One of the things we do here at MarketingProfs is create and manage partnerships. Like everybody else in business, we do this because we have our own interests in mind and feel that partnerhips can help us. You probably do this as well, perhaps through affiliate programs or cross-linking on the web, and through more complicated agreements off the web.
Regardless of the type, we all try to be good partners. At least, that's what people tend to say. But how do you become a good partner?
Well, we've learned some things about partnering that you might find useful. We'll tell you a bit about our experiences with one type of partnership called a co-reg agreement (call this a small case study). But the lessons are useful for all types of partnerships.
Co-reg agreements are a great way to build subscribers to online newsletters. We've found it to be a better way to interest people in our site than advertising, putting articles on other people's sites and even online advertising services like Moreover and paid search engines like Sprinks.
Of course, to do a co-reg agreement you need to first be a good co-reg partner. In our case, we strive to provide newsletter subscribers to our co-reg partners, and so far we've been able to get about 57% or more of our subscribers to subscribe to the newsletters of our partners. 57% is actually quite a high number but in some cases this number can be much higher.
To be a good co-reg partner (and also to be able to see whether or not your partners are being good to you), you need to do at least 3 things which are common for really any partnership. This includes:
- A good selection of partners
- A very good way to encourage your customers to interact with your partners
- A good reporting system, so you know what's going on
Choosing Partners
Choosing the right partner is the most obvious, but often difficult decision in all partnerships. With co-reg agreements you want to partner with sites that draw traffic in your target segment. Most co-reg agreements require you to "upsale" the partner sites on your "Thank You" page when people subscribe to some service, or in our case, our newsletter. It doesn't matter whether the site draws a lot of traffic or not, but what does matter is whether or not a lot of people see the Thank You page, otherwise they won't see your offer.
Don't focus on the irrelevant aspects of a partner (in our case, that would be traffic), just the relevant aspects that relates specifically to your goals in the partnership (conversion of traffic to people who go to the Thank You page).
The other thing about partners is that we find it's best to work with sites that are (or can be positioned as) complementary to us. Complementarity is central to any parthership, of course, but sometimes this means reducing your offering. That's right,you might need to give up something (hey, this is a partnership we're talking about).
For example, we position ourselves as providing solid marketing know-how for both online and offline companies. A good example of a complementary site is one that provides real-life marketing case studies or marketing data and statistics. Sure, we provide some case studies and data as well, but we downplay those in order to be a good partner (and this is important on our Thank You for Becoming a Member page, which I'll talk about next).
So you might start by thinking about whether your partners are complementary or not. If they aren't you can make them complementary by reducing what you offer or how you position yourself. Encourage Visitors to Visit Your Partner
Since we spend a lot of time and thought identifying partners (and you should too), we feel good about encouraging our visitors and members to visit our partner's site or sign up for their newsletters. For example, when someone signs up for our newsletter offer, they are brought to a thank you landing page. We spend a lot of time thinking about this page and how it will best work to encourage a subscriber to subscribe to the newsletter of a partner.
This is how we do it. We first tell them (after we say thanks for subscribing) that in essence, marketing success doesn't happen by just having the solid know-how that we provide (notice how we're purposely focusing our message), it requires more. And now we tell them what we see as the other things they really need to succeed. For example, we might say that you really need to also experience case studies and we highly recommend a resource. By the way, we really mean this!
We do the same for every partner, and since we're only partnering with complementary sites, we try to make the whole package complementary. Therefore, we never overlap two partners. If we overlapped partners we would surely end up not doing the best for any one partner. That's no way to be a good partner!
As a result, we can put 2 or 3 partners on our thank you page and most people who sign up for one sign up for all 3.
Another thing is to make it absolutely easy to engage with your partners. In our case this means making it rediculously easy to subscribe to our partner's newsletter. When someone signs up for our newsletter, we carry their email address behind the scenes (in what's known as a Session variable), so the user doesn't have to add their email address again (who really wants to do that?). All they do is check or uncheck a box next to each partner and hit subscribe. Our software takes care of the rest.
Reporting
We like to know how we and our partnerships are doing, and so we put together a good reporting system that allows us to track how many people we're sending to each partner, and how many people they're sending us. By doing this we can see if we need to do anything to improve the conversion rate (from our subscriber to a partner's subscriber) in real time. We can also see how our partners are doing for us. We don't mind providing more subscribers to a partner than vice versa, but when the difference gets too large we try to contact them to work out other agreements, for example, free advertising, etc. When that can't be worked out we simply click a button and our partners disappear from our Thank You page. Frankly, we never dreamed we would need to have this level of control and reporting. But many of our partners so far haven't really been that great. In fact, in every case we have provided almost 2 times as many subscribers to them as they have to us.
Risks and Lessons
Being a good partner requires taking risks. That means you can get burned from time to time and like I said this is where having a great reporting system comes in handy. We used to start a partnership by saying let's try this out for 3 or 4 months. Now we say let's monitor this agreement after 2 weeks and make sure we're both putting enough energy into the partnership to make it mutually worthwhile.
It's like a date. If your date isn't as involved as you are in the relationship, maybe it's time to cut the cord.
And that of course is the real lesson of being a great partner. You need to work for the benefit of both parties (not just yourself), but be willing to get out or at least feel some control over the situation when it's clear your partners don't feel the same.
In this way, the partnership is like a marriage. If you're both compatible, respect each other, and work hard for each other, the results could be truly incredible.
