In today’s world of intense competition, it’s extremely hard to sell a product, even if it is one of a kind and of excellent quality. In order to excel in sales, you need to have a beating marketing strategy. It’s not a secret what miracles data scraping and web crawling can do to your business. Considering all the amount of information available on the web, such data can be of great use to marketers if it’s collected and used properly.
There are plenty of ways web scraping helps marketers. For example, you can scrape information regarding your potential customers and create portfolios; you can crawl data regarding sales and corresponding marketing techniques to spot special correlations and understand best working marketing channels; you can also monitor competitors’ websites by scraping their news and events.
There are many ways web scraping services can benefit your marketing efforts; however, in this particular blog post, we will talk about what a great tool data scraping is for affiliate marketing. More specifically, we’ll look into ways you can use email marketing for affiliate marketing by leveraging the power of web scraping. So keep reading to find more valuable information.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Before we proceed to the main topic, let’s just briefly talk about affiliate marketing and what it’s all about. With the age of blogging and internet marketing, affiliate marketing has grown immensely. Affiliate marketing is a type of marketing where an online retailer pays commission to an external website for generating traffic and sales from its referrals. With the huge competition facing every affiliate marketer, there are many who fail in their business as they are unable to come up with a strategy that stands out. However, in 2019, affiliate marketing still has a long way to prosper. Consider the following stats and facts:
- 81% of brands and 84% of publishers leverage the power of affiliate marketing, a statistic that will continue to increase as affiliate marketing spending increases every year in the United States.
- There is a 10.1% increase in affiliate marketing spending in the US each year; by 2020, that number will reach $6.8 billion.
- In 2018, 16% of all orders made online could be attributed to the impact of affiliate marketing.
The numbers are quite impactful, which means that affiliate marketing is on its rise. The high competition is the reason why so many affiliate marketers fail. Of course, there are some other basic mistakes too. For example, often affiliates fail to sell because they fail to properly test the product. In affiliate marketing, it’s not only about selling but rather helping. Usually, affiliates are trusted by people and that’s the main reason why people listen to them and buy the products they recommend. Another, more technical mistake, is the failure of proper tracking. An affiliate wants to always track the sales and know where the sale came from. That way, you will know which pages are converting well so you can grow and scale that campaign. But don’t rush to get hopeless if you don’t get the results you want. We are here to help you and show you new and fresh ways to use web scraping services to strengthen your affiliate marketing strategy.
Email Marketing For Affiliate Marketers
Email marketing can be a powerful tool for affiliate marketers. In this blog post, we will give you tips on how to collect email list with the help of email scraping. However, before we proceed to email scraping, let’s understand what email marketing is all about and how it can help affiliate marketers.
Email marketing, unlike most of the other marketing channels, is not solely about selling, but rather it’s about building a strong relationship and trust. While spamming and sending tonnes of unnecessary emails to your list of subscribers will only deteriorate your image and make you look untrustworthy in the eyes of the clients.
We live in an era of huge consumption and a great variety of products. So customers have become pickier and more cautious when choosing products. So marketers that concentrate on selling only may not be as credible and reliable as before. In contrast, such marketers create an adverse effect and clients lose their trust in the efficiency of the product. There are several email marketing practices for affiliate and internet marketers that will have substantial results. Let’s consider each one:
- Build a strong and long-term relationship
Before you start selling, understand who are the people on your list, what they want, what are their struggles, and how you can be valuable for their specific pain point. There will most surely be promotional emails that you will send, but always remember that people subscribed to you because they want to receive good content. - Concentrate on these 4 types of emails
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- Content only – content is the main part of your email strategy that will create value to the audience. You can share a piece of information that belongs to you, or even share other people’s stories that you found helpful and interesting.
- Invite to connect – this is the main type of emails that helps to build a relationship with the actual person behind the screen. Use the email platform to invite you subscribers connect with you via social media. Drop them a link to your Instagram or Facebook page, or send them a nice introductory video of yourself.
- Promotional – this is the type of email that needs to be sent between all the other emails. If you send promotional emails every 2-3 email, you will make more sales and money because your promotions will be spiced up with great content and personal involvement.
- Make the closing strong
Closing is an important part of the email where you can once more connect to your audience. An effective closing urges people to ask questions and get in contact. Make the reader believe that they are not communicating with an automated machine, but rather a human being, who’s there to answer all the questions and concerns.
It’s also very important to build a good email list. Email marketing won’t be effective if you don’t have a good email list in the first place. You need to build an email list of people who are engaged, who belong to your niche, and who are your target. Creating a good email list is as important as building your business. If your email list is full of uninterested or even fake people then all of your email marketing efforts will be in vain.
Your main asset lies exactly in the email list you own. That’s because email is the only platform that makes communication personal and which you basically own. You won’t have such a personal involvement on social media or any other platform. So do your best to build a good email list. In the next section, you can find out how exactly to build a good email list with the help of email scraping.
Crafting Email Database with Scraping Services
Now we are ready to get to the main part of the discussion: email scraping. Data scraping is the process of crawling data and information from web pages. It’s indeed a savior in the mess of data available all over the web. The amount of information is so big that you can’t simply go and scrape it all manually. Email scraping is a great and useful technique for collecting good email lists from all over the web.
Scraping email addresses is not so hard if you know your target audience and where to look for them. It’s pretty obvious that you want to collect emails of people who are potentially interested in your product and not just random people who will instantly delete or ignore your emails. So put an extra effort in doing your research and finding platforms, websites or forums where you’ll find emails of your potential clients. The rest will be handled by the web scraping service company.
Once you crawl different websites and collect emails, you need to sort them out. For example, there might be emails that are repetitive. So you want to clean your list and find out the ones that are repeating more than once. Repetitive emails show that the people behind them will be potentially more interested than others as they are more active and integrated on the platforms you crawled. So you can clean your data and sort the emails based on different categories, such as the one just mentioned (e.g. duplicate emails), and segment the lists.
We have to also mention that scraping emails is the most cost-effective way of collecting emails. All the other ways are either way too time consuming or too expensive. For example, you can pay a lot of money to buy email lists, however, you will face a major risk. The database can be outdated or have a lot of fake emails. Also, you can try to collect the emails from the websites manually. However, this will take you so much time and leave you with so little information that won’t be of much help. So email scraping is the most cost and time-efficient way to get email lists.
Other Ways Data Scraping Can Help Affiliate Marketers
There are more ways of using data scraping for affiliate marketing than just by email scraping. So let’s look into other ways how data crawling can help an affiliate marketer.
- Scrape other affiliate websites to spot popular products – as an affiliate marketer, you most definitely want to know how products are selling, in order to display the best-selling ones on top. And where to get such information if not from your competitors’ websites? Scrape affiliate marketing websites that you think are your competitors to get a competitive advantage by spotting the best performing products.
- Scrape partner websites – if you have partnered up with a website, you want to get affiliate links to their websites for the top-selling products. You can crawl reviews or comments from your partner websites, in order to give links to products that have good feedback. It’s a great way to stay trustworthy in the eyes of your subscribers by offering them products that are loved by most.
- Scrape out-of-stock products – it’s also important to scrape information regarding the availability of the products. You don’t want to display links that are out of stock. Such minor failures can disrupt your reputation in the long-run.
There are plenty of other ways you can leverage the power of web scraping and data crawling to succeed in your affiliate marketing efforts. Use the tips above, and don’t forget that email marketing for affiliate marketers is a one-way ticket to success. Establish a strong strategy, use web scraping for always having fresh and reliable data, and the success will be guaranteed.