Why we wrote this guide

We want to help you use co-marketing as a tool that allows you to take your promotions a step further. Co-marketing will help you and your partners quickly grow your businesses with minimal costs.

We’ve found that co-marketing, or partner promotions, have several obstacles that tend to paralyze brands and prevent them from even starting because: they are unsure of where to find partners, how to approach partners, and how to setup and market the promotion.

This guide will walk you every step of the way… helping you navigate your way from beginning to end so that you can launch a successful partner promotion.

and a bit about us

Giancarlo Massaro

Co-founder

Created Viralsweep's predecessor, AnyLuckyDay. Alumnus of Sacred Heart University. Serial Entrepreneur.

Steven Kovar

Co-founder

Previously Lead Designer at AppSumo. Alumnus of University of Texas. Interned at NASA's Habitability Design Center.

Lauren Appelwick

Netted

Marketing + Partnerships Director for Netted by the Webbys.

The benefits of running partner promotions

Running a sweepstakes with just your own brand can be very successful, but have you ever thought about running a sweepstakes with several other businesses that compliment your brand?

The biggest benefit of co-marketing is that every brand involved in the promotion gets increased exposure for their business. Every participating party comes to an agreement on what they will be contributing, which usually involves a dedicated email blast to their list, as well as posts on their social profiles. When you’re working with multiple brands that have sizeable audiences, you’re increasing exposure for your business, while growing your email list and social profiles at the same time.

This huge advantage over single promotions usually come at little to no expense, because every partner is contributing an equal amount to the promotion, and everyone is splitting the email opt-ins.

Who are partner promotions for?

They're for anybody

Partner promotions can be used with just about any type of business, and they can even be used for both B2C and B2B.

Co-marketing allows you to partner with other brands to promote your content, infographics, videos, products, services, events, etc.

You don’t necessarily need to be running a sweepstakes for a partner promotion either (though that is what this guide will primarily focus on). Co-marketing allows you to partner with other brands to promote your content, infographics, videos, products, services, events, etc.

Introduction to Co-Marketing

Co-marketing is a powerful promotional tool that allows several brands to all grow their businesses simultaneously.

You may have heard of co-branding before, and this is different than co-marketing.

So co-branding is where two or more brands work together to create a product or service, or to make a product even better than it already is. In Apple’s case, they partnered with Nike back in 2006 to launch the Nike+iPod, which allowed the iPod to talk with certain Nike+ footwear products to track your workouts.

So picture this: you want to run a sweepstakes or contest to promote your business and your products and drive in new email subscribers and sales. Now, how much better would that promotion be if you had a second business promoting your offer to their audience as well? What about a third business promoting the offer? This is a big "ah-hah", lightbulb-overoyour-head epihany for most people.

With co-marketing, you are able to unlock the door to entirely new audiences, and the cost to do so is very low compared to other forms of marketing.

Remember, you could use co-marketing for almost anything: to market new products or services, to promote courses, books, videos, and even events too.

In this guide, we’re going to show you how to use co-marketing to launch successful sweepstakes and contests.

You’ll learn how to acquire partners for your campaign, how to setup a campaign with multiple partners, how to market the campaign, and everything you can think of in between.

Meet your Co-Marketing Guru

Lauren Appelwick

Lauren is the Marketing + Partnerships Director at Webby Media Group, which produces The Webby Awards and Netted by the Webbys. Netted is a daily newsletter and a can't-miss resource for the best apps, products, and services the Internet has to offer.

She has grown Netted by the Webbys newsletter list by over 300%, thanks in part to the Viralsweep platform.

"Partner promotions are great for list building because you can easily triple your distribution while keeping the cost of acquisition incredibly low."

Lauren has been an active user of Viralsweep for over a year, and she's run over 50 co-marketing sweepstakes. As someone who has run successful promotions for years, garnering hundreds of thousands of impressions and entries, we’ve caught up with Lauren to pick her brain to find out how she manages to pull off these co-marketing promotions, and how you can, too.

But first, we wanted to know why Lauren prefers partner promotions over just running a promotion where only her brand is involved.

“Single-brand promotions are great if the objective is to generate activity within your own audience. (e.g. Hosting a giveaway on behalf of a sponsor, or converting newsletter subscribers to Twitter followers.) But they're not always successful or efficient when it comes to list building.

Partner promotions are great for list building because you can easily triple your distribution while keeping the cost of acquisition incredibly low.”

Lauren’s right, while running a single promotion with just your brand can be successful, it doesn’t beat having multiple brands promoting a single offer, which opens the door to multiple audiences that you could only previously access by paying for advertising.

The first step in getting a partner promotion started is to identify and acquire partners.

Partner Acquisition

Finding partners to work with you on a sweepstakes is the first step that we find many brands struggle with. If you’re a fairly new business in your niche or you don’t have many connections, it can be tough to find partners who are willing to work with you on a campaign.

So, how do you find potential partners? Lauren says that it is easy to find partners if you keep your eye out for sweepstakes or contests in the first place, because then you have a grasp for which brands run them.

“I must be subscribed to at least 150 newsletters. I flag the ones that involve co-promotions, and keep a spreadsheet of who's working together.

Before you send out pitches, it's valuable to know who's open to partnerships, which other brands they're aligned with, and what kind of promotions they've participated in recently.”

This advice is extremely important, because this is the first step in identifying potential partners who are warm leads. If they’re running sweepstakes or partner promotions already, then you already know they are open to the idea of running similar campaigns.

If your brand is small, fairly new, or you just don’t have any connections to reach out to, Lauren says it’s acceptable to send a cold email when reaching out to partners.

“Everyone's partnerships program started small. The great thing about co-marketing is that you're building relationships as you go. If a past partner had a positive experience working with you, they're often happy to introduce you to new leads. We're all trying to accomplish the same thing, so it's helpful to exchange an intro or a favor when you can."

Don’t be discouraged if you don’t hear back from anyone. You need to test your outreach (try multiple email templates to see which one gets more responses), and test the type of partner you are reaching out to (perhaps the brand you reached out to is too large, so try finding a smaller brand to start).

What type of partners should you look for—and how many?

Before sending out a cold email though, you should always do your research.

Keep an eye out for potential partners, and list them in your spreadsheet for future reference. On a per-campaign basis, Lauren says she usually goes for 3-4 partners, depending upon how well-aligned everyone is.

A really strong group of 3 partners has the potential to convert many entrants to their email lists, while a group of 6 partners is going to be really tough, because onboarding entrants to 6 different lists can feel spammy and it may upset readers.

In determining the types of partners you should be seeking, you need to think about content fit.

Picture this, Lauren says:

“If an ad for your brand showed up on a potential partner’s site, would that seem natural? Or would it appear out of place? If it doesn’t feel natural, that partner probably isn’t the right fit for you.”

You never want to work with anyone who is in direct competition with your brand, and you also likely don’t want to work with anyone that has an audience size that is much smaller than yours. However, Lauren says that a smaller list may be able to buy in by sponsoring the prize, thereby taking on the costs that the other partners would have to split.

Partner Outreach

Reaching out and closing several partners for a campaign can seem like a daunting task, but we’re here to help walk you through the process so that every barrier to entry is broken down for you.

First, when reaching out to potential partners with a cold email, you want to make absolutely certain of a few things:

Now that you’ve followed the above points, it’s time to reach out to a potential partner.

As Lauren says:

“The context of your outreach really depends upon where you are in the process. Your outreach to your first potential partner may read much differently than your outreach to the third, when you’ve already closed two other partners.”

For example, your first outreach may look like this:

While your third outreach may look like this:

We asked Lauren how she would approach a partner she came across that she had no previous connection to, but wanted to work with. She said:

Organizing the partner promotion

Setting Expectations

Before a campaign begins, it is best to set goals or expectations with your partners, so everyone knows what to expect, and what role they will need to play when it comes to marketing.

Lauren says that before the promotion begins:

“Every partner shares their email list size, as well as their audience reach through social media. We try our best to match impressions."

"For example partner A could have a list size of 500,000, and partner B could have a list size of 200,000, but a Facebook page with 1 million fans. In this case, partner A would send (1) dedicated email, and partner B would send (1) dedicated email and post 3x on Facebook.”

Generally though, Lauren says that everyone typically contributes a dedicated email blast and a few social posts because the group of partners is usually all about the same size. In addition, if one partner realizes they are underperforming, they will increase their media plan to try and catch up.

Appointing the Lead

Usually, if you are the one looking to run a co-marketing campaign and you are acquiring partners, you’re most likely going to also be the one who is setting up and coordinating every aspect of the promotion.

Lauren says that in their case, one partner takes on the role of Project Lead. This person is the one who kicks off the campaign by reaching out to potential partners to gauge fit and interest.

All partners will usually have a stake in the theme, design, and what the prizes are.

However, the Project Lead is the one who really controls and coordinates it all, while always looking for feedback and input from the partners to help craft a successful campaign for all those involved.

Duties of the Project Lead

The Prizes

Determining the person or company that will supply the prizes will come down to your individual agreement with partners, however, in almost all cases the partners always split the cost of the prizes, or they all contribute an equal dollar amount of prizes to the campaign.

However, if you are a smaller brand, or you are bringing in a partner that is a smaller brand, it’s possible that they will foot the bill for the prizes in order to be part of the promotion.

Partnership Agreement

There are terms that are agreed to by all partners before the start of the campaign, using a partnership agreement. While terms may vary for your own individual case, for Lauren, all partners put in the same amount of media, and therefore everyone walks away with the full list of email opt-ins.

In some cases, some partners are only looking for publicity and branding, and do not care about receiving the email opt-in list.

Once you secure all of your partners for a campaign, you will need to have them all sign a partnership agreement where everyone agrees to the terms of the promotion, and everyone is in agreement on what they need to be doing.

Email Opt-Ins & Official Rules

When dealing with a promotion where there are multiple partners, it is important to make entrants aware that they are going to be opted-in to multiple email lists when they enter the promotion.

If your email opt-in is not made clear, you may end up with a very high unsubscribe rate when sending out your emails.

Lauren says that she will always explicitly state the terms of entry on the landing page below the entry form. Something as simple as “By entering this sweepstakes, you agree to receive email communications from all partners and sponsors.”

According to Lauren, it feels sneaky to hide the opt-in terms in the rules, because if entrants know what they’re getting into and why they will begin to receive your newsletter, they’ll be less likely to mark you as spam, which is very bad for your business.

Lauren astutely mentions:

"The rules we use have been approved by our lawyers. Rules change based on eligibility, who you're targeting (US only, or open to Canada, etc.) and what the prize and age requirement is (18 or 21+)."

We always recommend that you have your lawyer check over your official rules before launching a sweepstakes. Additionally, there are limits as to what you can and can't do with the email opt-ins, so you have to make sure you're abiding by all CAN-SPAM laws.

Marketing the Campaign

Set Up Tracking

When running a partner promotion, you want to have sufficient tracking in place in order to determine the performance of each partner.

Tracking partner performance can be done using several methods. First, you can use the Google URL builder to generate custom campaign URL’s for each partner. Each partner will use their specific URL when promoting the campaign. Inside of Google Analytics, you would be able to track traffic going to these URL’s under your campaigns.

Another option is to use Viralsweep’s custom tracking links tool, which allows you to create your own bit.ly URL’s that you can supply each of your partners with, and then you can track clicks and entries coming from each link directly within Viralsweep.

While impressions or visits to the page are important, the most important factor is determining the number of conversions—or in this case, entrants—each partner is driving to the campaign.

This way you can reach out to each partner throughout the campaign to let them know how they are performing, and if they are underperforming, you can encourage them to increase their media plan.

Marketing the Promotion

Marketing is planned before the promotion begins, and is laid out in the partnership agreement that everyone signs. This agreement will let each partner know what their role is when it comes to marketing.

The great thing about co-marketing is that you really don’t need to think too hard about how you are going to market the campaign. Partners also should not have to spend any money on advertising.

Since every partner has their own audience, the only thing they need to do is reach out to their audience to promote the campaign.

When you have multiple partners doing this at one time, you should start to see a surge of traffic and entries.

If a campaign is running and all partners have promoted it and it is underperforming, or a specific partner is underperforming, there could be several reasons for this.

If a partner underperforms, it could be that the prize was not a good fit for their audience, so their audience is not converting as well as they had expected. On rare occasions, it could be that the partner was not upfront about the number of conversions they expected to drive to the campaign from their list.

If everything is properly planned before launching the promotion, your partner promotion should not underperform to the point of becoming a lost cause.

If every partner has done their part and the campaign is still not performing as well as expected, ask…

A good way to figure this out is to look at your email list size, and then look at your email campaigns. What % of your list is opening your campaigns? What % of your list is clicking through on your email campaigns?

If you have 100,000 emails on your list but you only get a 2%-3% open rate, you should not be expecting to drive 10,000 entries to your campaign

Paid Advertising

Paid advertising, like Facebook ads or influencer posts can be really successful for driving traffic and entries to your campaign.

However, Lauren says:

“I’ve only known partners to do paid media when they are suddenly and unexpectedly underperforming, and that’s just out of respect for the other partners.”

She continues, "Sometimes, a smaller partner will include paid in their marketing plan, but it’s rare."

Since there are many partners working on a campaign together and everyone has an audience, paid advertising shouldn’t be necessary as long as everyone has a sizeable audience to begin with.

Advice for Brands

We picked Lauren’s brain to get the most information out of her that we could. When asked how small brands should get started when they don’t have that big of an audience, she said:

“I would recommend starting with some other brands that have an audience size of under 100,000 to help kickstart you.”

“Go to them and say that you will not only host the sweepstakes and make all the creative, but that you will also cover the prize costs. It’ll give them faith that you’re not just trying to ride their coattails, but that you want it to be successful for them as well.”

The two biggest roadblocks we’ve found many businesses face are:

Though we’ve covered how to overcome these hurdles earlier in this guide, Lauren says:

“Think about brands that are complimentary to yours, or have similar (but not competitive) value propositions. If you run a beauty newsletter with makeup tips, maybe a spa brand might be a good fit. Or if you're a small bed & breakfast, maybe a local coffee shop would like to work with you. Even when brands reach out to me, and we decide it's not the right fit that time, we often stay in touch and will help connect each other to leads in the future.

But the biggest piece of advice I can offer is: don't burn anyone. Your partners are, in many ways, the keepers of your reputation and how you're perceived to other potential partners. If you're rude or difficult to work with, or you don't deliver on promises you made, rest assured that it will not remain a secret. Partner campaigns are based on mutual interest and integrity, and you won't succeed if you don't make a positive impression.”

When it comes to partner promotions, Lauren has a great deal of experience being approached by brands of all shapes and sizes, so we wanted to put you in her shoes for you to see how someone at a larger brand analyzes outreach from a smaller brand.

Netted is a large company with a large following, so we asked Lauren how marketers at established brands might think about partnerships with smaller, newer brands.

Lauren says:

“Any marketer approached by a smaller brand is going to wonder: If my list is 500k, what do I get out of a list that's 5k? Is my brand stuffy, and the smaller brand is trendy? Do they have major growth potential that will benefit me later?

You should make it very clear what value you bring when pitching a much larger or more established brand. Remember that every time they send an email campaign, that's an opportunity for their readers to unsubscribe. They need to know that taking a chance on you will be worth it.

Thank you

We're so grateful that you took the time to read our Advanced Guide to Partner Promotions.

We hope the information we've provided will help you in building up your email list, social audiences, and growing your business. We also want to thank Lauren Appelwick for taking the time to provide us with amazing insight into the world of co-marketing.

If you have any questions or comments about anything in this guide, or about promotions in general, leave a comment below and we’ll respond.

We also built a Partner Network to help brands using Viralsweep to find partners they might have otherwise never considered. The network boasts over 1,000 brands and is growing daily.

Check out the profile for Netted by the Webbys created by our co-author of this very guide, Lauren!

What are the perks of joining the Viralsweep Network?

• Find Brands

  Find the perfect partners in the Viralsweep Network to invite to your upcoming campaign.

• Hire Influencers

  Find the right influencers to promote your next campaign—every step easily handled in-app.

• Message In-App

  Skip the giant email chains. Coordinate your next campaign with Viralsweep's in-app messaging.
  

• Assign Permissions

  Ensure each partner contributes equally by setting data permissions and performance expectations.

• Beautiful Profiles

  Give your brand the perfect first impression with a beautifully designed profile.

Ask us anything, or tell us how your partner promotion went!