How to Craft Best Email Templates for SaaS Affiliate Programs

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Affiliate programs are an integral part of many businesses. At its core, affiliation allows other businesses or individuals to advertise their services and attract customers, receiving a reward for their work. As practice has shown, 81% of brands use affiliate programs to boost brand awareness and drive sales. Today, we will delve into one of the most important parts of affiliate marketing, namely emails.

This guide explores best practices for crafting affiliate email templates, covering recruitment, engagement, and retention strategies. It will also share insights from a real affiliate manager we talked with. Without further ado, let’s get started.

What Kinds of Email Templates Work Best to Recruit Affiliates?

Recruitment is the first step in building a strong affiliate base to bring your business the desired profits and leads. The main goal is to familiarize the future affiliate with your program, highlighting the benefits and providing instruction on onboarding the program. This type of email can be varied in structure but always has the following key elements.

Key Elements of Recruitment Emails

Let’s discuss each one in detail.

1. Clear outline

It’s hard to promote the brand if you don’t know how. That’s what the outline is for. It tells the future affiliate about the whole commission structure and how you see your future partnership. It describes how affiliates should promote your brand and bring you new leads.

2. Affiliate program benefits

It’s vital to mention the benefits of the affiliate program for future partners. Your task is to show clearly that this is a win-win partnership, where you gain leads while the affiliate receives a fair reward for their honest work.

3. Onboarding guide and useful resources

Since these are recruitment emails, it’s not necessary to go into much detail, as there are separate email newsletters for a full-fledged onboarding guide, which we will talk about a bit later. It’s enough to show the general steps so the future affiliate can envision the approximate onboarding process. In addition, it will be useful to leave links to materials and resources that will help the affiliate get to know your business better and understand whether they want to promote your products or services and whether they will be able to do so.

Onboarding Affiliate Email — *Source: Stripo template*

It’s not just about the template type itself—it’s about making it feel human. Generic emails end up in the trash. Make it personal and conversational, as if you’re inviting someone for a coffee, not sending a robot-like sales pitch.

You don’t need to write an essay about your program in your first email. Keep it short and treat it like a casual conversation. Mention something specific they’ve done, like a recent blog post. Show you’re genuinely interested in them. Focus on how your affiliate program can help them and their audience. Remember that it’s not just about selling your product. It’s about helping them grow, too.

Lastly, wrap things up with a simple question to encourage a response. Something like, “Interested in learning more about how we could work together?” This invites them to engage without feeling pressured.

Oleksii Petukhov
Affiliate Manager at Stripo

Now that you have your affiliate, you must stay in touch with them. Your business is a constantly evolving system with innovations and developments that your affiliate should be aware of. Communicating promotions or updates helps keep affiliates motivated and engaged. Whether it’s a simple privacy policy update or a completely new product in your line, your affiliate needs to know about it in advance so they can properly target their marketing to promote you. Timely and engaging emails that outline promotional offers or new commission structures keep affiliates in the loop.

Tips for Promotion Update Emails

To make things easier, let’s discuss some tips that will help you craft better promotion update emails for your affiliates.

1. Announce promotions or seasonal campaigns

Update emails should contain all the necessary news regarding your business updates and upcoming marketing campaigns. If you’re planning a seasonal event or campaign, your affiliate should know about it in advance to prepare, and so your joint efforts bring more revenues. The same applies to a new product. The affiliate should know what it is and its benefits so that they know how to promote it and attract new clients to you.

Sooner or later, your partnership with the affiliate will also be updated, namely the terms of the commission. Changes like this represent vital information that should be provided in update emails. Notifying affiliates about changes in a timely manner helps you guarantee high-quality cooperation and avoid unpleasant situations and frustrations. Think of broadcasting upcoming promotions or updates to your affiliates as a quick heads-up to a co-worker—it should be timely, clear, and easy to digest. The goal is not to overwhelm your affiliates with too much information all at once or give them promotions they haven’t had time to prepare for.

3. Offer new marketing materials and resources

Your affiliate will also benefit from any new materials and resources you release or update. Has your business changed the name of any features of products or goods? Alert your affiliates so that they know about the innovations and do not mislead future customers. You get the idea.

Update Affiliate Email — *Source: Stripo template*

How Do I Re-engage Inactive Affiliates?

Inevitably, some affiliates will stop being active, and the question of re-engagement will arise. Re-engaging inactive affiliates is key to maximizing their potential and keeping your cooperation going. That’s what re-engagement emails are for. Personalized re-engagement emails can reignite the interest of your affiliate partners by offering them new incentives, sharing recent success stories, and providing performance tips.

Strategies for Re-engagement Emails

In order to make your re-engagement emails work, you should stick to several strategies.

1. Personalized incentives

The first thing that immediately comes to mind as a re-engagement tool is increasing rewards and bonuses for improved metrics and overall performance. More generous rewards can motivate an affiliate to start working with new focus and motivation.

2. Success stories

If during the affiliate’s inactivity, your business has reached a new height or released a new product, it’s time to remind the affiliate about it. You’ll alert the affiliate that your business has new grounds for active promotion and the affiliate has something to work with. Another great strategy is sharing success stories from other affiliates that can remind them that success is still within reach and encourage them to get back on track.

3. Performance tips and suggestions

Affiliates lose interest in the partnership due to dissatisfaction with their own results, which is influenced by many factors. In the re-engagement email, it would not be superfluous to throw in a few tips and suggestions for improving performance. You can inspire the affiliate to apply them in practice and also boost metrics. Besides that, re-engaging inactive affiliates is about reminding them of the value they bring and reigniting their motivation. And you better approach them with something personal. Something that shows you’re aware of their efforts and reminds them of their positive impact.

Re-engagement Affiliate Email — *Source: Stripo template*

What Is the Best Way to Thank Top-Performing Affiliates?

Fair payment is the foundation of all things, but personal gratitude should not be forgotten either. Recognizing top performers with personalized “thank you” emails strengthens affiliate loyalty. Offering perks, bonuses, fair commissions, and recognition makes a lasting impact. To show that you value your partnership and the affiliate’s work, it’s worth considering separate emails with unique “thank you” content. These emails can include:

Personalized “thank you” messages mentioning affiliate-specific achievements and contributions.
Exclusive bonuses or rewards for top performers, like a year-long subscription to your product or a special invitation to a networking event.
Highlight their success within the affiliate community, spreading the word about their professionalism and credibility.

Sure, the most obvious way to thank your top affiliates is to boost their commission. But let’s be honest, you can’t bump up commissions all the time. That’s where other impactful gestures come in, keeping the partnership strong without always relying on cash.

Think about ways to help your affiliates reach their goals while benefiting your business. For example, you could collaborate on a link exchange, co-host a webinar, or find opportunities to grow your audiences together. A win-win approach will always keep your relationship thriving.

Add perks like free product trials, co-branded marketing assets, or even a dedicated landing page for their referrals, and you’ve got a solid motivation system. It’s all about showing your affiliates that their success is as important as yours.

Oleksii Petukhov
Affiliate Manager at Stripo

How Do I Structure Onboarding Emails for New Affiliates?

As we mentioned earlier, onboarding is critical to ensuring new affiliates feel equipped to start promoting. A well-structured series of onboarding emails should provide a warm welcome, clear instructions, and access to essential resources.

Key Steps in Onboarding Emails

Let’s see what exactly should be included in your onboarding emails.

Start with a warm welcome so they know who you are, the main rules in your program, and what’s coming so they are comfortable right away. Once it’s done, grant your affiliate access to affiliate systems. These can include any company systems for running and reporting affiliate businesses, as well as payment systems for partners and affiliates.

2. Step-by-step instructions on how to set up referral links

Each business is unique, with its own guidelines for affiliate links. Guide your affiliates step-by-step on how to get their referral links set up, how to use the dashboard, and all the practical stuff they’ll need. Just don’t hit them with everything at once. Break it down into manageable chunks, and make sure they’ve got access to all the right resources—banners, email templates, social media content. Providing your affiliates with a comprehensive guide helps avoid any issues and ensures that link performance is transparent for both you and the affiliate.

Additionally, using affiliate management software can make link generation a breeze. For instance, Tapfiliate’s affiliate marketing platform automatically generates affiliate and referral links, which are conveniently accessible on the affiliate dashboard.

3. Marketing resources

Marketing resources include everything that will allow the affiliate to thoroughly know your business and promote it correctly. These can be marketing assets, FAQs, promotional materials, company policies, brand kits, and so on.

What Type of Content Should Be Included in Affiliate Performance Update Emails?

Regularly checking and notifying the affiliate about their performance is the main strategy that helps the affiliate work in the right direction, analyze the current situation, learn from mistakes, and get better. Performance updates are essential for engaging affiliates. They provide data-driven insights and encourage affiliates to improve their efforts.

Elements of Performance Update Emails

To fill your emails with valuable information, include the following:

Key metrics such as clicks, conversions, and commissions earned directly show their performance.
Actionable tips for improving their performance, regardless of whether they are doing well or have some performance imperfections.
Guidance or additional resources for their success that offer your insights and help find common ground in their marketing actions.

I think the goal here is to provide real value, not just repeat stats they can already see in the dashboard. Keep it simple and stick to the key metrics—clicks, conversions, and commissions earned. If you can, give them some context by comparing their current results to past performance or the program average. After that, focus on what they can do to improve and how you can support them. Include tips for boosting results, like what landing pages are currently working best or which products are converting best. Highlight any upcoming opportunity, such as a special promotion or bonus period, that could give their efforts an extra push. Show your affiliates how to grow, not just where they are.

Oleksii Petukhov
Affiliate Manager at Stripo

How to Design Stunning Email Templates

It’s about time to talk about tricks that will help you create stunning affiliate email templates.

Affiliate Email Design Tips

To create eye-pleasing emails for your affiliates, you should keep in mind several nuances:

Accessibility comes first. You never know who will read your email, and you might get an affiliate with visual impairments. So, you need to be prepared for this scenario by creating accessible emails where color combinations won’t confuse colorblind people and fonts and text layouts that will allow dyslexics to read your emails easily.
Dark mode optimization is a must. According to surveys, 81.9% of people use the dark mode on their phones. As a result, your emails should be adapted to the dark theme. This will not only avoid the bad impression of a non-working email for the recipient but also show that you think about the comfort and preferences of your affiliate.
Fewer attachments—more links. Don’t overload your email attachments. Instead, you can leave all the useful material in the form of links that the affiliate can read without having to download the attachments to their device and perform unnecessary steps.
Signature with contact information as a finishing touch. You intend to stay in touch with the affiliate, so having a signature with all your contact details is a must. In the signature, indicate your first and last name, your position in the company, a link to the company’s website, and all possible ways to contact you (phone, personal email, links to social networks, etc.). This will greatly simplify your communication with the affiliate.

Benefits of Using Templates and Modules for Affiliate Emails

After combining all the mentioned tips and creating your email with the email design tool, you can save it as a template for further use or break each element into a module. But what do you get from using modules and templates? Here’s a list of benefits:

Drag-and-drop functionality for easy email template creation without technical skills.
Pre-built templates are designed for different types of affiliate communication, such as onboarding, promotions, or performance updates.
Modular email design allows you to save each email element as a module and reuse it multiple times in other templates.
Cross-platform compatibility and ease of email testing, ensuring that emails look great on any device.

Modules will allow you to quickly create new emails for all occasions from the modules you made by simply combining them. And by the way, this approach will speed up the email creation process by 5 times.

Bonus Tips for Even Better Affiliate Email Performance

Beyond crafting templates, SaaS businesses must consider several other important aspects, like personalization, strong subject lines, and a healthy mix of content to keep affiliates engaged. It’s not obligatory, but implementing one or more of them will make a difference.

Personalization in Affiliate Emails

According to surveys, 74% of marketers think personalization needs greater focus and support in their organizations. This isn’t surprising because everyone loves to have a personalized experience, and emails are especially important. When it comes to affiliate emails, personalized emails are a great way to show an individual approach to each affiliate partner and their value to you. To embrace personalization, you can do the following:

1. Segment affiliate lists based on performance or activity level

Segmentation will help you not only see the overall picture of the performance of all affiliates but also understand what email content will work best for which affiliate in an email.

2. Personalize content to make affiliates feel valued and catered to

This point is closely related to the previous one. For example, once you identify top-performance affiliates, they will definitely benefit from “thank you” emails mentioning their person-specific achievements. Meanwhile, less successful or even inactive affiliates should be given attention with the help of individual emails with tips on improving performance.

Crafting Strong Subject Lines

The subject line is the face of your email and the first thing recipients see when opening their inbox. A clear and concise subject line must say what the email is about, especially in communications with your affiliate partners. According to statistics, 64% of recipients decide to open or delete emails based on the subject line, so paying attention to subject line quality is necessary.

Offering Exclusive Content or Assets

To pack your affiliate emails with maximum value, providing exclusive content is a must. This can vary from special marketing access to exclusive insider promotions that can lead to unique marketing approaches by the affiliate. You can also frame these offers as value-adding resources to support affiliate success and bring more value to your email communication.

Conclusion

By using personalized, action-driven email templates designed by template builders, SaaS companies can establish lasting relationships with affiliates, boost performance, and efficiently grow their affiliate programs. Consistent, clear communication through thoughtfully crafted emails is key to maximizing affiliate engagement. We hope this article was enjoyable and interesting to read, as we enjoyed writing it. Have a great day and amazing affiliate performances.

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How to Craft Best Email Templates for SaaS Affiliate Programs