In the age of internet marketing it’s easy to overlook more traditional mediums like good old fashioned mail. For many types of business this might make sense but before you rule it out for your own business take a closer look at how to leverage a direct mail campaign and some benefits of doing so.

Direct mail campaigns allow you to create marketing materials beyond subject line and copy. You can design an entire 3 dimensional object to put in your target audience’s hands and the choices you make can have a huge impact. Your direct mail piece can be in an attention grabbing color, it can contain product samples or promotional items. In short, it affords you the opportunity to make a much larger impact than digital communication can offer.

Below are examples of a few cases where direct mail campaigns made a lot of sense:

1. A skincare company I’ve done marketing for in the past designed a campaign to promote a new line of roll-on fragrances. Since this sort of thing can’t be sampled through the internet, the company sent out perfume samples to every customer who purchased from them in the last 6 months. In the sample packages the company included a coupon for 10% off any purchase of the new roll-on fragrances. The benefits of the coupon were two-fold. To begin with, it gave customers a money saving incentive to purchase if they enjoyed the samples. The other advantage of the coupon is that it allowed for tracking the success of the campaign. The coupon code that went out in the direct mail piece was only given to those customers so when orders came in with that coupon code, the skincare company knew they were getting sales from the direct mail campaign.

2. An interior design firm that catered to home owners with properties worth over 1 million dollars designed a campaign to entice new home owners to use their services. The firm made a favorable introduction with new home buyers by mailing them a “housewarming” direct mail piece. The firm put together gift baskets containing pens with their web address and phone number, brochures of past jobs they’d done and fresh baked cookies from a local bakery. To offset the costs of this direct mail piece the firm also included a value-pak type coupon pack for local vendors such as restaurants and dry cleaners. Each vendor participating in the welcome pack contributed to the expense of printing the coupons and mailing the packages. (Note that this case includes not only a smart use of direct mail marketing, but also employs the power of cross-promotion to offset the cost of the direct mail campaign!)

The costs for direct mail can certainly add up quickly so it’s a strategy that you’ll want to use sparingly most of the time. That said, for a big impact campaign or the promotion of a product that needs to be sample, direct mail can be a powerful tool for attracting new customers or wooing existing ones.

Editor’s note: Thanks, ReviewPage.com, for telling your visitors about Brand Torrent.

The mailing list is an invaluable tool in your marketing arsenal. It’s an entire list of people who think your brand is interesting enough to let you email them your marketing pitches on a somewhat regular basis. You may be wondering how a company gets consumers or clients to agree to such a thing, and honestly, it’s not always easy. We’ve got a few tried and true tips for making your mailing list bigger and better and we’re going to explore them today.

Before we get started, you’ll need to decide if you’re doing an email or direct mail list. Email is obviously much less expensive, but a direct mail list sometimes makes more sense for certain kinds of businesses. If you’re going to run a direct mail list, I’m going to get back to you. Direct mail is a totally different animal than email that deserves a blog entry of its own, which I will get to before the week is out. For now, I’m going to talk about building and maintaining an email newsletter.

Before you even start to think about email marketing, you must promise to observe the following rules:

1. Email marketing is for opt-in recipients only. Do not send your newsletter to anyone who didn’t agree to sign up for it. If you do, it’s spamming and it can get you in trouble with the law, your web host, your internet service provider, and it generally reflects badly on your brand.

2. All email marketing transmissions must come with an easy-to-use unsubscribe link. Not allowing people to leave your newsletter will also make you a spammer, potentially landing you in hot water and definitely fostering animosity with customers.

3. Use your newsletter strategically and sparingly. Do not email your newsletter contacts constantly. For most businesses a monthly newsletter is reasonable. If you have very compelling content, you might be able to get away with a weekly or daily message, but if you’re going to make your messages more frequent, keep in mind that you may have a harder time keeping people subscribed and getting people signed up. It’s also a good idea to let subscribers know if they can expect frequent messages so they know what they’re signing up for. For most companies, a monthly newsletter promoting a new product or service or offering a special deal is the way to go. This allows you to remind your customers or clients to spend money with you, gives them impetus to do so and, most importantly, doesn’t get on their nerves.

So how do you get all these fans of your brand signed up to receive your emails? There are many ways to go about this, but the following are tried and true in my experience.

1. Give something away. People love free stuff. If you can do a monthly or weekly drawing from your newsletter list for a free gift, you’re likely to attract more subscribers. Be sure to let your customers or clients know they’re eligible to get a free gift by joining your newsletter.

2. Offer special deals and discounts. Everyone loves the idea of being in on a special offer. Send your contacts a special coupon code or deal along with your newsletter. Be sure to tell potential newsletter subscribers about the access to exclusive deals when they subscribe. This company offers site visitors an instant 15% discount for joining the newsletter. That’s an offer that just about guarantees every paying customer is going to join up, since they’ll want to save at check out.

3. Offer interesting content. If you’re a subject matter expert on a topic that interests your customers or clients, offer them free information with your newsletter. This professional and personal coaching consultant offers newsletter subscribers access to a free book when they sign up. A company selling dog leashes might offer a newsletter providing pet parenting tips. A company selling gourmet hot sauces might have a recipe newsletter.

Whatever hook you use to interest people in your newsletter, make it easy for people to sign up. This means you should have a sign up form on every page of your site. Not a link to a separate sign up page, a form that justs asks for an email address and has the user click “submit”. You want as few barriers as possible to getting onto your newsletter. Take it from big companies like Crate and Barrel and Overstock.com. A link to a newsletter sign up is not nearly as effective as an actual sign up on each and every page of your site.

Once you’ve built up your list, you can not only use it to market your own company, you can use your list as a cross-promotion tool. The bigger your list is, the better position you’re in to cross-promote with another company with a big list. When you send out those deals and discounts you can mention promotions for your partner and they’ll do the same for you. This can add up to thousands of free eyeballs for your brand without spending a penny.

You may not always be in the mood to write, but even if you don’t do it every day, your business needs a blog. Blogs are good for a number of things. Here are just a few:

1. They’re sticky. A sticky site is a site that keeps visitors coming back. If you’ve got frequently updated content, visitors will be back to check out what you’ve got. If you’re running a retail site you may only have new items seasonally or even less often, so you’re going to need another reason to keep your site on your customers’ minds and a blog is a great way to do it. While many business blogs focus entirely on what’s new with the business, your blog needn’t do this. Blogging about something related to your business that your customers are likely to find interesting is a great way to keep them glued to your site. If you sell pet grooming services you could do a photo blog of cute cats and dogs. If you sell clothing, a blog with fashion tips might be a good fit. If you sell a service like interior design you might want to start a blog about design trends or home decor if your clients are mostly residential.

2. They provide search engine optimization. Everyone wants the search engines to love their website, and search engines love content. If you want the search engines to show you some love, give ‘em what they want and start writing. Fresh, interesting content on your site will keep the search engines coming back and paying attention to you, which means it’ll be easier for customers to find your site when they’re doing a search. It’s like free advertising!

3. It provides a cross-promotion vehicle. We had to throw that one in there, right? Since we believe cross-promotion is a terrific way to market your brand, we’re all for having as many tools at your disposal as possible to do this. Agreeing to write a post about your marketing partner(s) in exchange for their promise to do the same gives you a no-cost means of trading marketing power with a partner. Posting about a partner doesn’t mean driving customers away from your own business. Choose a marketing partner with a product or service complementary to your own. For extra points, you and your cross-promotion partner might consider giving each other coupon codes to post along with the blog entries.

If you’re not sure how to get a blog onto your company website, there are a few options. My favorite is Wordpress. It’s a free, open-source program you can install on your own web server and you can customize it to look just like the rest of your website. (We actually use Wordpress to host this blog.) You will need PHP and MySQL to run Wordpress, but many web hosts offer those along with their hosting packages. If you don’t have PHP and MySQL, or you aren’t up to installing software yourself, trust me, it’s pretty easy to do. You might want to explore some of the free hosted blogs such as Blogger or Wordpress’s free hosted blog option.

Further Reading:
Hubspot says “How to Build World’s Most Valuable Brand? Don’t Advertise! Use Inbound Marketing“

One great way to promote your business is by doing good for others. You can donate a percentage of profits from sales to your local animal rescue or soup kitchen or a larger organization like Amnesty International or the Red Cross. Raising funds for a charity gives people an extra push to buy from you, since they’ll be able to feel good about their purchase. Your charitable efforts also gives bloggers, local papers and other writers reason to talk up your business.

You can stretch the power of your charitable work by enlisting the aid of partner businesses. Form a coalition of businesses selling products complementary to your own and agree to donate a share of your profits to the same charity. Next, agree to have a promotional page on your websites (or a promotional display if you’re a brick-and-mortar business) talking about the fund raising efforts and mentioning the participating companies. This cross-promotion effort gives consumers a listing of companies they can patronize and help raise funds for the charity.

To drum up extra attention for your charitable promotion, consider sending out a press release about the fund raiser. If it’s feasible, you might even want to do some extra advertising promoting the fund raiser. Brick-and-mortars might do this in the local paper; online businesses can promote their efforts on the web. For example, if you’re a group of online companies raising funds for an animal rescue, it might make sense to run an ad on cuteoverload.com (a popular animal lover blog) letting their audience know about your efforts for a cause they care about.

As with any promotional campaign, plan to track your success in advance. Online shops can create a special landing page for visitors who’ve come to check out the fund raising promotion. Brick-and-mortars might go with a lower tech option, such as asking customers how they heard about the business.

I’m a big fan of promotional items like pens, key chains, and so forth. People rarely throw them away, and sometimes they even pass them on to other people, thus passing on your company name and phone number, address and/or web address.

Today’s Marketing Sherpa blog post on this topic reiterates the value of these types of items. If you haven’t had any made for your business yet, a quick Google search of “promo items” will turn up tons of companies who can make these things for you, often for just a few cents per piece. That’s cheaper than your average click on a search marketing campaign!

Since we’re all about cross-promotion here at Brand Torrent, I not only suggest getting these promo items made post-haste, I highly recommend trading your promos with other companies that share your customer demographic. Customers will love getting a
free useful item in their order, and you and your cross-promo partners will reap the rewards.

If you’re new to the world of cross-promotion, you may be wondering where to start. How do I select a partner? How do I come up with a cross-promotion plan? What should I keep in mind when making these decisions? We’ll tackle the basics of these issues today, so you have a clearer understanding of how to get started.

Using the search tools on Brand Torrent, you’ll be able to look for companies that are interested in cross-promotion. The best partner for you is going to have a similar customer demographic, but not necessarily a similar product line. Think about your typical customer. How old are they? Are they men or women? What are their interests? What sort of household income and education are they likely to have? Once you’ve answered these questions about your own customers, you want to find a business with customers who fit a similar description. If you sell contemporary high-end jewelry and your average customer is female, style-conscious, 25-40 years old and middle to high-income, you want to connect with a partner whose customers also fit this description.

The next thing you’ll want to keep in mind when selecting a cross-promotion partner is a fair exchange. If you’re interested in trading promotional mail order inserts and you only ship 5 orders in an average day, you shouldn’t partner with a company that ships 50 orders in an average day. Make sure that you can match whatever exposure you’re hoping to get from your cross-promotion partner in return.

Once you’ve selected a cross-promotion partner, it’s a good idea to talk about what your cross-promotional activities will encompass. If you’re going to mention each other’s websites in your customer newsletters, agree to dates on which the newsletters will be going out. Discuss the actual copy that will appear in the newsletters. To keep a productive and positive working relationship with your cross-promotion partner, it’s important to chart a specific plan of action for your cross-promotion activities, and talk about your expectations.

The next thing to consider with your cross-promotion plans is tracking your success. You’ll want some way to measure the results you’re getting from this form of marketing. You may want to attach a coupon code to your cross-promotion efforts so that you’ll know which customers made purchases through your cross-promotion campaign. You may want to provide a special URL on your site for your cross-promotion audience so you’ll know how much traffic your campaign brought in. There are a variety of ways to track the success of your marketing efforts, so you’ll want to come up with something that works for your own situation.

The final thing to keep in mind about cross-promotion is that it’s like any other type of marketing; the goal is not just to get immediate conversions, it’s also to gain exposure for your brand. Just because you didn’t see an overnight jump in sales based on your cross-promotion efforts doesn’t mean the efforts were wasted. Getting your brand in front of your target audience is the way to begin building a relationship with your customer base. These relationship-building exercises will bring you more business in the long-run than any short-term oriented marketing campaign that focuses only on immediate increases in conversions.

Spending money on your marketing efforts is a great way to build brand awareness, but it’s not the only way to do it. By pairing with a well-suited cross-promotion partner, you and your partner can enhance your respective brands’ visibility on the cheap, or even without spending a dime. Here are a few ways to do it:

1. Mailing List Cross-Promotion
To use this strategy you’re going to need two things:

• a base of customers who subscribe to your company’s email newsletter

• a company to partner with who also has a base of customers subscribing to their newsletter

For this to be effective you’ll want to pair with a company whose customer demographic is similar to your own, but a product line that isn’t the same as your’s. For example, a company selling baby clothing might want to partner with a company that sells diaper bags. Both companies sell to parents with babies or small children, but they aren’t selling the same thing. These companies can agree to mention a coupon code for one another’s online shops when they send out their next newsletter. This gets the apparel vendor’s name in front of the diaper bag company’s customers and vice versa. Ideally, companies who cross-promote this way will want to have similarly-sized newsletter subscriber bases. It’s not really fair for a company with 100 newsletter readers to engage in this type of trade with a company with 1000 readers.

2. Business Blog Cross-Promotion
If you blog regularly for your business, all you need to find is another business owner who does the same and has a customer demographic similar to your own. You and your cross-promotion partner can agree to write a review of each other’s online stores in your blogs. This will get your company name in front of their blog readers and vice versa. It’s important to find a business blogger who has a blog readership similarly-sized to your own so the exchange is a fair one.

3. Promo or Sample Swaps
If you regularly mail out products to your customers, find another company with a similar customer demographic who mails out a similar amount of orders regularly. You and your partner can exchange promotional postcards, product brochures, product samples or other collateral to slip into your orders.

If you’re going to promote this way, it is best if you can provide your cross-promotion partner with something their customers are less likely to throw away, like a pen with your company name and web address on it, or a magnet. Some printed promotional materials are pricier than others, but there are lots of places online with pretty extensive catalogs and a variety of prices for items like this.

If you’re really on a budget, you can make your own promotional goodies that are a little more memorable than a flyer. For example, you could buy a large bag of candy and make stickers with your logo and web address and adhere your stickers to the candy wrappers. This sneaky form of building brand awareness gets your company name noticed in a way that makes it harder for the consumer to tune out.

4. Co-Sponsor A Product Giveaway
Product giveaways are a terrific way to build up your newsletter subscriber base. You can bring even more consumer eyeballs to check out your product giveaway and register for your newsletter by organizing a product giveaway with a partner. Here’s an example of how this might work:

Say you’re a spa goods retailer. Your customers are probably women interested in luxury items. You decide to partner up with a jewelry maker because she has a similar audience. Your partner sends you a pair of earrings and a necklace and you send her a bottle of shower gel and a bottle of moisturizer. Now you’ve got some jewelry and your own spa goods with which to put together a gift basket for your newsletter sweepstakes. Your partner has your spa goods and her own jewelry for her gift basket.

After you and your partner put together your gift baskets, take photos of them and put up a sweepstakes page on your websites inviting customers to sign up for your newsletter and automatically be entered in a drawing to win free gifts from you and your jewelry designing cross-promotion partner. You can mention to your visitors that they can double their changes of winning by visiting your partner’s website and joining her mailing list too.

At the end of the day you and your cross-promotion partner have brought your customers’ attention to each other’s brands and you’ve both increased your newsletter subscriber base. You both now have a built-in audience to send out news about discounts, sales and new products.

5. Exchange Coupon Codes
We’re all familiar with the idea of link exchanges; sometimes you’ll visit a business website and see they have a page of links. The thinking here is that this contributes to search engine optimization and maybe attracts a few human visitors along the way. What’s more likely to draw human visitors are coupons. This is similar to having a links page and doing a link exchange, but instead of just giving your visitors a long boring list of links, you’re pointing them towards savings with shops they might enjoy.

To do this type of promotion, you’ll need to set up a coupons page on your own website. After that, you’ll have to select some partner(s) with product lines that would appeal to your own customers. You’ll need your partner(s) to set up coupon pages on their sites too. Once you’ve got your pages set up, you and your partner(s) can provide each other with coupon codes to your online stores. Customers coming to shop with your partner(s) will find their coupon pages and that’s how they’ll find you. You’ve also given them a little push to actually make a purchase, since they have a coupon code in hand.

If all this seems overwhelming, don’t get discouraged. It takes time to increase brand awareness, but doing a little every day will go a long way in the end. In the mean time, we invite you to create a Brand Torrent profile so companies looking for a cross-promotion partner like you will be able to find you.

If you think cross-promotion is only for small business, think again. Some of the biggest corporations out there are leveraging the power this marketing style. Case in point, the product-touting ad campaigns promoting the new Will Ferrell movie Jackie Moon. Ferrell has appeared in character promoting both Old Spice deodorant and Bud Light beer, along with his new movie.

This type of TV advertisement is becoming more common all the time. Alicia Keys appeared in commercials promoting both her own new album and mega retailer Target. Advertisers can use these commercials not only to share advertising commercials but also to establish a positive affiliation between their brands.

You need not be a multi-million dollar corporation to put this type of marketing to work for you, whether your budget is $0 or a few thousand there are lots of ways for the creative marketing to harness the power of cross-promotion to grow a brand.