President Reagan once had a sign on his desk that read, "There is no limit to what a man can accomplish if he doesn't care who gets the credit." This aphorism offers a good deal of wisdom to manufacturers engaged in partnership marketing because it implies that they will profit mightily from helping their marketing partners achieve success.

For many years, manufactures have helped VARs, retailers, and other channel partners promote products and services through co-op advertising programs. Co-op programs commonly offer marketing partners ready-made advertisements and financial help with their placement. A key feature of co-op advertising is the manufacturer's identity is submerged in a co-op ad and the partner's identity is allowed to come to the fore.

Co-op advertising programs have had a long successful history and iMakeNews has now introduced a similar program to enable manufacturers to help marketing partners promote products and services through a network of online newsletters. It is called the iMakeNews Newsletter Network. 

How the Newsletter Network works:

The manufacturer contracts with iMakeNews for newsletter design, production and e-mailing services for themselves and their partners. Each of the partners are encouraged to develop their own unique newsletter identity. The manufacturer imposes only moderate standards, mostly having to do with the proper use of the manufacturer's trademarks and tradenames.

Manufacturers produce monthly newsletters for the partner communities. These newsletters contain articles offering sales and marketing tips plus an assortment of articles that are available for use in their marketing partners' newsletters. Articles on the following topics might be found in the content pool offered partners each month:

• New product announcements  
• Product update announcements  
• Special offers  
• Application notes  
• Technical notes  
• Changes to operations and maintenance manuals  
• Training class schedules  
• Customer service notes  
• Industry news abstracted from business and trade publications

Marketing partners produce and e-mail monthly newsletters to their customer communities.

• Because partners are really independent businessmen, each of their newsletters will have a completely different look and feel.  
• Many of the articles in each of the partner newsletters are drawn from the content pool provided by the manufacturer.  
• Partner newsletters also contain articles that address the specific needs of a customer community. For example, a Dell computer VAR selling to doctor's offices might include articles on medical record keeping or medical forms processing software and applications.

Both the manufacturers and their partners compose these newsletters using iMakeNews, an application that offers them flexibility, speed, and ease of use.

• Three attractive newsletter formats are provided with user-selectable backgrounds and accent colors. For content clarity and readability, all three newsletter formats are designed in accord with graphics industry best practices that specify such things as text body widths and text fonts, weights and colors.  
• The only graphic elements the customer need supply are the newsletter banner and editorial graphics.  
• iMakeNews also makes a wide variety of content resources available including a library of articles on subjects of general interest, articles abstracted from popular business and trade papers and articles written on a contract basis by professional freelance journalists.  
• Newsletter copy may be typed directly using our content editor or it may be quickly assembled, by cut and paste, from a wide variety of plain text or HTML resources including Word documents, emails, and web content.

Once produced, manufacturers' and partners' newsletters are emailed from our state-of-the-art mail server.  iMakeNews makes a rich suite of mail list management and emailing services available, among them:

• Opt-in email list resources available from hundreds of publications and commercial websites  
• Both bulk and single address mail list entry and editing  
• List sorting and segmentation  
• Rapid email engine delivers newsletters quickly, no matter how many you are sending.  
• Bounce Management (returned email) including the categorization of returned mail for customer review and disposal, and the automated removal of bad addresses from the mail list.

Newsletter response tracking is also available which enables both the manufacturers and each of their partners not only to measure how many, but also to determine how many people:

• Opened the newsletter  
• Looked at each of the articles  
• Referred the article to someone else  
• Clicked on any link within an article  
• Responded with a particular answer to a survey question

A profiling system even lets you know who read each article and lets you automatically develop segmented lists of subscribers based on their interests.

How the Online Newsletter Network Benefits Manufacturers:

• It is far less expensive than co-op advertising  
• It vastly improves communications between manufacturers and their marketing partners. Partners are more apt to read the manufacturer's newsletter when they are considering the use of some of its contents in their own newsletters  
• Since marketing partners get their product articles and graphics from manufacturers, manufacturers are able to assert a greater control over the quality of the communications that ultimately gets to the marketplace  
• By communicating with the marketing through marketing partners, manufacturers are able to address a much larger community of customers and prospects

How the Online Newsletter Network Benefits Marketing Partners:

• The cost of producing and mailing the newsletter is low or non-existent  
• If partners choose to use only those articles supplied by manufacturers, there is little or no labor involved in producing their newsletters  
• The high quality content supplied by the manufacturers makes the partners' newsletters look very professional.