Did you know that the global market value of the affiliate marketing industry stands at $12 billion in 2022? And if the numbers are to be believed, this number has been predicted to skyrocket in the next five years. 

As an affiliate, you may already be aware of the fact that eight out of every ten brands run an affiliate program. And while there are already platforms that you can tap into like Amazon Associates, ShareASale, CJ Affiliate, and many more, the possibilities of earning top dollars via affiliate marketing are endless.

According to a report, the top affiliates make more than $1M each year. And with the possibilities of affiliate marketing helping you earn top dollars is endless, you’ll be shocked to know that some affiliates earn millions of dollars every year via affiliate sales.

BUT! Not every affiliate marketer is able to make top dollars via affiliate sales.

From having well-established processes and systems in place to implementing the right set of tactics, if you want your affiliate marketing venture to be a success, you need to do it right. 

Most affiliate marketers drive high-quality traffic to the product/service website via:

  • Social Media Marketing
  • Blog Posts
  • Email Marketing

And while these strategies are great, the only problem is – you need to put a lot of time, effort, and money into them. 

Let’s talk about email marketing. The average email open rate stands at 21.33%. Whereas, the number stands at 98% for SMS. The average click-through rate (CTR) of emails is around 6-7%. On the other hand, for SMS or text messages, it’s 45%.

Not many affiliates tap into the unbelievable potential of text message marketing – that’s because not many people know how effective it can turn out to be.

Affiliate marketing is promising and has been helping affiliates generate top dollars. 

Whether you’re a new affiliate looking forward to stepping into the realm of affiliate marketing or are a well-established affiliate marketer wanting to try text message marketing to drive traffic, we want to show you how effective SMS affiliate marketing can be.

Throughout this blog post, we’ll discuss:

  • What is SMS Affiliate Marketing? 
  • 4 Insane Benefits of SMS Affiliate Marketing Affiliate Marketers Should Know About

What is SMS Affiliate Marketing?

SMS Affiliate Marketing is the process of driving traffic to the merchant website via SMS. Affiliates can promote affiliate offers by rolling out affiliate links to their SMS list, allowing them to not only tap into text message’s outstanding open rate but also put engage with people on the platform of their preference.

While email marketing, social media marketing, and blogging have been the most commonly used strategies used by affiliates to drive traffic to the merchant website, when it comes to SMS affiliate marketing, affiliates can build strategic SMS campaigns to promote the merchant’s product(s) or service(s).

Here’s what the process looks like:

  • Merchant runs an affiliate program to promote their products or services
  • Now, affiliate marketers can enroll in this program to earn a commission. To promote the merchant’s products or services, affiliate marketers can build strategic text message marketing campaigns and get their recipients to click through the affiliate link.
  • And for every successful purchase, the merchant will pay affiliate marketers some kind of commission fee.

The reason why SMS affiliate marketing is gaining traction is due to text message’s outstanding open rate. 

Data fetched from a report indicates that nearly 67.1% of the global population are unique mobile phone users, a 1.8% increase when compared with last year.

Unique Mobile Phone Users

With the digital era kicking in, this number has been predicted to rise at an exponential rate. And with an ever-increasing number of people having access to smartphones, SMS marketing has turned out to be one of the hottest marketing trends, especially for affiliate marketers.

Remember – not many affiliates are reportedly using SMS affiliate marketing. We’re still in the very early stages. Hence, it’s a brilliant opportunity to build results-driven SMS marketing campaigns to drive your affiliate revenue.

But to run strategic SMS affiliate marketing campaigns, you need to build a fool-proof SMS marketing plan. At the same time, you’ll need access to a powerful text message marketing platform like Textback.ai – after all, you can’t manually send text messages to every single person in your database.

Read our blog post on how to effectively plan and implement a results-driven SMS marketing campaign in 2022.

Now that we have already discovered what SMS affiliate marketing is, let’s dive deeper to understand the four insane benefits of tapping into the strategy.

4 Insane Benefits of SMS Affiliate Marketing Affiliate Marketers Should Know About

Following are the four insane benefits of using SMS marketing to promote affiliate products and services:

  1. When Compared with Other Digital Marketing Strategies, SMS Marketing Has the Highest Open & Engagement Rate
  2. Helps Roll Out Personalized Messages
  3. Helps Build Strategic Campaigns to Target Different People at Different Stages or Different Intent
  4. Advanced Tracking

Let’s touch down on each of these benefits one by one.

1. When Compared with Other Digital Marketing Strategies, SMS Marketing Has the Highest Open & Engagement Rate

As we already mentioned before, text message marketing has the highest open and click-through rate. 

The open rate stands at an impressive 98%. At the same time, the average click-through rate is 45%. When compared with the 21.33% average open rate and 6-7% CTR of email marketing, that’s promising. 

Additionally, it’s important to note that companies like Apple and Google have put in place advanced mechanisms and algorithms to filter spam emails. This means a huge chunk of your emails will hit the SPAM folder. However, the probability of your SMS hitting the spam folder is quite low. 

The spam rate stands at 53% for emails, whereas it’s just 2.8% for SMS. With recipients receiving notifications for SMS, there’s a high chance they won’t ignore it.

Let’s talk about the engagement rate.

Nearly 64% of consumers have reported that they prefer receiving text messages over emails or phone calls. BUT that doesn’t mean that your SMS marketing campaigns are guaranteed to succeed. 

You need to put in a lot of work to position yourself as credible, authoritative, and trustworthy. After all, they’d always think twice before clicking through, especially if they don’t already know you.

If you do it right, you’re more likely to engage your recipients via SMS than other forms of communication. That’s the reason SMS affiliate marketing works as well as it does, all thanks to the high open, click-through, and engagement rate of SMS when compared with emails. 

2. Helps Roll Out Personalized Messages

A whopping 99% of marketers have reported that personalization helps advance customer relationships. As an affiliate marketer, there’s a high probability you’ll try to engage people you don’t even know – unless you are a well-established person with a rock-solid online presence.

Now, let’s imagine your name is John with an interest in purchasing leather bags. Which one of the following SMS are you likely to click through?




“30% OFF on all leather products sold by Brand A.
Grab your favorite one today.”

OR

“John, roll in style with Brand A’s wide range of luxurious leather bags.

Oh – did I tell you – they have a minimum 30% clearance sale going on? Grab your favorite leather bag today!”

The reason why the second email works as well as it does is that it has an:

  • Engaging message
  • Friendly tone
  • Brilliant copy
  • And invokes a sense of urgency

And most importantly – it’s a personalized message. But personalization is so much more than just about adding the recipient’s name. It’s also about putting the right message in front of the right people at the right time.

What if John isn’t even the least bit interested in leather products? In that case, this wouldn’t be a personalized message.

With an SMS marketing platform like Textback.ai, you can build highly strategic SMS marketing campaigns that help you roll out text messages based on different triggers. And that’s the power of personalization.

3. Helps Build Strategic Campaigns to Target Different People at Different Stages or Different Intent

Let’s dive a bit deeper into the importance of crafting different sets of messages for different people at different stages or with different intents. 

Imagine John & David – two different people at different stages of their consumers’ journey. Now, both are interested in purchasing a leather bag. 

John is ready to make a purchase. However, David is still in the very early stages and isn’t ready to make a purchase yet. Now, you can send a simple and straightforward promotional message to John. But the thing is – the same message won’t be enough to convert David – as he’s not ready to make a purchase. 

Rolling out the same message to both parties won’t do you any good. 

Now, you need to build a strategic campaign to get David to purchase a leather bag – which you can do by building SMS drip campaigns. Throughout this campaign, you can set different triggers – which when hit will help you roll out relevant text messages to David to further bring him down the buying journey.

At the same time, let’s imagine John is looking forward to purchasing a men’s leather bag; whereas David wants to purchase a women’s leather bag for her beautiful wife. 

Now, if you are planning to add an affiliate link to men’s leather bags to your SMS message, then this message won’t be relevant for David. His search intent is different. Sending an SMS with men’s leather bags URL will not work for David – as he’s planning to buy a women’s leather bag.

Luckily, Textback.ai makes it extremely easy for affiliates to build strategic SMS marketing campaigns to help them roll out SMS based on the recipient’s buying journey and intent.

4. Advanced Tracking

To optimize your SMS affiliate marketing campaigns, you would obviously have to track the right set of metrics and gain insights into whether your SMS marketing campaigns are delivering results or not. After all, you can’t afford to roll out thousands of SMS to people based in the US – with a pretty low conversion rate. 

Imagine – you’re sending 50,000 SMS each month to people based in the United States. Let’s assume the price of a single SMS stands at $0.2. So, multiplying 50,000 by $0.2 – that’s $10,000 you’re spending on SMS affiliate marketing.

BUT! What if the spam rate is too high? 

Or what if the click-through rate is too low?

If you don’t track the right metrics, you’ll never know. To gain insights into your campaigns, you need to measure the results of every single campaign you’re running. 

Otherwise, you’ll never know how well or how poor your campaigns are performing.

If your click-through rate is pretty low, maybe there’s a problem with your personalization efforts. Maybe, you’re not targeting the right set of people. Or maybe the SMS copy isn’t straight to the point or appealing.

You’ll only be able to figure out the problem with your campaigns when you monitor and track the right set of metrics.

Textback.ai’s advanced dashboard allows affiliate marketers to monitor and track their SMS marketing campaigns with ease. 

From spam rate to click-through rate to advanced metrics like the behavior of your recipients after clicking through your affiliate link, we’ve made it extremely easier for affiliates to dive deeper into their campaigns and optimize them to the fullest.

Now that we have discovered the four insane benefits of SMS affiliate marketing, it’s important to take into consideration the four important points affiliates should take into consideration. And that’s what we’ll be discussing in the next section.

4 Important Points You Should Seriously Consider While Running Strategic SMS Affiliate Marketing Campaigns

  1. The Power of Data – Data is the key to successful text messaging marketing campaigns. The more targeted your audience is, the better results will be the results your SMS marketing campaigns deliver. While accurate targeting is important, you need to make sure that it’s fresh. Also, it’s equally important to ensure that you have permission to use this data. If you want to run successful SMS affiliate marketing campaigns, you need to constantly manage your data, segment it based on your audience’s activity and your needs, monitor it, and build strategic SMS marketing campaigns.
  2. Putting the Right Offer in Front of the Right People at the Right Time – You can’t roll out an SMS that promotes leather bags to people who aren’t even the least bit interested in leather bags. If you want your SMS marketing campaigns to deliver outstanding results, you need to put the right offer in front of the right people at the right time. And doing so will include a lot of testing, research, analysis, testing, monitoring, and optimizing. 
  3. The Quality of Creatives – Again – if you want your SMS affiliate campaigns to generate 10x or 20x ROI, you need to have the right creatives in place. Simply framing a 10% off text message won’t do the job. Instead, you need to make sure that you are catching your audience’s attention, engaging them, and making sure that your offer generates a sense of urgency and helps you make them click-through.
  4. Incorporating the Right Strategies into Your SMS Marketing Campaigns – Running successful text messaging marketing campaigns is like running a factory. You need to have dedicated systems and processes in place for things to work. Textback.ai will help you keep things organized and build strategic processes – from the constant flow of data to fresh creatives and more. 

SMS Affiliate Marketing is Promising!

SMS marketing is gaining traction, all thanks to SMS’s impressive open, click-through, and engagement rate. People want you to text them rather than dial-in or roll out an email. These days, people are using their smartphones all the time. In fact, we’d go as far as saying – smartphones are man-made body organs. 

With an ever-increasing consumption and promising text message marketing numbers, SMS affiliate marketing is a brilliant strategy for affiliate marketers. 

And while SMS affiliate marketing is powerful, you need to equip a feature-packed SMS marketing platform that’s not only results-driven but also cost-effective – just like Textback.ai. 

Affiliates, what are you waiting for?

Level up your affiliate marketing venture today with SMS affiliate marketing today.

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