This week, on the Affiliate Marketing Podcast, we have a special episode for you to enjoy. Leanna Klyne, Head of Agency here at Affiverse, is your Fireside Chat host. Joined by Affiverse Founder, Lee-Ann Johnstone, alongside Todd Crawford, Co-Founder and VP of Strategic Initiatives at Impact.com they discuss tackling tracking and inefficiencies in affiliate program management. Let’s dive into this hot topic….
Listen in here for all of the insights:
The Role of Networks
Leanna points out how many networks are now engaging in agency services and publisher recruitment. She asks Todd why this all-in-one service is something that impact.com seems to have steered clear from?
Todd replies, “I was part of the team that co-founded CJ. So I understand how, at the time, when we started that, in ‘98, we didn’t have managed services. But our business model was an override model, which means if our clients made more money, we made more money. And we would see that our clients weren’t making as much money as we thought they could make, which was impacting our revenues. We would give them advice, and either they didn’t take it or didn’t have time, or for whatever reason, they weren’t growing their programs to the level that we thought they could be. So, initially we took like five of our top clients and we just started helping them – actually managing the program for them and we saw great results. So we said, hey, we can not only grow our revenues by providing the services we can charge for them. That was really the beginning of managed services.”
Todd goes on to say, “I kind of look at managing a program as there’s two things you’re doing: revenue generating tasks and administrative tasks. So, approving applications, recruiting affiliates, even creating new contracts, uploading product feeds and ads, things like that, which don’t really generate revenue in and of themselves, but you have to do them.The idea is to minimise that to maybe 80/20 or 90/10 through automation and just efficient workflows, and then free up as much time for really what is the role of a program manager agency to manage revenue and the partnerships and recruit really good new partnerships. So when we did that, we weren’t gonna do services.”
Working With SaaS and Networks
Leanna asks Lee-Ann to offer insight on working with SaaS and networks alike to meet clients’ needs.
Lee-Ann explains, “There comes a point where a network has to decide are they the service provider or are they the technology solution provider? For some clients, there’s a time and a place for everything – and there’s a price point for everything, too. So depending on where you are in your kind of affiliate program lifecycle, and the resources that you have internally as a business in order to invest in this channel, I think you’re going to make decisions based on different kinds of metrics that are at your disposal at that time.”
“Whilst I don’t think that there’s a problem with networks offering services, because obviously they want their clients to be successful, I don’t think that you’ll ever get the depth of services from a network that you would from a specialist OPM agency, which is this is what we do every single day. We do it across multiple different platforms, across multiple different clients, across multiple different industries and across multiple publishing networks.”
The Future of Affiliate Marketing
Leanna asks both Lee-Ann and Todd to comment on what they see ahead for the future of affiliate marketing.
Todd replies, “Well, for Impact.com, we just launched our Impact.com slash creator solution, which came through an acquisition of an influencer platform called Activate. So we acquired that, I think, almost two years ago. What we did is we ported all of that functionality into our platform natively. The idea is that, you know, the future of affiliate is the future of partnerships and really expanding what types of partnerships you can manage.”
Lee-Ann replies, “I think the future of affiliate marketing is that we’re definitely heading to affiliate 3.0 with the onset of better tracking solutions and amalgamating all of the partner types together into one platform. I think we’re going to get a lot more clever with how we spend because we’ll be able to monitor everything from everywhere all at once.”
Todd adds, “There’s lots to learn and I read today, ‘If you’re not being paid well, or learning, or both, you should quit your job – find a different job’. I think this industry has both of those – so, it’s exciting!”
Catch-up on more insight from Todd with us in 2023 here.
We would like to wish you all the very best for the holiday season. Thank you for supporting us and for tuning in each week to learn with us. Here’s to all the exciting episodes we have for you in 2024!
Listen to find out more about:
- Industry changes.
- The importance of using specialist services.
- Lee-Ann explains what she describes as Affiliate 3.0 and what this means for you.
Key segments of this podcast and where you can tune in to go direct:
[12:00] Making sure that your program is positioned with the right solutions to help you scale.
[15:00] Opportunities to expand in the partnership space.
[19:25] Explaining Affiliate 3.0.
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