Jeremy Weisz 15:00
No, that’s great. And, you know, I have several more questions. But obviously it became — I mean to me, I don’t know, maybe I’m missing something, it seems like a no brainer. Why would you not do it? You only pay someone for someone buying something. But it seems like a no-brainer, I guess. But I don’t know, maybe it’s more of an awareness thing. And maybe like you said, it’s a perception thing, that people like, well, we can put our energy there, but we could do something else also.
And, you know, I know before we started chatting, or before we record, you mentioned all, you know, risks or challenges and like, what you’ll maybe have you talk about, some of those are, what are people’s obstacles there? Because I don’t know, to me, it seems like kind of a no brainer. In a sense.
Sarah Bundy 15:48
Today, it is a no brainer, for sure. Historically, so affiliate marketing has been around for about 25 years. Like I said, I’ve been in for 27 years, I’ve been in it for about just over 20.
When it first started, it was the Wild West, we didn’t have the technology back then to understand how affiliates were promoting and what they were specifically doing. And we didn’t have the compliance measures in place to be able to hold them accountable to anything in particular. So lack of tracking, lack of transparency, lack of compliance, lack of rules and regulations, and lack of expertise, because it was a new industry. So even somebody who had been an affiliate manager for two years, didn’t necessarily know all of the tactics that affiliates could use to drive transactions.
So in the early years, it did have a bad rap. Lots of affiliates decided to cheat systems and like, hold their cards very close to their chests and say, you know, this is how much you owe me. But they wouldn’t tell people how they were promoting. And if it was cannibalizing other channels or anything like that. And because the advertisers didn’t have the tracking, attribution and data to actually see what was happening, they could get away with a lot of different things. So that was what was happening kind of in the early years of risk. And unfortunately, it scared a lot of brands away.
Jeremy Weisz 17:14
I like performance-based partnerships — it’s a much better term.
Sarah Bundy 17:20
That’s what it’s turned into today. So today, the ecosystem, the landscape, the landscape is known as performance based partnerships, where affiliate, traditional affiliate is a piece of that influencers is a piece of that. Now, content creators is a piece of that now. So that’s why now we’ve sort of shifted the thinking of affiliate marketing and performance based marketing is a monetization approach to growth versus a channel. And all of those challenges that were historically issues and concerns which were totally valid issues and concerns have been mitigated.
Now, because of the transparency of the advancements in technology, the advancements and compliant FTC has requirements. GDPR has requirements, everybody has to be compliant, or else they can’t play, they get kicked out, they get fined, you know, so people are following the rules. Brands are investing in it. The advancements in technology, even how affiliates might use AI, or the network’s might use AI to scale things and create some efficiencies is wonderful. It’s brilliant, it’s working.
So and you need to have people. The other thing is that a lot of brands don’t didn’t have affiliate managers, or agencies that knew what to look out for and proactively manage accounts. So it turned into a little bit of a free for all because nobody was there. It was like having a classroom and for eight hours, you’d have the students monitoring themselves or nobody like they’re all in the same room together. There’s no teacher, there’s no adult monitor, you need to have somebody who’s there to manage supervise guide to lead, and kind of keep people going in the direction that they need to go.
So for brands that are looking to invest in affiliate marketing today, they can sort of be they can be rest assured now knowing that the compliance issues have been fixed, that the technology transparency, attribution issues have been fixed, that bad players in this space can’t get away with stuff very easily anymore, if at all. There’s a lot more great players in this space, amazing value, add affiliates, technologies that help with conversion optimization on a person’s website, but get paid on an outcome base. You’ve got affiliates who have massive email, opt in email lists where people want them to email them.
And it’s a very specific audience that a brand could really benefit from that they would never be able to reach on their own accord, but they can through an affiliate partner. So some of the benefits that brands are seeing today by investing in affiliate are increased reach, right so getting into new markets that they otherwise can’t reach on their own increase conversion rates, which they otherwise would not be able to to increase on their own just because of third party is saying no info winds is such a big thing.
Now, education is such a big thing. Now when you get a comparison site or a review site, and they’re saying this is five star compared to this, or here’s all the features and benefits I love, I love about these particular products and services compared to these that helps convert, you know, buyers into into loyal customers, first time buyers and then into loyal customers and into retained customers. Affiliates even have the opportunity to help with upselling crossing selling increasing lifetime value. So there’s all these super benefits.
And if you think about it, from a brand perspective, a lot of these affiliates are putting out this content, the brand exposure, the product exposure, and that exposure doesn’t cost the advertiser anything, because they’re only paying on the outcome in most cases. So they get all these extra benefits. And then all of the risks that were there historically have been kind of mitigated over the last few years. So the opportunity is huge now. And we are seeing a lot more companies coming in and investing in it because of the opportunity for scale and growth and incrementality that they haven’t been able to see by only investing in the usual traditional channels.
Jeremy Weisz 21:05
As a company. Sarah, what’s interesting, when you first started till now I’m curious of the evolution of niche, because there’s so many rabbit holes, like when you say influencers, it could be there’s, if you just talk about health and beauty, for example, there’s like so many people and so many sites and so many things to manage there, as opposed to So where did you decide on. Okay, I’m gonna start with this niche or niche and then how it evolved. And again, I’m showing the site where we can see, you know, today there’s like b2b and SaaS was gaming, electronics, travel and hospitality, fashion, apparel, health and beauty Home and Garden. Take me back to when you first started.
Sarah Bundy 21:47
I appreciate the question. Thank you. So when I started the company, I was on my own, I started as a solopreneur, I was actually six months pregnant. And I was like, Hey, let’s start a family and a business at the same time, because why not. And when I had left the corporate world to start my own agency, I had actually been the in house affiliate manager for a company called clearly, it was known as coastal contacts in the United States.
I was fortunate enough to be able to join that team very early on, it’s one of Canada’s biggest e-commerce success stories. Roger Hardy, who is the founder and CEO of coastal contacts, and clearly, in the beginning, took me under his wing and I was able to learn so much about running a business, growing a culture, Gazelle companies, structure operations, and marketing is so awesome. And I joined that company as the sales manager for the call center, and did a really great job of helping the team understand how to solve problems better, faster and with higher value than anybody else, and create the structure for them to successfully be able to do that. So when Roger and the clearly executive team sort of saw the sale, the sales lifting, they said, Sara, we want you to take over our online sales force as well. And I said, “Great, what’s that?” and they’re like, “it’s an affiliate program.”
There’s about 1,000 affiliates there. Nobody’s really managing it, they’re just kind of there, can you take over and help them do the same. So that’s how I got into it. I spent three years in e-commerce selling contact lenses and glasses through partnerships. And so a lot of the first clients that we had my very first client when I left was actually a company called eyeglasses, 123. And they sold name brand sunglasses, Ray Bans, Gucci and Armani and things like that. So I kind of took some of that expertise of E commerce and this specific niche market and translated it into the ability to support these guys through their SoundCloud sales.
From there, we got some more referrals, and that was e-commerce as well. So e-commerce can be sort of complimentary, you know, you get to, uh, one of the nice things about working with affiliates is that if you’re working with an affiliate that’s selling sunglasses, chances are they’ll also be promoting apparel, or they might be promoting travel brands, because there’s a complement to all those things, right. So then from E commerce, we actually started to take on travel and hospitality clients for two reasons.
One, there was a nice complement to the existing client base that we had. So people could sell apparel and travel in the same way. But also before I got into e-commerce, I was actually a travel agent for a year. And I worked for a company called Flight Center and became one of their top customer service slash salespeople in the year that I was there before I went to the coast. And what ended up happening was that I was thinking about how later when I had my agency I was thinking about how I can get some travel clients, right? It’s a perfect complement. And so I actually ended up going to the Vancouver Travel Show & Expo in person. And I went table to table introducing myself.
And while I was there, I went and went to the flight center table and to the CFO of the company, which happened to be there. I introduced myself and let him know that I used to work for Flight Center. We talked about how to sell products. And because I was a top salesperson, I played center. And I said, you know, now I run an agency that does this through online salespeople. Are you interested in partnering on this? Let’s give it a shot? And he said, Absolutely, yes. So we actually set up flight centers, the first affiliate marketing program, that was actually a pay per call program, where people would call into the call centers and inquire and do their bookings.
It ended up becoming such a success, that they actually had to pause the program at one point because they couldn’t take the influx of all the calls coming in, they didn’t have enough people to actually answer phones. So we did have to tone it down and pause at one point, so they could, so they could staff up and finish their training. But yeah, affiliate marketing is so great. It works in so many different ways for so many different brands. But that’s how I got into e-commerce first, because of my time that clearly, and then travel as a second category, because of my time at Flight Center. From there, we closed a bunch of travel brands over the years.
And travel actually was our largest category until COVID hit. And then unfortunately, with nobody traveling during the first two years of COVID, we had to pause or cancel all of those contracts with our travel brands. Because they couldn’t, they had to sustain themselves. So we ended up shifting into b2b then. And we can talk a little bit about that if you want to. But now that COVID has sort of gotten through most of the challenge of being able to travel and people are traveling again, we’re back, we’re seeing an influx, again of travel related opportunities for growth for brands. And that’s something that we’re continuing to pursue and provide some really great services around again. So Parker on NetSuite, we’re talking about b2b.
So NetSuite is one of our largest b2b clients, NetSuite by Oracle, this was actually a really interesting story. Because I love really innovative companies who are willing to test that are really that are willing to try, right. And I kind of feel like affiliate marketing and partnership marketing is a wonderful opportunity for brands to test and try things on a performance basis. Before they have to put a lot of money into something they can test and try different campaigns, different types of content, different types of distribution channels. So when COVID hit, our travel brands paused, we had to think about how to pivot to make up some of that revenue. We didn’t want to lose any of our staff. So we had to figure out okay, where can we go? Where can we service?
And one of the areas that we noticed needed help was the b2b space, because a lot of those companies would have historically done their sales in person at conferences or taking their clients to dinners or things like that, but they couldn’t anymore because of COVID. So we said, Well, look, why don’t you guys think about doing lead generation, and connecting with your potential buyers through ebooks, through white paper downloads through demos of your products, we will help drive leads, we have two metrics that have kind of count in the b2b world, the lead, Gen SaaS rolled and those are marketing qualified leads MQLs and sales qualified leads SQS. And so they said, Sure, we’re willing to test it out. And they gave us a budget that we could work with for the first six months, we had to figure out how to get this off the ground.
And it worked. It didn’t work. We didn’t blow it out of the water in the first six months, because it was a new category for us back then. This was four years ago, three and a half years ago. So we didn’t blow it out of the water in the first six months. But we did enough in the first six months that they were very interested. And they’re like, “Okay, there’s something to this, let’s double down on our budgets.” So for the next six months, they doubled down on their budgets. And that blew up like we took off on that one because we learned from the first six months we had more to work with. We had won some new partnerships that were phenomenal b2b partnerships, who understood how to convert business to business buyers.
And then from there, we’ve been scaling. So NetSuite. Oracle not only has been one of the most amazing clients for us to work with, because every time we come to them with new opportunities, new ideas, innovative things that we want to try, they’re like, yes, yes, try it, test everything. And we love that some of the programs that work the best are the ones we’re like, “Yeah, let’s give it a go. Let’s see what happens.” And we test and learn and adjust as needed and where it’s working, double down, triple down, quadruple down, where it’s not working, reallocate the budget to something that we can test again.
Jeremy Weisz 29:36
What are some examples of the testing because you said there’s so much you can test, there’s ebooks, there’s white papers, and what levers are you pulling and what do you test helping them test so that they can experience? Obviously a lot of growth in that segment?
Sarah Bundy 29:56
Thank you. So part of the tests are around different partner types.? So you might be you might, we might test a comparison site versus a loyalty cashback site that specializes in business small businesses, or b2b. We might test different forms of white papers, different landing pages with different calls to action, different kinds of incentives and offers. So we also have to think about when it comes to business to business and SaaS lead gen, it’s a very different type of buyer than someone trying to buy some Nike running shoes, when you’re buying a $30,000 product to help you operate your business. It’s a longer sales cycle.
Affiliates want to be compensated differently, because of the price point. And the difficulty of getting someone to be convinced to move further down the funnel, right. And the metrics that you track are different, right, you can track a $200 or $150 Nike shoe sale with one transaction. That’s the conversion they get paid the commission on. But when you’re doing something that has multiple touchpoints, over a longer period of time, and there could even involve a salesperson that has to call back, then you have to do things like plug into the CRM.
Jeremy Weisz 31:15
Let’s say that you got to be tagged something because like if it comes in the person may buy eight months later, and they may have come in, they emailed. But then they may have done a demo with one person that wanted questions in the demo. And then a conversation like eight months later, you forget how this person even comes to us.
Sarah Bundy 31:34
Exactly, you got it. And so there are specializations that need to be done. There are nuances of b2b SaaS that you need to understand in order to really make it successful. And that’s where a lot of b2b companies come to work with us. Because we have now all of that time in history, where our clients are NetSuite Unbounce, big commerce, sauna, like we’ve got a wonderful list of b2b brands that we work with.
I think that being able to understand the technology, passback is a piece of it. But understanding who those partners are, what’s going to render with the buyer, what kind of assets work versus not historically what kind of budgets, we even have to be creative in the payout sometimes. So you know, maybe one affiliate might want to earn on MQL is marketing qualified leads, a different affiliate might want to be paid out on sales, qualified leads, a different affiliate might want to be paid out on a converted sale at a higher percentage of a $30,000, you know, invoice, and then another affiliate might want to CPC cost per click way up front, or a combination, there’s hybrid models in there, too. So it’s a little bit complex.
And we need to understand to get to that ideal cost of acquisition, what are all the different formulas that you can use for different partner types that’ll help us get there and have as cost effective a way as possible. And that’s what we do for a living. So yeah, but a lot of companies will plug into the CRM. So let’s say you’re Salesforce, and let’s say somebody, somebody wants a demo that goes into their Salesforce system. And then a salesperson calls them back and manually moves them down the funnel, right? So there’s different stages in a CRM. So maybe it goes, eventually, when it goes to from, you know, They’re one of the best in the b2b space, that’s what they specialize in. So there’s good stuff out there.
Jeremy Weisz 33:39
It’s a lot of work. Sarah, for you. Do you prefer a company that already has an affiliate program? Or? Because this one like you’re starting them from scratch, you’re actually starting an affiliate program? So I’m curious what your preference is? Because I know you’ve done both, you probably come in, do they have some kind of existing infrastructure? What is your preference?
Sarah Bundy 34:01
So we definitely serve as both the easier ones for us or the existing affiliate marketing programs, because the foundation is there, the tech is usually set up already. And they usually already have a group of affiliates. So we can build on that. Whether we’re doing new recruitment campaigns to bring in new partners, whether we’re just outreaching to those existing partners and reactivating them or building relationships, understanding their audiences and creating some custom pieces so that they can be more successful through better conversions or higher average order values, or better branding.
We will introduce a content play and we can push out campaigns.So the established problem programs are the best and the easier it is for us to scale up.I will say that an established brand is the easiest way to build an affiliate program. It’s very difficult to build an affiliate program if nobody knows who the brand is. It’s not unheard of. They don’t have any existing marketing channel. is running except for affiliates, because affiliates are going to put their skin in the game, right. So if they don’t know that the brand is good and that the product resonates well with customers, it has no reputation.
It’s difficult for an affiliate who is entirely commission based to want to go and put their time and their money behind it. So it is important for brands to hit a certain threshold or invest a certain amount to get it to a point where affiliates will take it and run with it. On the flip side, really quick, new programs that are starting from scratch, there are huge, they’re billion dollar brands that still don’t have affiliate marketing programs, which is unfortunate,
Sarah Bundy 35:37
I don’t want to name any right now, publicly, but you can find them. One of the easiest ways to see who has an affiliate program or not is either to go to their website, scroll to the bottom of their page. And in their footer, they’ll usually have a partnership program link or an affiliate link. Or if you go sign up as an affiliate to any of those big five affiliate networks I talked about, you can look and see who has programs already. So then you can do the math and figure out who does not. Now that said, more than 80% of companies today have active affiliate marketing programs. So there’s about a 20% actually is less than less than 20% of big brands that don’t have affiliate marketing programs yet.
What’s happening with those brands, though, is that they’re giving all of those sales to their competition. So if, if an affiliate program does not exist, then the competition is leveraging partners to reach audiences that they can’t reach on their own. And they’re capitalizing on market share that the other company without an affiliate program is not getting. So it’s just a way to expand your reach and growth that is difficult to do if you’re not doing it. If all you’re leaning on is your email marketing campaigns, your meta and your Google, then you’re leaving money on the table.
Jeremy Weisz 36:49
I want to talk about the team for a second. And the evolution of the team because you’re very pregnant, you start a company talking about some of the evolution of the hires to now you have a president you do who’s helping run the company. So start me from the beginning a little bit, just take me through maybe a quick evolutionary history.
Sarah Bundy 37:16
Absolutely. So when I started the company in 2009, my goal was to be a great mom, and to take immaculate care of a client or two, and I use the term immaculate care purposefully, because mediocracy drives me nuts. The good enough mentality is awful. When, especially when you’re in a service based industry, and when you value expertise and quality. So I wanted to make sure that whichever clients we brought on, we could take such unbelievable care that they would never have to worry about anything, they would know that we had their backs, we’d show up, our response rates were huge.
And that the results were there. So for me by myself, I could only manage one client at the beginning, that client got so big that within 10 months, I came to my husband, his name’s Ian. And I came to my husband, Ian, and I said, Hey, Ben, you know, Kai, my son, he’s crawling around, businesses are busy, I either need to hire, help. At work, I can hire an assistant, or I can hire a nanny, or you can quit your job and come join and be my business partner and help with the baby at home and help with the paperwork in the organ organization. And they admitted stuff in the background. And we had a little laugh about it. And then three days later, he came back and he’s like, actually, I love that idea. I think I think I’m on board and I’m like,
Okay, if you’re serious, I’m serious. He’s like I’m serious. So he quit his job as a financial analyst at Raymond James, after seven years in the financial industry with a very lovely career, and came on board as my partner at AIM. And then the two of us did everything we managed every account, we’d brought in smarter accounts. So more clients had a second child. So now we have a baby and arm each. And taking phone calls, answering emails, servicing clients, recruiting affiliates, working on campaigns, building newsletters, you know, looking at all the reports and data, doing all the compliance did everything for three years, just the two of us.
And then we kept getting referrals from people who were being happily taken care of because they didn’t like being immaculately taken care of. And we were turning away so much business, we were like this is ridiculous. We actually need to create a company so that we stop turning away from this business. So we started hiring contractors to help us to serve some of the business that we had. And then more business would come in. We built it up to I think we had 18 people in the company just managing various things and had to convert. We started to bring in employees. We hit 35 people at one point in 2016 we actually became one of Canada’s first fastest growing companies, we made the Profit500 list for the first time. And we actually won company out of Company of the Year best company in BC out of 400,000 businesses in BC. And then we were on the Global Map, right.
And then in 2020, we actually ended up getting acquired by a wonderful company called plus company. If you look up plus company.com, you’ll see all of the amazing network of absolutely brilliant and innovative agencies that they have in their group. We did our due diligence, we interviewed them as hard as they interviewed us, we didn’t just want to, you know, be acquired by anybody. And they’ve been outstanding. I love working with them. And everything that, you know, we talked about prior to the acquisition, which I was very nervous, what actually happen on the back end has happened and them, then some, they are so awesome.They’ve put their money where their mouth is all the things that I’d hoped for in regards to the culture, how they support our team, how they support growth, the resources that they promised us, we’ve been getting all of that and more.
And so in September of last year, we actually were able to hire a president, they supported us bringing in a new president. His name is Charlie Calabrese. He basically oversaw all of the operations for one of the very large affiliate networks we talked about called partner eyes. And when I approached him, you know, I had known him for about a decade. And he was kind of like a big brother figure to me, over the 10 years that sometimes I’d go to him and with all these weird challenges, and it’s a What would you do in this case? Or how do I get over this roadblock? Or can you review this contract for me, I don’t even know how to interpret this. And he was always gracious and gave me wonderful advice throughout the 10 years that I’ve known him. And so when I approached him, he’s like, Hey, buddy, how’s it going? Like, he goes, me, lady Haley, how’s it going? And, and so when I brought this opportunity to him, I think he was pretty pretty floored, pretty surprised.
But you know, he’s an outstanding person, very well respected, well known in the industry, and he’s just a powerhouse, he knows what he’s doing. So I was confident bringing him on, he wanted the opportunity and so he started in September. Ian retired in December so after 14 and a half years of running the company with me, Ian was able to step out and do the things that he loves now, I am not now also not in the day to day operations. So even though I don’t have team ops, finance, tech reporting to me or anything like that, I still get to be involved in growing the industry and am advocating for all things affiliate marketing, and it makes me happy.
Jeremy Weisz 42:34
Sarah, I want to be the first one to thank you. There’s a lot to unpack here. But I know we’re ending the time. But I just want to thank you for sharing your lessons. Your story is really remarkable for what you’ve created from inception till now and continue to do. I want to encourage people to check out allinclusivemarketing.com to learn more and more episodes of the podcast. Thanks, Sarah, and we’ll see everyone next time.
