their cheapest plan starting at just under $48 per month. You will receive 20% but that is only a one-time fee. Probably not one to spend a lot of resources on even if you liked the product. It is also likely to be one that will be more difficult to sell given the number of products on offer for $20 per month and less.

OntraPort

OntraPort will pay you 25% commission if you become an affiliate. They do offer SMS tools and also a CRM (customer relationship management) package. Membership functionality is also included in their plan but at $79 per month it does seem somewhat pricey. Unless you have an audience that needs the additional tools you may find it difficult to make many sales of this product. Compared with what other tools are charging for just the basic email marketing suite.

Pabbly

This solution is again one that is probably better suited to the end user than an affiliate marketer. It offers excellent value for money with their cheapest plan coming in at $9 per month for 2500 subscribers.

They do offer a generous 30% commission and a number of creative assets to help you promote the product.

Rocket Responder

They have a unique commission structure. You will receive between 20% and 75% commission based on how many people you have referred. If you have a large audience then this might be a product to promote. If you could generate 1250 or more new users in a month then you would earn 75% commission.

Unusually they offer their users an unlimited number of subscribers and charge only $20 per month. This looks like quite a decent option for the end user and also a decent one for the affiliate.

SALESmanago

In addition to the usual email marketing tools SALESmanago also has a pop-up system that can generate up to 200% more leads. They also offer a number of other add-ons such as social proof for e-commerce sites. You can, if you wish, subscribe to just the email side of the system and they offer certain services for free.

Commission rates are good at 30% but SALESmanago’s website isn’t clear on pricing for certain types of customers.

Sendinblue

Sendinblue has affiliate programs both for agencies and bloggers. Blogging affiliates would receive €5 whenever someone is referred and creates an account. If they go on to a paid subscription then you would receive a further €100.

Sendinblue has a number of different pricing tiers including a free one. Their cheapest paid plan starts at £16.50 per month and that allows you to send up to 10,000 emails which actually seems like a very reasonable deal.

Depending on your subscription level you can also access SMS, chat and CRM functionality.

While payouts are listed in euros potential affiliates should be aware that the program is open to agencies and bloggers from the US as well.

SendLane

Offering the standard 30% commission on the monthly fee. SendLane plans start from $35 for 1000 subscribers so that means around $10 per month for you as an affiliate. SendLane also includes SMS functionality in their plan which is good since they are more expensive than many of their competitors.

Sendloop

Another low-cost option with plans starting from as little as $9 per month. You could earn10% commission on the monthly fees as an affiliate.

SendX

SendX offers a high delivery rate because of its Opti-send technology. This uses more than 30 parameters to try and make sure that your email doesn’t go into the recipients spam folder.

SendX’s monthly fees start from as little as $7.49 and as an affiliate you would earn 30%.

Snov.io

Affiliates of Snov.io are paid 25% commission but only for the first 12 months. It is one of the more expensive options given that their cheapest plan starts at $39 per month.

They do offer one feature which I haven’t spotted anywhere else. You can submit a list of email addresses which they will endeavour to clean up.

UniSender

Offering excellent commission levels of up to 50% and the second tier of commission of 7% when someone you refer signs up as an affiliate. This would seem to be a great option if you are looking to promote some email software.

It would appear from their website that this is a Russian company, I will therefore leave you to do your own research on this one.

Woodpecker.co

This company focuses on cold selling via email. Targeted at B2B (Business to business) clients. It is an automated system that can be personalised and will integrate with many common platforms such as Google and Outlook.

Pricing for their lowest price plan comes in at $40 per month and they offer a 14-day free trial.

As an affiliate you would earn 20% commission from their paid plans.

This company is targeting B2B customers and is therefore a little different to the majority of other players in this roundup.

Zoho Campains

As a Zoho affiliate you will earn 15% of the first purchase. So, from an affiliate marketing point of view probably not one to spend weeks creating a promotional campaign around.

Other related tools

Hunter.io

This tool helps you track down the email address behind a website. You can also verify the validity of an email you already have.

Hunter.io will pay out 30% commissions but only for the first year. Their cheapest monthly subscription is €49.

Stripo

This is a tool that you would use in addition to your email provider. It allows you to create and test email templates that you are going to send out to your customers. They have a free plan which would allow you to recommend it at no cost to your customers. They have two paid plans, $125 a year for small businesses and they also have an agency plan at $400 a year.

They offer lifetime commissions up to 25% of each referral on the paid plans. They have a 120-day cookie which is quite generous.

I think this would really only be applicable to hard core email marketers as it is an additional cost on top of the usual automation software.

How to promote

A classic way to promote any software product is to create a mini course showing how to use the software to perform specific tasks. You could then upload screen recordings of you performing these tasks onto YouTube. You would place your affiliate link in the description. It will be up for you to judge whether the market is saturated though in this area.

A better idea might be to create a website that offers advice on starting up small businesses. You could feature a number of different software products and again have video lessons on how to perform basic tasks. Accounting software is another staple of any business. You could add your recommendation in that area along with some coaching videos.

Sprinkle in some advice in other areas such as obtaining finance or the types of insurance that businesses need. This will allow you to feature affiliate programs for loans or insurance and you could have quite an attractive little money earner.

Best Email Affiliate Programs:

Conclusion

You would need to weigh up which product you think is the best and also which one might be easiest to promote.

If your goal is just to make money then go for one of the larger commission percentages. I think that would be a mistake however.

Ultimately it comes down to the make-up of your audience. If you have a lot of experienced internet marketers, then they are unlikely to be worried too much about the price. They would be more interested in the functionality offered, in particular the automation features. If your audience is primarily new to internet marketing then you would probably be wise to promote one of the cheaper solutions. They are more likely to convert with that audience.

With any affiliate promotion you should really stick to promoting products that you use yourself. Try out some of the options in your own business first to see which you prefer. You can then use those reasons to sell that product to your audience.

James