5 Quick Ways To Use Email With Your Amazon Niche Sites

In this week's post, we're going to cover email marketing.

It's beyond the scope of a single blog post to completely cover it as much as we'd like, so this might be a good time to mention that in the next few weeks we'll be releasing an email marketing course (among other things).

But for this post, let's keep it simple, and cover 5 quick ways you can use email with your Amazon niche sites.

First off, let's segment this slightly and talk about Amazon sites. It's Amazon sites that people often struggle to come up with email ideas for.

Amazon affiliate sites do tend to be harder to utilize email marketing for, because of the nature of the traffic they attract.

Generally speaking, when someone finds an Amazon site, they're just looking for what product to buy, and want to go straight to Amazon to buy it.

Not only that, but Amazon doesn't really have any way of notifying you when someone purchases something, so it's hard for you to craft a follow-up sequence promoting some products if you're not even sure if the email subscriber has bought something or not.

Let's imagine a scenario where someone finds your Amazon site.

Perhaps they've Googled “Best Camping Tent” and found your article, where you've reviewed some of the top Tents.

Now, the standard thing for you to do at this point is try to get them to visit Amazon and buy a tent… or anything really.

This is generally accepted as the best thing to do, and it's certainly how we structure our sites as well.

If you tried to get this person to subscribe to your email list instead, so you could promote tents to them later, you'd run into a few problems:

• You'd have no way to know whether that subscriber ended up buying a tent or not
• It'd be complicated to track how well the email sequence was converting (you could do it, but you'd need to set up a unique post that only your email traffic goes to, and give it a unique tracking ID).
• It'd be hard to really persuade someone to subscribe in the first place.

So, this is why we find it a lot easier to just focus on getting clicks to Amazon instead.

With a site that promotes Clickbank guides or sells its own eBooks for example, email makes much more sense. As Gael has pointed out in this awesome article here, it makes more sense with these types of sites to keep your front-end promo free, and promote to people on the back end.

But let's go back to Amazon sites quickly.

Despite what we've said above, there ARE still some ways you can use email with Amazon sites, and if they are able to bring in a few extra sales, or help you build a list to monetize a different way, why not at least try?

If you can create a lead magnet to get people to subscribe, you're halfway there.

Note: We recommend Thrive Leads for email opt ins. In fact we recommend Thrive for pretty much everything. Check out our review here.

5 Email Ideas For Amazon Affiliate Sites

1.) Share new product reviews

Whenever you review a new product, it makes sense to share it with your email list. There will likely be SOME subscribers who haven't bought that type of product before, and will be interested to read more. It just makes sense to share these via email.

You can also add older product reviews to an email sequence so new subscribers get exposed to them and just may end up buying something.

2.) Share informational articles

If you have a lot of info articles on your site, it makes sense to share these with your subscribers too, especially as part of an indoctrination sequence (basically you welcome them to your email list, and share some of your most popular articles with them. This helps you build trust and authority).

Even if there's no real monetization on those posts, it's still worth sharing them.

First of all, an info article is more likely to get shared by your subscribers on social media, but in addition, the more traffic your site gets, the more you can benefit from other things, like Amazon CPM ads, or Google Adsense.

3.) Consider sharing other non-Amazon products

Don't assume that because you've got “An Amazon affiliate site” you have to stick with promoting Amazon products. If you're in the camping niche, as with our earlier example, you could still promote camping eBooks, or travel guides, or special deals.

Some of them could even be worth creating an email sequence around.

4.) Share related products

Imagine in our Camping Tent example, as well as links to Amazon, you have an opt-in form for someone to get a list of essential camping gear. In fact, your whole site could have that opt-in form.

In this case, you know the person may have camping tents covered by the time they subscribe, but what about other equipment? This is an opportunity for you to create a mini-sequence where your share reviews and information about other related products too.

This is great if your site is only ranking in Google for “tent” keywords, but your site has a bunch of other products you're promoting.

Remember though, you're not allowed to put Amazon links directly in emails, that will get you a ban. Instead, put links to your articles, and then Amazon links in those.

5.) Promotions!

Ever heard of Black Friday? Wouldn't it be great to create a Black Friday deals page, and share it with your email list? 

You don't have to stop there either, you could also share with them during Prime Day, or during the Christmas period. We talked about this in a previous post here. 

Amazon is always doing promotions, so it could be worth building a list purely for these periods alone.

Final Thoughts

Once you get your head around the fact that as well as a monetization strategy, email is essentially just a traffic source, it becomes clear that building email lists for Amazon sites isn't a bad idea at all. It might be harder to get people to sign up, and it might not convert as well as organic traffic, but it all adds up, and not only that, a list is an asset, which can add to the selling price if you ever want to sell your site.

For more info, be sure to subscribe to our email list & we'll notify you of our upcoming email course, which goes into more details on Amazon and non-Amazon site email strategies.