Outreach for Affiliate Managers

What is one thing we all can agree on?

That most affiliate managers in iGaming are terrible at outreach.

If you manage the inbox and social media channels of an affiliate company, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

When someone starts a conversation with “do you got casino traffic” or “what GEOs”, you know you’re in for potentially a frustrating convo.

I think outreach is one of the most underrated and under appreciated skills in iGaming, in affiliate marketing, in SEO and in everyday life. 

BTW this newsletter is sponsored by StatsDrone and FTDx and your company could be next!

So let’s start with the first question?

What is outreach?

I asked ChatGPT to answer this in one sentence and I got this:

My definition of outreach is this is your first touch point with your target and you want to get your message received, opened and generate an action. Ideally getting a response that is of course positive.

If I open up my spam folder, I will find a lot of the worst outreach messages there. 

How many affiliate managers out there understand the basics when it comes to email deliverability?

How many think that copy and paste messages on LinkedIn are effective?

This all starts with outreach and many messages are dead on arrival because of poor execution and a lack of attention to detail. 

I’ll give you 3 points to take away as FYI.

1. Nobody likes really long messages

2. Keywords like casino are trigger keywords that harm deliverability

3. If you don’t know what DKIM, DMARC and SPF mean, time to learn it now

Email versus DMs

With the growth of email automation tools like Lemlist, instantly.ai, reply.io and Mailshake, email has become too easy and not in a good way. 

Let’s look at open rates.

I’ve read articles that say LinkedIn open rates can be as low as 50% and as high as 90%. 

I’ve just seen an article on Hubspot here that says email rates are around 42.35% as of 2025. 

I think that last stat by Hubspot is generous but regardless, I’m confident LinkedIn is better but only if you’ve got the right audience.

LinkedIn has the ability for people to look you up and see connections in common before they connect with you or decided to read and reply to your message. 

Ok DMs are better but finding affiliates on LinkedIn can be very difficult. Everyone’s a media company and we have no problem finding companies like Traffic Lab, Vita Media Group, OneTwenty, Catena Media, etc… You know, companies that should be using StatsDrone.

For everyone else, you might have to find the contact info of the affiliate on their website. 

First impressions

We are all getting a lot of messages and it is tough standing out.

If you do get the wrong impression at the start, you might have permanently lost a sale. 

Now writing to an affiliate “what GEOs” isn’t going to get you blocked, but you’re not helping the account manager in getting them to be helpful towards you. You’ve just approached this person treating them like a transaction.

I can share that when we ran our affiliate sites, most affiliate managers kept asking for the #1 position on the homepage. 

If they were friendly, then I’d tell them where our best traffic came from which happened to be our newsletter. It was actually rare for any affiliate manager to ask us about our best performing pages for FTDs and where we made most of our revenue. 

Email automation tools

I’m the kind of person who dislikes automated messages especially if I know they are automated. However a well written message can still get my attention. 

One reason why I think anybody should use any of these tools like Reply.io or instantly.ai is that they have built in analytics. These tools will help you write better emails as well. That last email you tried? You’ll know quickly if that email resonates with your target users or not. 

Simply put, your Gmail account doesn’t come with analytics or any real CRM for that matter. 

CRM tools

I believe most affiliate managers are not using any CRM tools. When they lose track of the fact that you’ve had a previous conversation with them, that is an easy sign.

I know some of the big CRM tools are Hubspot and Salesforce but I personally like Monday.com where I think the other tools can be fairly expensive. 

Think outside the box

The message you’re thinking about writing is likely similar to ones your targets are already getting. Think of ways you can mix things up.

One way that I’ve had success with in the past is Loom videos where people know they aren’t automated. The best part of Loom videos is I can get an email telling me that my video has been viewed. 

Where to find affiliates

Finding affiliates isn’t easy. You can find them on Telegram groups, WhatsApp groups, forums like GPWA and Affiliate Guard Dog. Many are on LinkedIn but they don’t openly advertise what they do. For the 1000s of affiliate sites out there, that is a lot of research to find where these affiliates are.

If you are looking for help finding them, we have a research tool that aims to map the internet of affiliate sites. It is called Affiliate Track and it is made by StatsDrone.

If you want beta access, leave a comment like ‘find’ and I’ll send you a DM.

Remember these tips on cold outreach.

1. Try to personalize

2. Use email automation tools especially for analytics

3. Use CRM tools

4. Keep your messages short

5. Learn to avoid keywords that trigger spam filters

6. Warmup your emails, instantly.ai can help with that

7. Build a relationship with your affiliates