Can you Include Affiliate Links in Emails?
- April 11, 2024
Email marketing is one of the most powerful ways to reach out to your audience. All of your superfans have willingly given you a personal piece of information in order for you to contact them.
Once you’ve collected a decent enough sized list, it’s time to start monetizing.
This leads many to the question:
Are affiliate links allowed inside emails?
The general answer is that yes, affiliate links are allowed in emails.
However, there are two main levels of affiliate link compliance that you want to pay attention to:
- The program level
- The email provider level
In addition, you’ll also want to pay attention to how your email deliverability is affected when including links in your emails.
Below, we’ll break down more in-depth the rules surrounding affiliate links inside of emails, as well as how to stop your affiliate emails from going to the spam folder.
Let’s get right into it!
Affiliate Programs and Affiliate Links in Emails
The first place to look for compliance is at the affiliate program level. You’ll need to take a look at the terms and conditions for each program, to see what’s allowed, but generally speaking most programs will allow affiliate links inside of emails.
A notable exception is Amazon’s Associates program.
Up until March 1st, 2024, their operating agreement stated the following:
“You will not engage in any promotional, marketing, or other advertising activities in any offline manner, including by…… in connection with email, offline promotion or in any offline manner”
However, more recently, they have changed the agreement to say the following:
You may include Special Links in emails, SMS and direct messaging from your social media Sites; provided, that such communications are solicited (i.e., opted into by the receiving customer)
With this change, Amazon Associates links inside emails are now compliant, as long as the recipient opted into being contacted to your list. While hard to enforce, cold or unsolicited emails with affiliate links in them can get you banned.
Email Provider Compliance
The next level of compliance is at the email provider’s level. Email marketing providers take their reputation very seriously, as the actions of their clients reflect the entire company’s delivery and reputation.
For example, Mailerlite includes the following inside of their terms and conditions
Affiliate Marketing (Prohibited) - is a type of business where you earn a commission by promoting other company’s products. We don’t allow this activity, because there’s no direct relationship between you and your subscribers. You are not allowed to send unrelated offers to your subscribers or pretend to be another brand.
Affiliate Links (Allowed) - is a way to recommend product or service to your subscribers in your campaigns. Advertisement for another company (Affiliate Link) can only appear under your branding and be clearly presented as a special offer from another company. Moreover, the offer has to be related to your content and meet subscriber expectations. You are not allowed to send emails with links to content that is prohibited in our Terms of Use. Campaigns with blacklisted links will be stopped automatically and we may be forced to close the account permanently.
In order to be safe, take the time to read your email marketing service providers terms and conditions in order to be safe. Emailing or reaching out to via their customer support line would be another way to make sure.
Avoiding Spam Filters
While this section isn’t necessarily about compliance, it’s an important section to cover as not following best practices here can lead to a ban from email marketing providers, or your promotional emails going to spam.
In order to prevent your emails from going in spam, you’ll want to avoid wording like:
- “Free”
- “Deal”
- “Discount”
- “$$$”
- And other similar terms
If you’d like to test if your emails are going to promotions or spam, you can send a test email to an email address that you control, and see where it lands. Assuming it lands in an unwanted place, you can tweak the email line by line in order to determine what part of the email is triggering the systems.
In addition, including several large high quality images as well as multiple affiliate links can send emails to spam, so be sure to test if that’s what’s causing your emails to go spam or promotions as well.
Author
Author
Related posts
Amazon Associates Italy Guide: Account Setup, Amazon OneLink, Taxes, & More
Amazon Associates Germany Guide: Account Setup, Amazon OneLink, Taxes, & More
How to Create Affiliate Product Reviews (With the Help of ChatGPT)
15 Best Affiliate Marketing Tools
More revenue from every link you share
Geniuslink makes localizing, tracking, and managing smart links dead simple, so you can earn more without added work.