3 Ways Partnerships Can Drive Revenue Through Email

3 Ways Partnerships Can Drive Revenue Through Email

Email marketing is such a low cost, high conversion marketing tool — we all know that. Combine it with the power of partnership and you could really be building a targeted, engaged, and converting audience with the help of your partners.

So let’s break down how email marketing can be a tool for generating, converting, and nurturing an audience by leveraging a partner. Read on for 3 ways partnerships can drive revenue through email.

Generate Leads

We talk about it all the time on our blog: one of the biggest benefits of collaboration is that if you choose the right partner - with an audience with similar behavior, fears, emotions, values, and needs to your own - you have their captive audience at your fingertips.

One of the major pain points of email marketing is list curation. How do you generate leads? How do you generate GOOD leads? Partnership can help. Here are just a few ideas on how:

• Run a web-based giveaway. How do you do that exactly? Funny you should ask. I wrote about it in this blog post. In essence, you create a giveaway that requires entry through an email address. Each brand shares the giveaway with their email list. In the end both parties end up with a new list of emails of about 50% new leads.
• Swap blog posts and include them in both companies’ email marketing (more on how in another one of our blog posts). So you wrote an amazing blog post for your partners blog? Why not promote your email list at the bottom - linking them to a sign-up form? Then your partner can share that blog post via their email newsletter for some email marketing ‘inception.’ (Email marketing within email marketing).
• Co-host an event together. In-person events are all the rage right now, and the best event execution doesn’t end when you break down the table. Collect email addresses at the event to share with all brands involved. More on planning those events here and here. (If you couldn’t already tell we have a pretty extensive set of resources on our blog!)

Convert Those Leads

Okay, so you’ve got a list of potential customers from one of these partnerships, now what?

Segment. Make sure you are tagging or grouping these contacts together by similar characteristics — one of which being origin of acquisition. This will influence the type of content you send them down the road.

Warm up the list. There is absolutely nothing worse than getting an email from a brand totally out of the blue, and they never acknowledge how they got your email. Don’t be that brand.

Consider pace. A series of three emails sent within 3-4 days of each other is the perfect way to be transparent on why you are emailing them, begin educating them on your brand and the value you provide, and potentially giving them an incentive to buy. This email flow might look something like this:

• Day 1: “15% Off | So Glad We Met You at The Yoga Open House”: Tell them you were one of the brands tabling at the event and hope they had a blast. Give them a refresher on who you are and what you have to offer. Did you offer them a discount at the Open House? If so, extend it into the email and remind them of that activation by giving a special incentive to buy right now! (This also helps boost your sales and hook them in!)
• Day 4: “A Little Bit More About Parsnip + 15% Off”: This email is where you can really break out your best content to tell them all about who you are and why you fit into their lifestyle.
• Day 8: “Last Chance for 15% Off Parsnip”: Create a sense of urgency with your offer. Have it expire after a week or two. At that point they likely won’t buy, but the urgency you create around the offer will lead to more sales in the meantime.

Nurture Them To Be Long Term Customers

Great! So you warmed them up to the list, now what?

Well, do some analysis. How did it go? Did your welcome series generate sales? How many? Did people unsubscribe? This will give you a sense of whether or not this is a captive and relevant audience for your product. (And if this partnership is one worth doing again!).

Ask yourself the following:

1. Were the sales stellar? (Of course they were, you have an amazing product!)
   1. Keep this audience tagged and segmented so that you can send them specifically relevant content in the future. Don’t forget to also add them to your standard email marketing list as well.
   2. If you saw irregularly high sales from this group of people, you can even be intentional about emailing them once a month or once a quarter with an email specifically curated to their interests (based on your understanding of the partner you gathered them with) to really nurture them and generate sales.
2. Were the sales ho-hum? Maybe the time and effort it would take to individually email these folks would not be worth it based on the sales you saw from the welcome series. In that case, add them to your regular newsletter list and continue to nurture them this way. Long-time customers will begin to form naturally from there. (How to maintain those customers loyalty’ is a totally separate email marketing conversation!).

We know that email marketing is an overwhelming beast. There is a reason that entire email marketing platforms like Mailchimp and Klaviyo exist to help you manage this. The number of things you can do with segments, automation, retargeting, etc are practically endless. (And I could nerd out over them all day long!).

But, make continuous, small steps in the direction of a great email marketing program and before you know it, it could be your biggest sales generator. It doesn’t happen overnight though. And of course, everything's better with partnership, so why not start here?