Email marketing partnerships: how to help others help you

Did you know that partnering with non-competitive brands can improve your email marketing efforts, increase exposure, and help grow your email address database faster?

Despite these benefits, many companies are struggling to launch their email partnership campaigns as they stumble upon the same challenge – the inability to find suitable partners. 

Finding potential partners for email collaboration is easier than one might think. In this guide, we will share the top tips that will help you boost email conversions and sales with the help of email partnerships. So, let’s get started! 

Partnership marketing resources 

There are many good reasons why you may want to collaborate with other brands to run an email marketing campaign. Email partnerships can help you grow brand awareness, broaden your reach, engage new audiences, and ultimately increase conversions.

But before entering a partnership, you should consider different partnership marketing resources. Hence, you can find the most productive way to collaborate with other brands with the end goal of converting more email recipients into paying customers. 

Best partnership marketing resources

To help you get started, here is a list of the best partnership marketing resources. 

1. Publishing websites 

Partnering with online publishers is a great way to boost sales and conversions, especially if your company offers informational and digital products. When collaborating with publishing websites, you must keep up with the high demand for original and high-quality content. 

The quality of the content you produce is as important as the content type and topics. That is why it is important that you choose a publisher that matches your niche well. 

2. Pinterest 

Pinterest Business offers a great feature that sends emails to users when products they have pinned go on sale. These emails are pretty simple, but they do deliver the right kind of marketing message. When it comes to sales and conversions, this co-marketing method proves to be very effective. In fact, studies show that 83% of US Pinners have made a purchase based on Pins from brands. 

3. Non-profits 

Nonprofits are another great partnership marketing resource. Partnering with charities and other non-profit organizations is a great way to expand your reach and increase brand awareness. Besides, by collaborating with nonprofits, you can fulfill your corporate social responsibility and enable positive change.

4. Educational organizations 

If your brand offers products or services appealing to students, college faculty, or students’ parents, educational organizations are your go-to partnership category. Choose an educational organization that offers majors in the field that matches your product line for a better product-market fit.

Non-competitive businesses 

Even though it is important to choose a partner that operates in the same industry, you should not collaborate with a competitive business. Instead, partner with brands that offer complementary products and services. For example, if you offer digital services, like web hosting, it makes sense to partner with companies, like Smartproxy, that offer similar but not identical products. This way, you can get the most out of co-marketing without risking losing potential clients to competitors. 

Choosing the right brand to partner with 

The key to increasing sales and conversions often lies in choosing the right brand to partner with. The general rule of thumb is finding a company with audience demographics that match your target audience demographics criteria. So, when choosing a brand to collaborate with, make sure to pick the one that shares a similar audience but is not a direct competitor. 

Besides similar target markets, you and your email marketing partner must share the same marketing goals. If you aim to increase email conversions and sales, it makes sense to choose a brand with similar marketing goals for email collaboration. 

How to start your email co-marketing campaign? 

Once you have defined clear co-marketing goals and objectives, and have found potential partners, it is time to pitch your collaboration idea. When you start sending out emails with partnership offers, you will notice that they all share a similar email funnel structure.

Advised email funnel structure for email partnership campaigns:

1. Introduction – explains who you are and reasons why the company you are emailing should be paying attention to your offer. 
2. Recognition –  explains your choice of a potential partner and compliments their work. 
3. Request – pitches the idea for collaboration and answers the question “What do you want another brand to do?”
4. Offer – covers what you will do if they agree to fulfill your request. 
5. Call-to-action – gives an instruction on what they should do to discuss the partnership furtner. 

Even though the email structure and content will differ from company to company, you can use this structure format as a reference when designing your partnership pitching emails.

Choosing suitable collaborative marketing form 

Collaborative marketing can take different forms. It can be something as simple as mentioning another brand in your email newsletter or sending out a promotional email offering a collaboration discount. 

To help you choose a suitable form of collaborative marketing for your email campaign, below is a list of email co-marketing ideas.

Email co-marketing ideas:

• Send out news emails introducing another brand
• Inviting subscribers to check out relevant content from another brand’s blog. 
• Subscribers to attend a collaborative event or shared webinar. 
• Emails sharing another brand’s important dates (e.g. another company’s birthday).
• Emails inviting subscribers to participate in a collaborative giveaway or contest. 

Partnering with another brand to run a giveaway 

By partnering with other brands to run contests and giveaways, you can expand your reach and ultimately increase your sales and conversions. And email is the perfect medium to invite subscribers to participate in your collaborative giveaway. All you need to do is send out an email highlighting the prize and explaining to subscribers what they need to do in order to enter. 

A few content types you can run to increase conversion:

• Sweepstakes
• Giveaways
• Enter-to-win contests
• Quizzes
• Surveys

To create some of these, a tool like Typeform can come in handy, where you can create no-code forms, surveys, or quizzes and share them in your email. Surveys also let you collect feedback and other relevant data that can help you enhance your marketing campaigns.

Besides increasing conversions, you can use email partnerships to run contests for gathering user-generated content (UGC). Here is how it works. 

Let us say you have partnered with another brand to launch a contest or giveaway. Then, you can use email to promote your contest and get more prospects to join the competition. When designing the rules for your contest, you can ask contest participants to create and share pieces of content.

For example, you can ask your email recipients to share a picture of your and your partner’s product on social media via hashtag. Later, you can use these user-generated content pieces as a form of social proof to build trust with other prospective customers.

Final Thoughts 

Email co-marketing is a great way to increase sales and email conversions. A clear co-marketing campaign structure is key if you want your collaboration to bear fruit. That is why before launching your email co-marketing campaign, make sure to clearly define your goals and objectives, and know what you have to offer. 

The best advice is to start small and build from successful experiences. This way, you can ultimately increase email conversions and sales and choose the best-suited partnership marketing resources.