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Tips & Guides — 13 Dec 2022

How to Launch Email Marketing Partnerships

The Beginner’s Guide to Cross-Promotional Email Campaign

Digital marketing is a sophisticated system, which encompasses dozens of different marketing channels. Each of them is efficient on its own, but, when combined, various marketing strategies can change the game. Take, for example, email marketing.

Over 50% of customers said marketing and promotional emails have influenced their buying decision. Thus, you can up the chances to reach a broader audience, acquire new customers, and increase sales by using email campaigns in partner marketing. 

Partner marketing includes many forms, from creating joint products to a simple mention of your brand as a recommendation for other company’s subscribers. We have a separate article on the types of partner marketing — feel free to check it and find the best option for you.

Depending on the type of co-marketing with other brands you’ll go for, your action plan may suffer drastic changes. Yet, it will always begin with finding perfect partners for launching a cross-promotional email campaign.

1. Find Brands for Email Marketing Partnerships

The key to the success of your cross-promotional email campaign is the right partners. To find them, marketers opt for the companies operating in the same niche as their brand does. However, you’d better avoid collaborating with your direct competitors and cooperate with someone who promotes complementary products or services. 

Another option is to rely on your target audience’s preferences and interests. Try to think of the things your customers might like as well as your product or use alongside your services. For example, if Affise would run a cross-promotional campaign, we chose fraud prevention, CR optimization, billing tools, and so on.

As long as you want to benefit from email marketing, concentrate on the brands that do cross-promotion via email and have impressive subscriber lists. Don’t neglect small businesses — sometimes they gain more trust from email subscribers than enterprises do.

Finding partners that meet these requirements may be arduous work. To alleviate the process, you can use social media listening tools or content analyzers. They will help you spot the brands operating in the same niche and pinpoint your target audience’s interests.

Also, you may address dedicated solutions, such as Affise reach. This tool allows you to access verified media partners — marketing agencies, affiliate networks, and publishers. The potential partners’ profiles contain all the information you need — websites, vendor types, verticals, geo, and so on.

2. Set a Goal for Your Email Marketing Campaign

An effective email marketing partnership is impossible without a clearly defined goal. An objective frames the promotional campaign details — its type, messaging, and so on. Thus, setting goals is one of the B2B marketing best practices, which can be applied to cross-promotion via email.

Here are several examples of goals you may achieve with your cross-promotional email marketing campaign:

  • Get the X amount of leads with the partner email campaign;
  • Increase sales by X% with the email campaign;
  • Generate the X amount of revenue with the partner email campaign;
  • Increase the number of website visitors by X%;
  • Boost brand awareness.

A clear vision of the outcomes you want to achieve with your email marketing campaign will help you choose the right email type and form of collaboration, create relevant content, come up with a catchy subject line and strong CTA. Better yet, clear-cut goals are handy to evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

3. Choose a Suitable Co-marketing Form

Email marketing collaborations may come in various shapes and sizes. Here are several types of emails you can employ:

  • Email newsletter, where your partner introduces or mentions your brand.
  • Lead nurturing messages, providing some value for email subscribers. It can be content you’ve created together with a partner, useful tips, case studies, and so on.
  • Special offer email, where a partner shares your discount or other exclusive offers with their email list.
  • Announcement email that offers partner’s subscribers to attend a collaborative event or webinar you hold together.
  • Celebration email that shares your brand’s important dates.
  • Product launch email with a new product announcement.
  • Seasonal sale email to encourage subscribers to use your seasonal offer.

However, the exact form of a cross-promotional email depends on your agreement with a partner. You may get a simple mention in their regular newsletter, as well as a dedicated email campaign or even sequence.

4. Clarify the Details of a Partner Marketing Email Campaign

Crafting and launching a cross-promotional email campaign is a complex process, which involves a lot of details. To organize everything and be sure you’ll get the result you need, discuss the nuts and bolts of your partnership.

Start with the degree of control over a project your partner is ready to offer. Will you approve the final version of an email or your role boils down to simply providing another party with the key messaging points?

The email design requires your attention too. Present your brand guidelines to your partner and discuss what elements of your branding will be included in the campaign. You also may share your email template.

The pro-tip for this stage is to put every point you agreed about with a partner into a cross-promotion contract. The document should include a clear-cut description of the email campaign details, duties of both parties, deadlines, and guarantees.  In this stage, it’s essential to prioritize email security and follow DMARC statistics because it is crucial for building an effective partner marketing email campaign.

Wrapping It Up

Launching a cross-promotional email campaign with another brand is a great tactic to boost brand awareness, find new customers, and increase sales. However, you shouldn’t stop by clicking the Send button. To convert more leads into paying buyers, you’ll need to take care of other marketing materials, such as well-designed and high-conversion landing pages, email follow-ups, and so on.

To make sure you’ve squeezed every bit of value from your email marketing partnership, keep an eye on its’ results. Find the metrics to monitor in our article on how to integrate partner marketing with email marketing. In this piece of content, we also share a bundle of useful tips and tricks on launching email marketing partnerships.

Partner marketing campaigns need careful management, which can be resource-intensive. To streamline processes and achieve great results, employ a partner marketing platform, such as Affise. Our solution allows marketing automation, helps to find the right partners and manage relationships with them, provides end-to-end analytics, and more.

Try Affise today! Submit for a free trial and
check out all platform’s functionality by yourself!

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Anna Averianova

Written by

Content Manager

Anna is a Content Marketer with a background in B2B, creative approach, and eagerness for professional improvement. She aspires to produce content that helps achieve business objectives and benefit readers. When she’s not delved into writing another exciting article for you, she’s probably fooling around with her cat.

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