Affiliate Marketing Email Management

Affiliate marketing professionals need to keep track of all kinds of information, and much of it comes flooding over email. There is so much to keep track of in this business, so many email newsletters, so many requests for information--your inbox can become a scary place.

One of the most significant challenges any affiliate will at some point face is how to deal with too much information coming into your email mailbox. The choices that you make as to what email platform to use, and how to use it, can make you more or less profitable as an affiliate.

SBI Webmail

Here's an example of what we mean when we say that email software is a vital part of any affiliate marketing endeavor. Do you know Site Buildit, or SBI for short? (They habitually employ the “!” after all their iterations, as in "SBI!", but we can't comply with that here.)

SBI is a web development platform for small businesses, and not only because they pay $75 referral for any new customers that you send them, for life, every year that customer renews.

The problem with SBI—one of many shortcomings, to be truthful—is that their email management software is weak, and when you buy a site through them, they try to make you use their email platform. It's rudimentary and as such it's not especially useful.

It's graphics-deprived, it makes you manually “whitelist” everyone you email, and there is no adequate search function, only folders, more and more folders.

It's not that the system is completely horrendous, but there are much better options for an aspiring affiliate marketing millionaire than SBI Webmail. This is true of many non-enormous companies who do many things well but top notch email software isn't one of them.

After all, top notch email software is hard to do!

Microsoft Outlook

The best thing about using Microsoft Outlook is the familiarity factor, also you must consider the extensive programming work that Microsoft has put into this product. Like most Microsoft products, it's great to those among us who are great at using it.

The contact management capabilities of Outlook are impressive, for instance, when used properly. Also, the nice ability to synchronize other Microsoft programs such as PowerPoint and SharePoint gives Outlook a strong foothold in the market, albeit, probably, a slipping one.

Slipping, probably, because you have to pay for Microsoft Outlook, whereas you can get free or included-in-you-hosting-package email software from a variety of sources, such as:

Gmail / Google Apps

We are putting Gmail and Google Apps into one review because they are basically the same product from the email angle, Google Apps is the business version but it seems much the same as regular Gmail.

Google Apps does allow you to have an email address ending in @yourdomainname.com, for example if your site was called Ace Affiliates and your name was Fester, your email would be fester@aceaffiliates.com with Google Apps, whereas it would be aceaffiliates@gmail.com with regular Gmail.

What's brilliant about Google's email management software is, brilliantly, what's brilliant about Google itself: the search function. When you're working in Gmail, you can easily retrieve records through the search box. The amount of data that those little robots can process in such a short amount of time remains one of the highest accomplishments of mankind.

Google email, whether Gmail or Google Apps, is also extremely cheap, costing nothing in terms of actual dollars but you are served contextual ads in your browser window. This does give you the feeling that Google is always watching, but at this point I think that's a foregone conclusion in many people's minds.

Google email is also extremely fast.

The appearance and functionality of Gmail is not as utterly professional as Microsoft Outlook, and of course by housing your email on Google's servers, you may have some problems transporting your contacts and emails to another platform if you wanted to do that.

Anyways, these are some email software options that you will consider, as you attempt to drink from the firehose called affiliate marketing email management. Remember, do not ever forget, that you are not the only person on the Internet trying to make money by sending out lots and lots of emails.

To survive in this world, to not spend your entire life reading email, you must not only choose a good email software provider, you must also learn how to use your email system to best effect.