Marketing of any kind today is all about personalization. Audiences — whether B2C or B2B — expect personalized, relevant messages and experiences from the brands and partners they deal with. In email marketing, personalization is a must. Hubspot reports that for 2020, personalization is the #1 tactic used by email marketers to increase engagement rates. And when you use email to recruit new partners to your program, the same rules apply.
Hubspot reports that for 2020, personalization is the #1 tactic used by email marketers to increase engagement rates. And when you use email to recruit new partners to your program, the same rules apply.
Bringing on potential partners — here’s how
To convince a potential partner to join your program, you need to communicate in a way that is relevant and specific. But how do you do this efficiently when you’re reaching out to hundreds or thousands of prospective partners? Manually writing personalized communications to every one of your potential recruits is a heroic but impractical goal. By segmenting, you enable automation to step in and scale the execution of your personalization strategy. Think about it: by setting up 30 segments and automating delivery of 20 emails per segment each day, you can crank out 600 emails a day. Segmentation plus automation allows for personalized messages on a superhuman scale.
Segment by attributes
Maybe you want to attract a certain type of partner to diversify your portfolio and present a special offer. Or perhaps you want to present different offers to different influencers who are subject matter experts in specific verticals. Partnership professionals can segment recruiting lists by leveraging any combination of attributes imaginable in order to personalize messages and motivate response.
In the example below, personalization happens in two dimensions:
- Both small and large influencers receive some form of 1:1 personalized marketing, such as having their names and instagram URLs included in the email copy.
- Influencers with a larger audience get a special email: they are recruited into a VIP program.
| SegmentVertical: FashionInstagram Audience Size: <10K | SegmentVertical: FashionInstagram Audience Size: >75K |
| Hi {{first_name}},This is Max from Awesome Brand X. We’re always looking for emerging new fashion influencers on Instagram and love what you’re doing at {{Instagram_url}}!Would you like to join our program?You can join here (link).Best, | Hi {{first_name}},This is Max from Awesome Brand X. We’re recruiting great fashion influencers to our VIP Influencer program. We are impressed by your creativity and style at {{Instagram_url}}!We have some ideas, but would love to hear about how you work with brands. Let me know if you have time for a call.Best, |
Match the audience to the offer
Beyond personalizing emails by partner attribute, you may want to personalize by performance potential. In the diagram below, you can see that often your list will include a small number of recruits with huge revenue potential (red segment). You also have a modest number of recruits with still significant revenue potential (green segment) and a large number of recruits with smaller revenue potential (blue segment). According to the long tail theory, the accumulated revenue from the long tail (the area under the blue curve) can yield significantly more revenue for your program than the red area does. But to realistically take advantage of the high-volume long tail, you have to segment and automate.
One approach is to segment partners according to number of followers and partition them into the head, body, and long tail. Then, tailor practical, manageable offers based on the partner segment you’re engaging.
- For the long tail, you may put forward your standard offer, no additional perks, no negotiation, just take it or leave it. There are enough of them out there that you can afford to drive a harder bargain, and you can’t reasonably negotiate with hundreds of small partners.
- For the body, you may opt for more flexibility. Maybe there’s an up-and-coming blogger with a fast-growing audience who you choose to allow into your VIP program, and offer a 15% commission instead of your standard 8% commission.
- For the head, you may automatically suggest a conversation to hammer out a highly enticing, customized offer. These are potentially your most strategic partners, so a custom offer may require verbal negotiation.
To learn more about optimizing your email recruitment efforts to grow your partnership program, check out our eBook: How to scale your partner recruiting: Lessons from a million outreach emails. Or just shoot off an email to an Impact growth technologist now at grow@impact.com.
