Referral Programs Unplugged: Boosting Your Brand’s Network

[00:00:05] Jake Fuller: All right. Welcome back to the Profitable Performance Marketing Podcast. I am your host, Jake Fuller. Our topic this week is really exploring the differences between affiliates and customers when it comes to a brand’s referral program versus their affiliate program. My guest today is Will Fraser.

[00:00:32] Welcome to the podcast.

[00:00:33] William Fraser: Thank you so much for having me here, Jake. I’m really looking forward to this conversation.

[00:00:38] JF: Likewise. The first time we unofficially met was on a webinar Impact hosted not so long ago talking about their new product /advocate, which is powered off of SaaSquatch. So, I’ve been interested in that and jumping in a bit more. I think it’s an interesting topic to cover for listeners and anybody that’s in the affiliate space.

[00:00:57] And so before we jump in, would you mind giving everybody a bit of a background and where you are now and where you came from?

[00:01:04] WF: Yeah, absolutely. Not to date myself too much, but when I left university there was this thing called Facebook and it wasn’t just for the older generation. It was the growing, exciting social network. And I actually started my career building social media promotions.

[00:01:21] Think like a Facebook page, get entered into a draw and with that, we were promoting all sorts of things like Quentin Tarantino films to your local and national credit unions. You name it. And in that time, we really discovered two things. One, that through this world of incentives, we really could drive people’s behavior to influence their networks.

[00:01:41] And two it’s really hard to value things that don’t go to an actual purchase. For example, we were promoting the film Django Unchained. And I was talking to the promotions team and I was asking them, “how much does a trailer view, like how much value is there in someone watching a trailer?”

[00:01:57] And they were completely unsure. Banks couldn’t tell me how much the follower of a Facebook page was worth. No one really knew. And not to mention these are promotions, so they often had a end date when they started. So very hard to build an ongoing business around, but built that product for a little while.

[00:02:14] And then one day we came to work and Facebook had changed the rules as to how Facebook worked, and they had really destroyed a large amount of the traffic. So from that, we looked at this and like I said, we realized we knew how to influence behavior, but we didn’t know how to align it to value.

[00:02:29] So we looked around and we realized that this space of customer referrals was very similar, except it did connect to the purchase, right? It did connect to this idea of what are you going to buy? And so that was really cool. And at the time we were a group of nerds building a SaaS platform ourselves, and we looked around and we realized that these SaaS platforms, while there was great examples like maybe like Dropbox of SaaS platforms growing through referral programs, they had to build it themselves every time.

[00:02:56] So we set out to build a referral program platform for them. Really fun, really cool. Very early on, all of a sudden we got contacted by some very large enterprises and we had thought this was going to be a tool for two guys in a garage. We didn’t realize it was an enterprise grade problem when we started.

[00:03:13] So rapidly trying to figure out how to sign NDAs and do all sorts of different fun things. We built and learned and grew alongside of our customers. Ultimately discovering, how to expand into other markets. Well, it’s at a SaaS and the things like retail and subscription services for consumers and apps and you name it.

[00:03:31] But really this entire time, sticking around this idea of these customer referrals and these customer loyal members. Fast forward that, we ended up joining Impact. We sold SaaSquatch to Impact in April of 2023. And we’ve now been with Impact for just over a year and have morphed and grown SaaSquatch into /advocate as we call it now at Impact which is a really cool mixture of SaaSquatch and Impact and brings some really unique value to the market.

[00:03:58] So that’s the professional journey. Started out as an engineer. Got thrown into what they called the department of “not dev,” i. e. my co founder did not believe in my development skills anymore in the most amicable way possible. And just, yeah, live in the exciting dream now.

[00:04:12] JF: That’s a great story. I love hearing stories when you built something that was a passion project that you thought would be really cool for, as you said, two guys in a garage, and then all of a sudden it was, no, this is a real legitimate business and we’re going to branch out very quickly.

[00:04:26] That’s a fun problem to have and exciting.

[00:04:28] WF: Absolutely.

[00:04:30] JF: So I can understand the marriage with Impact. I thought it was really interesting when they announced it. I believe they didn’t announce it until somewhere around September of last year. I knew it was late last year. They announced that they had acquired SaaSquatch and I dug into it a bit then, more or less saved it for later.

[00:04:43] It wasn’t until this year when /advocate came out and they had developed that SaaSquatch product into what would fit Impact into their other products, which are their standard partnership management platform and creator, which they already had set up and now they have /advocate. So I think it’s interesting from an affiliate perspective, which is my background over the past, 10 to 15 years is digital marketing, but pretty heavily influenced in the affiliate world, and there’s a lot of brands that we speak to that have referral programs of some sort.

[00:05:13] They might call them an advocate program our customer advocates or referral programs, et cetera. And there’s always a bridge or a question of, can they just become affiliates now that we have an affiliate network? And it’s kind of a yes, no answer. And there are some nuanced differences.

[00:05:27] So the first thing I kind of want to jump into are, from your perspective, what are those differences and why is it important to keep that separate between here’s an affiliate partnership and here is a referral customer or an advocate for your brand.

[00:05:42] WF: Yeah, and I do like that you’re breaking up that advocate because that is, I think the broader group to look at here. It’s not just necessarily customers, but there’s this advocacy group that isn’t an affiliate and they aren’t an influencer. The way I look at it is on kind of a scale, a two dimensional scale.

[00:05:55] One is on the sophistication of the partner. So if you’ve had a publishers or loyalty sites or those kind of very traditional affiliates their sophistication typically is very high. They’re looking to be able to get into the data. They want, advanced things in their dashboards.

[00:06:09] They’re willing to do complex application processes, put in banking and tax information, and all this stuff because it’s really a business. You know, anyone who’s managed applications for a performance program knows there might be a decent volume of applicants, but there’s a few that really qualify typically.

[00:06:25] And for those people, you really do want something like Impact’s performance product, where you can really give them that sophistication they need. Go down a level of sophistication and you start to find your creators, your influencers, right? They’re still sophisticated, but they’re looking for less things, different things.

[00:06:40] It’s often one, two, three person businesses. And they are looking for more of a consumer experience, but they’re still willing to apply for things, right? They’re still willing to do like campaigns and targeted asks and things like that.

[00:06:50] But then we get down to this next level, and this is like the ultra long tail of partnerships, right? So I’ll give you an example here. This could be like a brand ambassador. So let’s imagine that you’re a company where you could value from chiropractors talking about you. They might love your brand. They might be ambassadors for the brand.

[00:07:07] They might recommend your brand to their customer base, but they’re ultra low sophistication. They don’t have a big website, a big presence. They might have a corporate social account where they post something every once in a while, but they’re not influencers. However, there’s 70, 000 chiropractors in America and they see 20 clients a day each.

[00:07:25] That’s a meaningful amount of traffic if you want to think about it that way, if they’re recommending your products and they’re high trust individuals. So these people aren’t going to apply. They aren’t going to give you their banking information. They aren’t going to go through a complex process and they don’t… they’re going to get lost in complex tooling, right?

[00:07:41] So those people are looking for a simpler product like /advocate or they’re your customers, right? Your customers already have an ongoing relationship with you. Once again, they’re not going to apply, and your customers might actually be motivated by something different where your brand ambassadors might be motivated by traditional cash payouts, your customers might be motivated by things like credit or discount, and you might want to motivate them with those kinds of things because it’s going to deepen their connection to the brand, get them to buy more, use more, connect with the brand.

[00:08:09] So really, to me, I look at it as this idea of like, how sophisticated is the partner and how high is the volume of the partner? And if you have a low sophistication, high volume partner, you’re really looking at more like an advocate or a brand ambassador type program.

[00:08:24] JF: That’s a really good distinction. I don’t think anyone’s ever broken it out that thoroughly. So I appreciate that. And to dive deeper into customers that want to refer we’ll focus on that past advocates or someone who has advocacy for a brand. But from a customer standpoint, it sounds like referral programs, and I’ve always viewed it this way, they’re really twofold, right?

[00:08:42] And I think anybody listening has experienced this. There’s brands that you go and purchase from, and then you get an email and says, “Hey, if you refer a friend, use this link and get 20 bucks off your next purchase” or just some kind of incentive to help you refer that out.

[00:08:54] So it’s both twofold when it comes to identifying ways to attract new customers, but also retention. It’s a huge retention play on keeping your current customers loyal to your brand and not going to a competitor. Is that what I’m hearing from you is the benefit from that?

[00:09:10] WF: Absolutely. So what we’ll see is customers that you acquire through your referral program, you should be acquiring them, we say for around 45 percent less than you would through something like a paid ad. These should be very affordable acquisitions, right? But also what you find, and this is really interesting, is that the customers that make the referrals, they tend to be worth about 17, 18 percent more on a lifetime value.

[00:09:33] So the people that are making the referrals actually end up spending more money, and then the people that they refer are more likely to make referrals. You’re getting your cheapest customers that become your best customers that are also your most likely advocates through a referral program.

[00:09:49] And a lot of that really comes down to these social contracts we make with each other. If I’m willing to recommend a product to you, that means it must be good. And if I don’t continue to buy and use that product, did I just recommend a product that I don’t believe in?

[00:10:02] You know, so there’s a little bit of a commitment from me, and then as the person that I refer, there’s this transient property of trust, right? That’s been assigned to me from my friend. I’m willing to give that brand, more confidence, more of a benefit of a doubt. And then I too also recognize that my social group is okay with these kinds of referrals and therefore I’m willing to make that referral on, and also I just know the referral program exists. Because one of the key factors to a successful referral program, sounds so silly, but is just that people know about it, right? Sometimes people can hide these things or be unsure.

[00:10:32] They feel like they’re asking too much of their customers, but a well designed referral program is a feature. It’s not a drag. It’s like, if I like your product and I can get social credit with my friends for recommending it and giving them some kind of a deal to access it and earn a reward for myself, like that’s a win. Like, everyone wants to do that.

[00:10:49] JF: Yeah, and I think you bring up something that I’ve been monitoring just for the affiliate side and looking at traffic and correlations between consumer behavior online and where they go, how they make decisions, from top funnel all the way down to that purchase cycle itself and then retention, and it’s hard to argue against the fact that consumers today, not only do they have a lot of different sources to discover new brands, but they’re really looking towards trust and authenticity. Those things seem to be drivers more so than even, five, 10 years ago when you can make a quick buck with a good marketing ad.

[00:11:21] Nowadays, people want to feel like they trust that brand. There’s authenticity behind that brand and there’s no better way to do that than looking through and finding out that somebody that you trust within your inner circle socially has been using that brand and would recommend that brand to you. So it sounds like a no brainer.

[00:11:38] From your perspective, and you’ve done this for a very long time and set up many brand referral programs, what are some common mistakes? Have you looked at programs that were existing before where you go, wow, this is not efficient. This is maybe unattractive to a consumer. What are some common mistakes? And then to flip that around, what are best practices to make sure that you’re setting this up correctly?

[00:11:58] WF: Yeah, there’s a handful of common mistakes that we do see out there. They’re all pretty logical that people incur them but I’ll kind of go through a few of them. Uh, this is kind of a, maybe not obvious one, but the first one that we see is an inefficient or ineffective incentive design.

[00:12:12] Especially when you’re coming from more performance marketing, we really think that people are in this for the reward. And I’m not going to say that the reward doesn’t influence people. Of course, that’s what takes us from ” yeah, I casually talk about this thing” to, “oh, I’m going to actually promote it to a friend.”

[00:12:27] But what’s interesting is whether it’s a brand ambassador or whether it’s a customer, you often don’t need to give nearly as much as you do to an affiliate, right? They’re not in this just for the money. People are not going to recommend your product if they don’t believe in it. So the core piece here is they truly believe in your product and they want to advocate for you, which means that they don’t need as much of an incentive to the person making the referral.

[00:12:52] But it’s really important that you do provide an incentive to the new customer. The new customer has a higher friction. They are having to choose to adopt or try out a new solution. So they’re going to outlay cash and time to try this. And so that’s the higher friction here. So we actually worked with some researchers from Wharton and Berkeley, and we did a little work with them to identify what would happen if you only rewarded the new customer and you didn’t reward the existing customer or the referrer.

[00:13:21] And what we found was it’s pretty effective, actually. Now we do know it’s more effective when you reward both sides, but if you only incentivize the referrer, it’s a little bit less effective overall. So, you know, the big piece there, I say is you don’t need to offer probably as much as you’re thinking. You want it to be worth their while, but you don’t have to make this a second job for them.

[00:13:42] And then at the same point, just make sure that you are in fact incentivizing that new customer, right? Now, if this truly is like a consumer program, think like Uber referral program, for that incentive you really do want to think about what we call brand currency, right?

[00:13:55] So give them something that lets them use the product more. But if this is a, maybe a program that is a little bit more community brand ambassadors, people that are looking to make a little bit of a revenue stream from this, there’s nothing wrong with cash. It can just be lower though, than you would pay to maybe your other partner types.

[00:14:09] So that’s one of the big things we see the other, one of the other big ones we see is that people bury these programs. They don’t market them enough. There’s this misconception in the market that referral programs, brand ambassador programs are a bit we call it fire and forget, build it and they will come.

[00:14:24] So people will set these things up and they’ll just be like, “great, we have a referral program” and on they go. And then all of a sudden, a year later, they’re looking at the referral program and they’re like, “why is it only contributing to 2 percent of our revenue?”

[00:14:35] You name me any channel that you don’t maintain at all that delivers 10 to 15 percent of your revenue. And that’s what your referral programs should be doing, right? You should be seeing a double digit, a low double digit contribution to your revenue growth. And so, we will see people who, they’ll send out one email. No one sells anything with one email.

[00:14:56] Like if you showed me your new customer onboarding flow or your customer reactivation flow for an e commerce site, and it was one email and you’re like, it’s not working. I’d be like have we thought about another email? We’ll see these very non complete marketing plans and these ideas where they’re not going to keep investing.

[00:15:10] This still is a partner program. This still is a program where we need to build those relationships. We need to drive the awareness. We need to market to people and depending upon your experience, there might be more points to interact with them, right? So your brand will know all about this, but we worked with a travel nursing company.

[00:15:28] I didn’t even know that travel nurses were a thing, but apparently, you can travel around America and you can work as a nurse in different places. Maybe you want to go to Hawaii and work as a nurse. What they found was that if they asked for referrals at a certain time of the year, i.e. as people were starting to get ready to travel they would ask for that referral and a lot of people want to travel with a friend.

[00:15:47] So it was a naturally social thing worked at this time of the year and when they sent out campaigns around that time of year, it worked really well. When they sent out campaigns at Christmas, it did nothing. So just knowing your business, knowing when to ask, maybe Christmas is a great time for you. Maybe people think about gifting your product. Maybe you’re a fitness related product, maybe New Year’s, but just thinking about how do I market this? How do I engage people as they’re naturally engaging with our product? We know that’s a really big one.

[00:16:11] And then the third one that I’ll mention here, and this is like wild to me, people make it really hard. This is partly why using your affiliate network to run a referral program is such a bad idea. But banks are probably the best at this. If it starts with print, print a form to a piece of paper, you’re dead in the water. Just stop it. No one has a printer, right? I don’t even know a friend who has a printer that I can go print this out. I’m going to staples. We see these programs where they’re asking for a ton of information or there’s like a secondary login and this is especially pertinent if you’re like an app or a subscription service No one’s leaving, no one wants to leave that product.

[00:16:48] But even if you’re like an e-store the idea that I’m having to ask you for additional information is brutal, lowers the conversion rate, and then it’s about we see people where they get stuck, where all of a sudden they’re like, their rewards are going out six weeks after you’ve made a referral.

[00:17:03] No one wants that. Again, you’re losing the momentum. So there’s just this friction and people have a pretty high standards for what their user experience needs to be today. I think you want to make sure you have a really strong incentive design. You want to make sure you’re thinking about this as an active channel that you’re investing in continually.

[00:17:18] And then you want to make sure that user experience is super smooth, if not all the way to delightful.

[00:17:23] JF: There’s a lot to chew on there, and I think for a few moments there, I thought you were describing affiliate marketing and there are so many commonalities I think between the two and talking about brands that we will speak to and they set up an affiliate program.

[00:17:34] Again you fire and forget or set it and forget it. That’s common within just the affiliate space. Specifically, you set up a program, you’re on a network a year later, why isn’t this producing 10, 15, 20 percent new revenue for us. Show me the emails you sent out to publishers to invite into the program and start promoting your brand and there are none. And it takes some of that day to day care.

[00:17:53] I want to go back all the way to the beginning of that, when we’re talking about incentives for people who to refer, but also for that new customer to convert, which is where you want to predicate some of those incentives, what are different types of incentives beyond just a cash value, or you talked about Uber it’s something they can use an app to use that product more.

[00:18:13] So is there a general breakdown of the top three, top five, top 10 ways to incentivize either the refer or that new customer.

[00:18:22] WF: Yeah, absolutely. And it really does depend on your business model. Depending on your business model, the right choice can be a very powerful tool. I’ll share a few here, but the first thing that I’ll say is start by surveying your customers. Whether you just make a phone call, you create a small survey.

[00:18:37] It’s amazing to me how many brands I work with that have never asked their customers what would drive them to make a referral, like what would be an incentive you’d want. And my experience has been that people are pretty quick to tell you what kind of free stuff they want, right? You know, “It’s Hey, what kind of gift do you want for Christmas?”

[00:18:51] Most people will tell you what they want. But here’s the way I look at it. If you have people that are like professionals around your brand, cash is going to be king. Okay. So this is going to be the people that are like the chiropractors, the dentist, the people that are like, they like your product, maybe the physical trainers, they like your product, but they, and they want to recommend it.

[00:19:09] But they’re probably at some point they do look at this product as it’s related to their business. So sure. Cash is great there. Now, moving on from them though the next and closest thing to cash is gift cards, and we find gift cards really useful in two cases. So gift cards are really useful when you have a product where the user doesn’t pay for it.

[00:19:28] This could be like a B2B application, like maybe you’re a point of sale system or maybe you’re I don’t know, some kind of a SaaS tool. And the users aren’t paying the bill. They don’t care for a credit because it’s not their money, but we actually have some interesting studies that show that cash can disincentivize them because they all of a sudden perceive themselves as being salespeople.

[00:19:49] And that’s what a lot of people don’t want to be a, used car sales person, even though they’re recommending a product to a friend, but gift cards can work really well for them. And they’re also really easy to implement because it’s just like an email digital gift card. We find that works really well in, in those applications.

[00:20:05] The other application where gift cards are helpful is when you have low frequency purchases. The classic example here is mattresses. You just don’t buy that many mattresses. Sure, I could get a credit for a pillow, maybe that works, but, at some point. And what I should touch on here, just as a little aside, is that when you look at customer referrals, a customer referrer, a top referrer is gonna recommend ten customers.

[00:20:30] But I, the question I always ask people is, like, how many people can you get to go to the movies with you on Friday? It’s not 30.

[00:20:37] JF: Not counting your kids.

[00:20:38] WF: Exactly. Not counting the ones you told to be there, right? You know, it’s a lower number and that’s the power of referrals. As we have this long tail, this very large group of people, that’s going to get us a few customers.

[00:20:48] If you start to see a referrer that’s breaking 10, they’re probably not just a customer referrer. You need to be recruiting them up into at least like a brand ambassador program, maybe into an influencer program or a full affiliate program. So I always think I’m from Canada, in the NHL, we have what we call farm teams, which are these kind of one rung down teams where you play and then you get called up to the majors. Well, you can think of your customer advocacy program as a bit of a farm team. You will discover some real bigger partners in there, but mostly it’s going to be twos and threes on the referrals. Okay, so we’ve got cash, we’ve got gift cards. Now our traditional retail program, honestly, it’s going to be discounts.

[00:21:30] It’s going to be coupons discounts. The rules, they are very standard discounting rules. If your average order value is under a hundred dollars, give them a dollar discount. If it’s over a hundred dollars, give them a percentage discount because the number looks bigger, but discounts work really well for getting that new customer on board as well as just bringing back that purchase. As long as you have a product that people buy frequently, right? So fashion, apparel, accessories, supplements, things like that.

[00:21:56] This can work really well in there, but there is this other camp and this is only for the brands that are really investing and really want to go deep, and that’s points. And this is brings your referral program tighter together with the idea of a loyalty program. And points is a really cool option because it’s kind of a choose your own adventure.

[00:22:14] People can go and earn those points and they can redeem them for whatever you want. So we have some customers that will use those to redeem your points for product, sure. For like credit or product, but also potentially for like trips to their big customer conference or, you name it, right?

[00:22:29] Depends on the brand, right? I don’t know if you remember the old Pepsi promotion where there was a Harrier jet that you could win? Yeah.

[00:22:35] JF: That they never gave away.

[00:22:36] WF: They never get away. Then they’ll do a Harrier jet, but it might be like 30 minutes to talk with the founder of a fashion brand or something like that, like some cool stuff.

[00:22:44] And the last thing I’ll put in here, I know I’m running down a lot of options here is leaderboards. So this isn’t so much a type of reward, but it’s to say adding a gamified element to these programs can be really interesting. We have one customer that gives away they used to give away a Tesla every year to their top referrer. Then they did some ATVs and I think last year was an F-150 Raptor, but they’re doing some bigger ticket items, but it’s also fun to put in some like extra gamification elements, right? So that you’re getting people. So if you’re like a sports brand, this is like ultra competitive naturally, right?

[00:23:17] There’s lots of fun stuff there you can do as well to just create kind of these secondary incentives.

[00:23:21] JF: First off, send me that brand who’s giving away ATVs. I might I might look into seeing how I can refer some business. No, I think you outlined a lot of great ideas and I think it, it outlines how complex these programs can become and what they’re can actually drive for a brand. And I think at least from my perspective, in the affiliate space, we’re always trying to show value in terms of… you had mentioned it perfectly with the NHL reference and having a farm team, as you look at different types of affiliates, categorically, how they interact with consumers and how you can start farming those into larger and larger partnerships that drive more and more value.

[00:23:58] And you can start getting more creative about how you pay those affiliates out, how you reward them for certain behaviors. Very similar on that referral side. And then to even flip that around, as you talk about referrers who get to that kind of above 10 customers and you might want to farm those and recruit them up and maybe they belong in more of an influencer program.

[00:24:19] And then maybe at some point they actually can become a full blown affiliate within a program. So, I don’t want to make assumptions, but it sounds like that is another reason why Impact was such a good fit. Do you feel like there’s good congruency between, obviously the /advocate program that you guys have built out as they’ve acquired SaaSquatch.

[00:24:37] They’ve got their creator program and then they have their partnership management, which is their main affiliate network platform program. Do you see that with some brands that are on Impact where they can, launch here, or they have that affiliate program, the refer a friend program with /advocate is building, and you’ve seen some crossovers happen. And the value of having that in one place.

[00:24:58] WF: Yeah, no we see definitely are seeing this… this call it ecosystem effect, having a lot of potential. If you want to see the future, just ask a teenager, right? It’s always the way I look at it, it’s just ask a teenager. And I was talking to my nephew the other day and he’s 14 and oh my gosh, at 14, he has such a clear understanding of affiliate marketing.

[00:25:19] They understand properties, they know these are children of the internet, they really do understand what an influencer is doing at any time, they understand what a review site is doing, and they don’t dislike it. You’re right. They want to play, right?

[00:25:32] They want to go there. And so what it’s causing though, is it’s causing some blurring of the lines between these type of partners, right? Are they a referrer? Are they an influencer? Are they affiliate? And I think we’re all starting to see that blurring, but with that blurring, it means that I think this kind of recruitment strategy is even more important, right?

[00:25:48] And if you think about your brand ambassador, your referral program is an easy on ramp into the partnership ecosystem with you. So what we’re seeing is some brands, you get whatever, let’s say you get a hundred applicants a week for your affiliate program, and you’re only accepting a few.

[00:26:03] Now, some of those, obviously you’re like, “Hey, like really hard no, we don’t want to work with you.” But some of them, you’re like, “you’re just not big enough. You’re just not the profile we’re looking for.” We find those are great candidates to actually, instead of rejecting them, just send them on over to your brand ambassador referral program, your /advocate program, where you’re like, you clearly like our brand, but you’re not really what we’re looking for in the affiliate program. We’ll send you to this more like generally available program. And I think that you can go down that way.

[00:26:29] And then the other thing we have, and not to do any kind of product plugging here, but we’ve just released the ability to actually scan your customer base and find existing partners in there.

[00:26:41] So quite often, partners are people too, right? They’re out there, they’re buying products, they’re using your service they’re in your mix. And you might find that you actually have a publisher or an influencer that’s just a customer and they’ve yet to join your program. And we’ve been working with some of the big social networks and getting data around how effective it is to have a influencer recommend your product or an affiliate recommend your product who’s used it, like naturally used it versus been gifted it, used it for six hours, whatever and… and does a review.

[00:27:12] The results are astronomically different, right? This ability to look into your customer base and find people that are actually part of publishers or are influencers is huge. So we really see this as like a continuum, right? Whether you’re pushing people who want to be affiliates into these earlier stages so they can grow with you.

[00:27:30] Or if you’re finding people that are customers and realizing, “Hey, you’re actually influencers and affiliates already. Why don’t we try to talk and recruit?” It’s a really natural kind of like, I don’t know fly wheel of sorts.

[00:27:42] JF: I think it’s really interesting because, in my opinion, it can be just as valuable on the flip side. So we have a lot of brands that are mom and pop shops, or they’re just up and coming brands that launched six months ago, 12 months ago, whatever the number might be, and they’re not quite ready for affiliate.

[00:27:56] And they’re thinking, I want to jump into affiliate. They don’t have brand awareness yet. They’re building a customer base. They’re just getting their feet wet and they want to jump right into affiliate, and we’ve tried this. And typically what we’ll find is you have so many people in that affiliate partnership, marketplace or that ecosystem that they’re turning around and saying, I’m sorry, the brand is too small.

[00:28:17] They’re not well known enough. They’re not, we’re not quite at a point where we want to take that brand on and represent or promote them. On the flip side, they’re going to benefit from starting with more of an /advocate program, using those customers to drive new customers, to help with retention, and as that builds, they can build themselves into an affiliate program when that timing is right.

[00:28:38] So I think there’s interesting correlation on how you can utilize it on both sides, depending on brand size.

[00:28:43] WF: A hundred percent. We see that story as well. That’s just totally appreciate brands want to get into that affiliate space, but as if you’re a, if you’re a publisher or a loyalty site or whatever you’ve got to go with brands that people are going to click on and convert on and you’re going to pick the bigger brand or, nine times out of 10 there.

[00:28:58] JF: Yeah, a hundred percent. Um, this has been extremely informative. I know a lot more about referral marketing that I did coming into this. And one of the things that I’ve always felt was that there are so many synergies between affiliate and between referral or advocacy programs. How do you bridge that gap?

[00:29:13] And I don’t know anybody who’s doing that past what is built as a kind of inclusive marketplace where you have both affiliate creator and /advocate with Impact, and I think it’s a pretty powerful tool. Because a lot of the times that’s where we run into headaches when we look at brands who will even ask us to give them ideas on creating a referral program or an advocacy program, or they’ll come to us and they have a brand or a product that does really well with doctor referrals and personal trainers and go, “great. We want to launch affiliate because we have all these personal trainers that recommend us. So obviously affiliate is just going to hit the home run” and it doesn’t.

[00:29:49] And what they really need to do is have a better system built out for the refer program and maybe work into that affiliate marketplace later. This has been super informative. I really appreciate the time coming on and chatting with us.

[00:30:01] WF: And Jake, just to touch on that really quick. I think what you’re nailing there is something that we’re seeing is there’s a trend and a need for these programs to live in the performance marketing teams. They have a tendency to sometimes live over in the customer marketing where they’re more about the loyalty, fluffy attachment, but that, what you just talked about is we have these physical trainers that are promoting our product and we want to drive that through a, conversion focused activity.

[00:30:27] My experience has been that the performance teams that really get this and can really deliver this, but I do appreciate that in some organizations they’ve yet to see that. So I think, it’s great that your customers are asking about that. It’s a trend that we’re seeing. We’re seeing more groups cluster what we consider the three partnership types under one group, but we just hope to continue to see that trend happening because the once it goes to performance honestly, the results normally grow quite dramatically from where they were when they were with the customer marketing team that just thought of it as a thing you need to do and moving on.

[00:30:54] JF: That’s the fire and forget it side of things, I believe. That makes total sense. I appreciate that last add there.

[00:30:59] So for anybody listening, if they wanted to get ahold of you or learn more, what are some next steps for them?

[00:31:05] WF: Yeah, absolutely. So if you want to get ahold of me please find me on LinkedIn Will Fraser. I’m a head of /advocate at Impact. com to make sure you’ve got me there. If you want to learn more about /advocate, go to Impact. com slash /advocate, and you can start to learn. More there, but those are probably two best ways to get ahold of us.

[00:31:21] JF: Fantastic. Thank you again for joining. I appreciate the time you’ve taken and, I might have more questions and as they come up now, I have your contact email. So I might blow you up with a few uh, “Hey, I need, I need help reviewing this referral program for this brand.” So don’t be shocked.

[00:31:35] WF: Absolutely Jake. Well, thank you very much for having me on here today. And I look forward to all of your questions.

[00:31:40] JF: All right. We’ll talk soon. Bye.