Affiliates that sign-up with affiliate programs are given the tools for them to promote the offers. Text links, banners, datafeed files, dynamic links, etc. Some even provides datafeed/coupon sites that can be downloaded and others provides widgets that dynamically updates itself when there's new products, updated pricing, new promo, etc. And of course, many affiliate programs provides email htmls for affiliates to email to their subscribers, email list, newsletters, friends, contacts, families.

Now if you're new to this and you're wondering what you're getting yourself into, remember that one of the biggest problem producing method for the affiliate in email marketing is... spamming. Consider that you can easily be blacklisted, gigantic hit on the your subscriber pool, getting sued and a list of other complication that arises from spamming. But if you're still going ahead with spamming (or something that almost qualifies as spamming), you gotta be familiar with spam reports, internal & external blacklists, dynamic IPs, and whole lot more technological aspects of it if you want to bypass the filters and systems in place to block your emails. If you're spamming from one email account, then consider your efforts in email marketing, even if you're sending legitimate emails to be hampered considerably. Once you're blacklisted, imagine all the recipients having to find your emails from the junk/spam folders.

Ofcourse, you might not necessarily want to spam, as you may have lots of subscribers to your feed, or members who are willing to receive a monthly newsletter of some sort. Perhaps some subscribers have even agreed beforehand to receiving promotional/'updates' emails. Then what you need to do is make sure, you learn the art of coming up with content that will appeal to recipients and encourage a call to action.

Some people might sell you their 'millions of email account database' but if you don't know what to do with it, it's gonna be wasted. There's alot of requirements to meet to avoid being labeled as spam and investments in regards to software, hosting, servers, etc for it to go anywhere.