How AI can help Affiliate & Email Marketers with John LoBrutto

Dustin Howes: 0:27

Hey folks, welcome to Affiliate Nerd out. I am your narrator, dustin Howes. Spread that good word about affiliate marketing. You're going to find me here every Tuesday and Thursday on LinkedIn Live round 12.15. So please consider subscribing or grab a download on my podcast sometime. My nerd guest of the day is John LaBru, head of Affiliate Marketing over at GetResponse. John, welcome to the Nerdatorium. Hey, great to be here. Absolutely Awesome. John and I go way back. I knew him well before he knew me. I was watching him on stage and really enjoying his topics and he was super instrumental for my learning experience and growing as an affiliate manager. And, john, I want to thank you for all those great sessions over at Affiliate. So I'm going to. You and Janine have put on some great content throughout the years, yeah.

John LoBrutto: 1:25

Janine Crooks is my partner with that, and everything focused on publisher and affiliate development.

Dustin Howes: 1:30

Thank you.

John LoBrutto: 1:31

Appreciate the kind words. We love doing that.

Dustin Howes: 1:33

You got it. So my guests here, john and I, will be hanging out. We have live Q&A going on. Jump in the chat. Please ask John some questions. You want this kind of information from this kind of 15 year plus veteran. But without further ado here, john, who are you?

John LoBrutto: 1:54

So it's not an existential question, or you just want to hear the resume.

Dustin Howes: 1:58

You get to answer this how you like.

John LoBrutto: 2:00

Any way, I want Well, I guess I'm someone who's been in the affiliate marketing business for a long time A bunch of different verticals you know started out with actually. I started out working for American Airlines for 15 years Baggage handler. Through college a ticket agent, became a supervisor, ended up managing Kennedy airport for American yeah, a lot of fun with that. Then moved into their computer reservation systems called Saber and then from there moved into something called Travelocity, which is still around, but I think Expedia bought it, so we were the first online travel agency, and that's where I got my technical teeth. You know, cut my technical teeth, worked for them for many years and developed a website for them called All Hotels, and at that time it was our hotelscom competitor and that's how I started affiliate marketing. That was about 15 years ago almost, and basically what we were doing was a global distribution product and you know multiple networks, trade double or everywhere, you know basically every network that covered a certain geographical region we were putting together for this project. And anyway, long story short, that's how I started an affiliate marketing and been working through that from different verticals. You know that was obviously travel and then retail and then working with the SaaS companies, web hostings, where we met obviously officially, you know one-on-one internet liquid web and worked in Nutra with Vital Plan for a while. I was in my own gig then. That's when I was an agency and kind of figured out I was spending more time getting customers than actually managing programs, and I like managing programs.

Dustin Howes: 3:38

So same boat, man, same boat it's. I just don't love the aspect of selling myself and my services. I love teaching, I love managing programs, I love the challenge of it, but I just hate trying to bark myself up and try to get customers. It's just not my force.

John LoBrutto: 3:58

And then you look at it like you know, like how lawyers bill out, you know you have the main folks that run the particular law firm and they could bill out higher amounts than the employees. And I felt very guilty about trying to bill out, you know, work that was done by someone else and not me, because they were paying for me. So it was just you know it just didn't work out and get response. That opportunity showed and I jumped on it. I thought it was going to be really cool and it has been. It's been great. It's almost four years and who am I? I'm a guy who lives in upstate New York and nice house, my kids, 20 something two of them live with me and a lot of fun. It's great being remote. I'm an old remote warrior, so this is nothing new Awesome.

Dustin Howes: 4:45

Your remote. Before it was cool in the code pre or post COVID or during COVID. Yes, the remote life is the only way to go. I was like starting to calculate the amount of gas I saved. So I'm going to a job full time, like a 30 minute commute each way, and it's in the thousands of dollars each year that, like you, don't really price in when you're young employee. The community costs, yes, but today it's more prevalent than ever. All right, john, your bio is in the chat. Anybody that wants to join us in the chat, please drop a question. If you'd like to come be in John's spot, go to dustinhowes. com, slash nerd and drop me a line. Tell me what you want to nerd out about. You can be in John's seat next time around, john. So what are you doing? You told us about Nutri, you told us about web hosting and now you're at Get it Response. What are you doing and who are you servicing over there?

John LoBrutto: 5:50

Well, Get Response cages to small business types and basically we're working with a large group of folks that are either mid-sized companies that have email marketing strategies or smaller companies that are developing or just realizing they need email marketing services. The interesting thing was, during the pandemic you had countries like Italy and France, and some of the European companies, countries that think about their entire economy was built on tourism and walkings. I'm Italian, I have cousins in Italy and they go to the restaurant, and the restaurant doesn't have to tell them what the specials are or if they're there or they know where to go. And they have walkings from the tourists or they have their Michelin stars, and when COVID hit, that just disappeared. So now these mom and pops that really had no online strategy whatsoever had to look at getting some sort of relationship with their customers, especially the local ones, to survive. Unfortunately, a lot of them didn't survive, but a lot of them did, and they did because they embraced products like we sell email marketing tools, creating lists, promoting their menus, promoting their specials, and so on and so forth. So we see this huge growth going on in Europe during COVID as a result of this, and it was interesting because the first group of folks that did it, you could see it, was like the under 30 crowd because they speak English online. So we had a lot of that and then it kind of transitioned to the over 30 crowd that was more native speaking. So we had a lot of localized activity as a result in the same regions and geo locations, and the same thing with the United. States. I mean, it was really the same thing all over. We had local pizza years. All of a sudden needed lists and needed an email marketing campaign and wanted to get their menu out to you because delivery started here in the United States like crazy right Reads. So that small business that is either in the process of developing an email marketing strategy and are new to this, or have one and it's not going anywhere and they want a new provider. That's our main customer. That's the folks that go ahead and provide us with the most amount of revenue every year.

Dustin Howes: 8:04

And they're sticky right.

John LoBrutto: 8:05

You know they come in, they figure it out, they're making money. It's a revenue producing product and you know that's who we're looking for. We also are looking for mid-sized and larger enterprise companies. We have a product called GetResponse Max which is tailored towards these larger companies bigger accounts, sub-accounts, things of that nature. So we're pretty full service with that.

Dustin Howes: 8:26

Beautiful and you brought up an interesting point of business is like it was really. It wasn't the boom of QR codes like this one up here, which is my AM checklist, but like businesses had to put that up and that's how you got your menus and that's how you could get your to go menu and website information. And COVID, like really popular, repopulized that again. Maybe push this into where they are today and as using it as a landing page and lead generation Pretty cool stuff. So, getresponse, tell us about what this product is. You told us about, like who it's helping on that small business side, but, like for my usage. I've used it in the past for lead capture of emails and sending out drip campaigns, but from what I know, it's so much more than that. Every time I look, you guys are adding on additional features. So tell me what this product is about.

John LoBrutto: 9:29

Well, it's a great innovation team. We're based in Danz, poland, and it's a fantastic group of people. I mean, I got to tell you I'm the old guy, right? So I have all these 30 somethings that are brilliant MBAs. They have just great ideas. They get online marketing and, unlike all the other places I've worked, they get affiliate marketing, which is really cool because you don't have to sit down, you know, explain to the people that you work for over and over again, especially as executives change. But the product is an email marketing, right? That's our basic core. We're an email marketing platform. That's why people come to get response. That's what we do best. That's our core product. Everything else is built around that. So the other step is marketing automation, right? So now we're talking about more sophisticated email marketing practices and the ability to have folks you know receive correspondence to you based on actions and activities. Did they open this up? Did they subscribe to this? Have they been looking at this particular website? That kind of moves into e-commerce marketing, which is another level of what we do Integrating our product into an e-commerce platform that you may be using on your website to sell retail AI choices or recommendations, ai chat, things of that nature. We're talking AI now, right? So all of these things come together based on what your usage need is. When someone comes into our website new we have to help them build lists. We have to help them develop their email marketing campaigns and strategies. And, again, talking about AI, we have AI tools that now help people do that from the actual creation of the campaigns. We have an AI campaign generator, right? It's just bam, five minutes. You have your first affiliate. I'm sorry, first email marketing campaign. And this is the point of what we do is to develop this platform in order to make it as user-friendly as possible and as effective as possible, because the bottom line is no one's going to pay. You're not going to be sending emails out to anyone unless you have some sort of capture and list magnet or be able to provide names that have opted in in order to communicate with, and it has to be relevant to what you're doing. You want to bring someone into your list that is looking for your services or is looking for you to recommend services, and that would be more of an affiliate marketing angle. But nonetheless, we want to provide a platform that's easy to use. It gives people the tools that they need at a reasonable price and then be able to grow with them, right? We don't want them to outgrow us, right? So we're constantly developing our platform in order to bring in these new tools that people need and make easier for them to use our product.

Dustin Howes: 12:04

Yeah, super important in the SaaS world to have a product that is sticky, that people are going to want to stick, and you're making it to the point where it's not like a necessity to stick with it, but it is like people want to stick with it because it's a good product. That's growing with their business and that's super important. That's not a lot of focus of a lot of software's out there. They just want that stickiness, absolutely Right, but they don't focus nearly as much as that scale aspect and what you're growing into making it and it's performance-based, because you're signing up for a plan to make money right.

John LoBrutto: 12:44

It's not about anything other than you're running a business and you need to return on investment. Yes, and that's where our focus is how do we return the investment that our customers make in our product? In the best and possible and maximization and maximize that as best we can.

Dustin Howes: 13:00

Awesome. So GetResponse is not an official sponsor today, but I am an affiliate. So if you want to go check out GetResponse, we're going to learn more. We're going to learn more about how affiliate managers can use it, which is really cool, and other companies as well. Go . Slash GetResponse to go check out and get a free trial and try it out for yourself. John, let's talk about your affiliate program. You've been doing this a long time and you're one of those experts in this SaaS product field. Tell us about GetResponse's affiliate program. This is in-house program as well as a third party on CJ.

John LoBrutto: 13:41

Yeah, so we basically, the core of what our affiliate program is is an in-house program. It's developed by GetResponse from the ground up. We do have a CJ program. You're welcome to join us on the CJ program. We use that for market development, being able to hit the marketplace and try to find new affiliates, and also where I find a CJ very helpful for us is sub-affiliate sub-accounts. I'm sorry, sub-network where we can hit other regions and geo-locations and use the tracking from CJ in order to support that, because it becomes a little bit of a technical requirement to do that in-house. We do it also, but it's easier on CJ, so we'll pick that up there. But our in-house program is really cool. So we have a upfront program $100 upfront for every sale and or a recurring program which is 33% of the monthly recurring. So what you basically have here are two different programs that are tailored towards how you do businesses in affiliate marketer. If you have a very high cost of acquiring traffic and you need a quick ROI in order to support that traffic acquisition, then the bounty program makes sense to you because you're going to get that upfront. If you're developing a long-term business.

Dustin Howes: 14:57

I'm going to put it up on the screen here for a little bit of an initial.

John LoBrutto: 15:02

So if you're developing a long-term revenue stream and you also know that you're bringing in customers that are sticky and are going to grow, because obviously the revenue increases as list size increases, then recurrence for you. We also offer both. So you sign up to get response affiliate program. You would sign up for one first, but then we offer the second program too, so you can manage how your links are being propagated based on what I just mentioned. What kind of traffic are you? Content specific, so that you're not investing heavily and you can go with a long-term route or you vary traffic acquisition heavy as far as monetary perspective, do you want a bounty program? So you have both. The other thing that's really cool, and something that we're doing that no one else is doing, is since get response is a product that affiliate marketers use. Our product integrates with the affiliate program, so it's one sign in. You sign up for one or the other and then we kind of solicit you for either, for both, and it's one login for get response and the affiliate portal. And we're developing an ecosystem so that you'll have tools on the get response side to help sell get response. And, as an example, again bringing AI into this, what if you had the ability to come in and develop a review site based on AI recommendations? Maybe we give you a list of five put get response first, put whatever the competitors that you want to go ahead and also have on that particular website or webpage and bam, it's done for you. You want to tweak it, but nonetheless the outline is done, the specifics of those particular advertisers or merchants are done, and then you can use that to support your affiliate program. I mean, this is just examples of things that we're working on for next year.

Dustin Howes: 17:00

Well, let's circle back to that. But before we get away from this topic, the Zenhouse program with the two different commission structures. First off, love the option as an affiliate to either see the long-term value of recurring income or see the upfront value of buying digital marketing and reinvesting that into more campaigns. It's a great mix. But you have an in-house program and a CJ program and these dual situations. This seems really complicated and complex. As far as an affiliate program goes, this is not for the faint of heart. But you have an in-house team that knows what they're doing and organizes this, and you're the maestro over there doing all this. How do you keep this so organized?

John LoBrutto: 17:50

Well, the DDoM methods are the most important thing, Most cookie things of that nature making sure it actually makes it easier because we're running everything in-house. It takes a first-party cookie to a whole new level because they're literally using a cookie that lives on our website for use on our website. It's all on the GetResponse domain. As far as the CJ piece, that's an added piece. It adds a little complexity to the whole thing but at the same time it really has to do with our dev team making sure the duplication and testing constantly right, constantly testing to make sure tracking is working properly. We also have a promo code attribution that you would get a promo code for us in the in-house program and that will automatically attribute your sale if it's used on top of the normal tracking. We have all these different layers to make sure that hey look, I want to get credit for my channel, right? Yeah, you know, that's the most important thing. And also it's more important for the affiliates to get compensation, because you know that's that's what I'm here for. I'm here to facilitate for them, make sure they get paid and make sure that you know we have this great relationship where they're making money and we're making money, right? That's the whole point. Um, the in-house the. The interesting thing that I do want to mention is that get response. And you know, you got to think about what was going on in the 90s and poland. You had this explosion of capitalism going on and our founder basically created this email marketing platform in order to have email marketing, to engage in email marketing. Right, because the platforms they were they weren't there back then we were. We were trailblazer here. You know, um, and one of the things and the reason why I mentioned this is affiliate marketing built, get response. You know we had a huge a number. You know this whole recurring model and having people come in and start a business and try to create a revenue stream long term. This was the how we intel and tell people to come in and and build our affiliate program from the ground up and it's really interesting because I walked into a very mature affiliate program right that had an enormous amount of affiliates. I mean we. I think when I started, we had about 60 000 affiliates on the books, so now we have about a hundred, 110 actually. Last choice, I mean not everybody's active, but people are active per month, right? So yeah, within a 12 month period, a lot of those people are actively bringing sales. So now you have to sit down and say how do we develop this right? On one hand, you want to have your top partners work closely with them, optimize, get and get involved with how they produce for you, but on the other end, you have this enormous long tail. And how do you get that done? Right, you get that done with content, with communication, with being able to guide them through. How to start the program, because it's activity, right. How to activate someone? You can sign a mobile you want, but you want to get them active, give them as much as they need. And this is where AI comes in, because it makes it easier. It's a less of a barrier of entry for someone to start something new and use, get response, as maybe their first vendor that they're promoting. On affiliate marketing, learn affiliate marketing from us and then use it, you know, for whatever else they want to use it for, but obviously start with you know what we're providing and trying to get them.

Dustin Howes: 21:08

Yeah, you know, on the ball here and how was your team internally using AI to to help you run these and organize this affiliate program from your end?

John LoBrutto: 21:19

well, we are in the process of really trying to integrate it into the portals and for use with the for the affiliates. Right, and this goes back to the SECA system we're creating, where we're developing AI tools in get response and at the same time, we're trying to develop, or in the process of developing, ai content creation in the portal, and some of that has overlap. Basically what we're doing. I mean, look you, I have some examples here that we were talking about, but you, ai is not the scary thing that is basically going to take over the world. Right, it may, right, but not now.

Dustin Howes: 21:57

We don't know, yet one day we're not going to worry about that in this conversation.

John LoBrutto: 22:00

That's not my above my pay grade, as they say, but for what we're using for it now people don't realize. So I'm a moldy oldie guy, right, I've been all right. I was around during the 90s when PCs became commonplace in the office. We all take that for granted now, but it was the same conversation everybody's worrying about PCs taking jobs, automation taking jobs, all these different things but what it did in reality was create an enormous amount of productivity. You know, back in the day, alan Greenspan was the Fed chairman and every three months you talk about the productivity gains in the 90s and how great the economy became in the 90s and that was all PC revolution. I was someone maybe middle management. I'd have a secretary. We would share secretaries and lower management. They would manage our calendar, they would manage typing things out for us all these different pieces that disappeared when we basically had PCs and then, when it was connected and we had email and calendar updates and synchronization, you know, towards, you know, millennium turn. That was just something that I can now be a trailblazer and do things that I would have needed three people to help. Right, right, that's what this is now right and and basically, yeah, people lost their jobs per se back in the day, but there were so many more jobs that were more satisfying that were created as a result of this, because the company, instead of hiring three people to do one thing. They were a high rate, able to hire three people to do different things, sure, and that's what's going to happen here. Ai is a tool for us to use as an assistant as it gets developed and integrated into what we do, what we use now, to apps, into websites, into platforms like get response. These things will just create a simplicity for us in order to get things done right now and, to answer your question, after this long kind of diatron, the it's, it's planning, right now, I see the most, the greatest impact in AI is planning, business planning, content creation and being able to just ask, like I have some examples where I was. I'm not even going to bring this in, this is just simple. I'm on jet chat, gpt 3.5 it's a free tool, okay and I did something like hey, how do I, you know, create an AI podcast, which is what we're doing today, and I have, like this entire example, what we could, we could be covering per se, based on this at the answer, things like get response AI tool overview, and I'm looking at what the AI comes back with and it's as good as the positioning papers I send out to my affiliates on these tools for them to update their websites. You know how do you start an email marketing business, just this whole. You know unbelievable detail on all of the different levels of how to get this thing started. And then you take one little piece of it and say, could you expand on this? And it'll just get into the weeds and you would have to hire people to do this or spend a ton of time. I talked to an affiliate today and he said he said to me you know, I usually I spent six months doing something I did in six hours last week, you know, using AI and it. That's what it. That's where it's at right now. It you don't want to use it for everything, you don't want to just rely on it. You don't want to just grab, you know, cut and paste, but it gets the organization and the planning done for you where you can use your brain for what you know. The uniqueness of what you want to, you know, relate to your, your audience, as opposed to trying to figure out how to get things started and organize them, work down. But so productivity gains, right goes back to that this is your assistant. Use it and ask it anyway. You know, ask it anything. I actually saw a funny thing at South Park where you know they were using chat GPT to how to how to answer the girlfriend you know, I might still be married if I had that back yeah, you can.

Dustin Howes: 26:02

you can fake who you are at this point if you want, if you want to be a driven and I'm I'm enjoying, like the YouTube channels of like fake people and Instagram folks and following AI bots that have developed themselves and hundreds of thousands of followers in the making Very interesting time that we're living in and we're so right on the aspect of it's not taking jobs, but those who are adapting are going to be able to do their job better. So quit trying to fight it and absorb it and start working with it and improve your functionality with using AI is the real key here.

John LoBrutto: 26:47

Make money with it. Right, as an old affiliate marketer, make money with it. Take it, grab it, run with it.

Dustin Howes: 26:53

Beautiful okay, so stick in with that trend of AI with your partners. What are they using to win and you're hinting at, like? You guys have a product within GetResponse that is able to amplify what affiliates are doing and make landing pages faster and easier to spin up.

John LoBrutto: 27:18

Yeah, basically right now, what exists on GetResponse is the ability to use AI to create websites, website pages, email marketing campaigns, recommendations for marketing automation, marketing automation tools that are based on AI in the e-commerce, you know side of things, having a product recommendations AI chat. So you know, basically our customers are using this because all of these tools. So it's not like, oh, I'm going to buy the AI product, right, that's, it's just integrated into all the different products at different levels. I think that someone did a test and they created an email marketing campaign in like six minutes, right, you know, all the content was written. The newsletters are written. I mean, my suggestion is go over it, of course and throne. But it's done. It's just, you know you have to tweak it right. That's that's the key. But the point being is that that's what our customers are doing and our partners are using it for content. You know, for the most part, you know what. What they're doing is trying to dive into the weeds on certain things and and using AI to to basically search the web to get the information for them and then takes that as a resource and then creates it, makes it their own. Yeah, you know, that's the biggest thing right now. I think there'll be layers integrated into just about everything we use right now. Probably the next five, ten years, I mean it'll be, you know, brand you don't even know it's there, right. It just, you know, powered by AI and you won't really know what the layer is, but you know that that's what. That's what pretty much people are using this right now to get things done faster and quicker and then have AI identify trends like so. One of the things I'd like to get done for us is using AI to to identify fraud, right. So you know, at the end of the day, we're going to thousands of transactions a month and we have these rules and criteria because you have to have an active product, an active plan, in order to get paid for it. Right, because you have to do that, especially right up front. We're probably a little bit more leading and I'm recurring because we're sharing, for sure, but you can see how you can put certain criteria into an AI. You know evaluation to optimize that process and we're in the process of doing that too even to flag activity ahead of time, because, again, you need someone to actually go through data in order to identify things that are happening or have happened, and if we can kind of streamline that where we get the alert as it's happening, it just makes it easier for everybody. We could shut it down and then you don't have that scenario where you have to go back and fix things right. So that's and it's better for the affiliate too, because at the end of the day, you know, those 20 sales that you thought you had, that was all you know. A bot doesn't happen, or we can inform you, as it's happening, that this is something we need to prevent. You know, and again, it's probably not just the get response relationship, it could be a relationship with all the advertisers that are getting affected to this so it's a pro activity it's it's being proactive as best as possible that's a that's a great point that you bring up, especially with products with the MRR model that you're in.

Dustin Howes: 30:31

Right, having the recurring rev share is easy. Like affiliates can't cheat that they. They're not going to spend a hundred dollars to make 33, right, but if you got a hundred dollar bounty and they have to spend, uh, 50 dollars to make a hundred dollar bounty, um, and they could just keep replicating that uh and and start beating the locking period. They're going to do that all day until you catch them. And I ran into this problem at WP Engine. Like I got into the program. They're paying 200 dollars and they had a 60 day money back guarantee and we had a bunch of affiliates that were buying for two months, then canceling the account and cleaning up, making 140 profit from doing that. And I came in and put in a manual process to go and check all these leads. But you're saying AI can like build this out for you and like put it in place and give her flags. That's brilliant. That's.

John LoBrutto: 31:32

That's going to be an incredible time saver yeah, I mean that and it's scratching the surface. It's one of the reasons. By the way, what you just example, that you just gave, is why we really don't play in the loyalty business. Sas company shouldn't be in loyalty rewards because, interesting, if you're paying 10, 15 dollars and then you know that, um loyalty rewards, a partner is giving them the full commission, I mean how do you, how do you? You can't protect that. It's just impossible. I mean you could, you could look at ways to reduce that reward or in some cases and these are the models that I like where they stretch it out over a long period of time. So you know, if you have a year subscription, they'll give you a little piece of it over the year, and if you cancel, then you it ends so that that's working with the advertiser or the merchant for these programs that work in a sass environment. I mean, if you buy, you know, a widget and it's 100 dollars and they pay for it and then the return window is closed and we you know they give you a commission on it. That's easy because it's a single transaction, but the ongoing subscription based stuff is very difficult for loyalty rewards and okay anyway, my recommendation, if anybody out there is on loyalty rewards, shift over to that subscription based kind of reward model and we'll talk about it Interesting that you mentioned that.

Dustin Howes: 32:54

I'm not a big, huge coupon loyalty fan myself. I rarely let them into the program, but they have their place, especially the lower commission rate. Strategic, yeah. And if you're paying multiple partners, if you have some kind of split attribution model, they could work in that kind of sense too. But in general I don't love them stealing last click from my content affiliates and with that, I think that's a great selling point for affiliate programs that have this model. Like do you guys promote that to your affiliates? You want to promote that? Hey, content affiliates, come on in. We're not working with coupon and loyalty sites. You're going to make more money with us.

John LoBrutto: 33:35

It's in our terms of service and it is something that we talk about when we we have conversations with some of the folks and you know, part of the onboarding process right, so that's the other piece of it. Yeah, activation.

Dustin Howes: 33:48

Yeah, I like putting it on the sign-up page. Yeah, but make this a highlight. When you have your six highlights of what your program is, make it like hey, we don't work with these kinds of sites, come on in content. We. We're here to help the creators out.

John LoBrutto: 34:03

Good tip like that I love.

Dustin Howes: 34:05

It all right. Um, let's, uh, let's talk about your program. Like coupon, loyalty sites aren't working for you, but what is working for you right now? Who's who's out there winning?

John LoBrutto: 34:18

A couple of things right. So one of the biggest affiliates we have trains people on how to become affiliate marketers. And their model is a self-fulfilling sales funnel, because you pay X amount for this class and if you bring in, we'll say five people at the end as a referral, being an affiliate of the affiliate marketing camp training, then your fee is eliminated or reduced. So they have this constant flow and they built up over the past three, four years to this monster, very friendly monster that word this wonderful affiliate partner that we have, and what I'm seeing there is. There's others that are doing similar things and I'm trying to help others to develop this in different languages. Right, because I don't want them necessarily to compete with our big affiliate, but I would like to see it in other regions and locations. So overall training and being able to help the user identify what kind of product like ours to use and then train them on it makes it incredibly sticky. So the biggest challenge we have is from email marketing to marketing automation, because you quickly grow into that but then you don't have the skill set in order to support the marketing automation piece and that's where people drop off. That's where you see churn and if we can get them educated on how this is not scary and this is not something that you can't do or you can do this and this is how you do this and you walk into it with that strategy, knowing this will be the next step and I'm not afraid of it. It becomes a very sticky product. So people that engage in that help us. The other pieces are just general content creation and video. Video is huge these days, but again it goes back to doing a tutorial or doing some sort of online review or some kind of value added, and I'm big on that when I sit with folks and they show me what they're doing. You have two views of this. One is that enough to get them started and then they're really adding value. And I'll make suggestions on how to add value because I want it to be unique and I want it to be able to have them add value so that they're not you know, they're the only ones doing this, because this is somewhat unique, even though it's based on things everyone else is doing, it's just enough of a niche to make it something that's special. And it's amazing how you can probe, continue the optimization conversations and you finally get there. Sometimes you get there right away and that's really impressive when that happens, but sometimes it takes a little bit. But once you get there, they're thrilled that we went through this whole exercise, because they really created something different.

Dustin Howes: 37:10

Yeah, I love the love that you're giving those affiliates and taking the time to help them with their conversion rate optimization and making this a true partnership. It leads back into that affiliate ecosystem that you were talking about earlier. I want to hear more about what you're doing to create this.

John LoBrutto: 37:32

Well, it started with the actual connectivity excuse me of the affiliate program, which I call the portal, with the GetResponse app. Okay, I believe it or not, that was really difficult to get everything to work together all at that base, and then we created a new dashboard that was much more user friendly. We obviously took some tips on all the top white label guys and folks that we worked with before and we wanted to provide that kind of reporting and that kind of visual and that kind of dashboard where you can just grab deep link generators.

Dustin Howes: 38:09

We're talking about ending like a.

John LoBrutto: 38:10

QR code to a deep link generator. That's going to happen quickly Getting libraries so that all of the positioning papers and the guides on how to get started and all the tips on best practices are just right there for them to grab. That's part of the ecosystem on the affiliate side. The other part of it is get them, if they are affiliate marketers, to use GetResponse if they are email marketers, to use GetResponse. And then provide templates in GetResponse that basically cater to affiliate marketers. And I touched on that before and this is coming soon. It's not released yet, not all of it. But think about your new affiliate marketing. You want to engage in email marketing. You define GetResponse through your email marketing research or your affiliate marketing research. You come in, you basically purchase GetResponse with a discount because we offer that to affiliates. Add yourself to the affiliate program and now you want to learn how to become an affiliate. You want that return on this investment. So if I have templates on how to sell GetResponse and newsletters and lead magnets and content that you can use as lead magnets, this allows them to get started faster but it also teaches them how to be affiliate marketers. So if I'm putting GetResponse in a default for this particular affiliate marketing strategy, it gets them started and it helps us because they are selling GetResponse but at the same time they are learning how to be affiliate marketers. Same thing with the website. We talked about that. My vision is very soon to have AI basically have a website creation where you can have review sites or content sites or basically go through all of the different types of sites. Have AI create those sites with you, but you put the input in on what you want to discuss. And, as an example, on a review site, you can have a list of five and you just type in the URLs and bam, you have a list of site created based on public information. That's what you want. You want the most current public information. The other thing that we're looking at is how do you get this thing to be current. So this is probably a much longer term vision, but it's not just creating it, it's keeping it current. I don't think AI can do that. Just crawl out and take a look at what's changed in this particular set of URLs that you may be focused on on this particular page and then dynamically update it or just alert you that it's being updated or alert you that there's been a change, and things of that nature. Should I update this? I think that'll be very helpful because one of the biggest problems I think we have an affiliate marketing and you would know this. It's like all the outdated crap that's out there sometimes, sure, it's a website in 2017. It's still live, for whatever reason. They haven't touched it in six years and they could be making money if it was updated, even if they're not paying attention to it.

Dustin Howes: 41:17

That's the other thing. It's a lost piece of content that they've long forgotten about, and sometimes it's like pulling teeth trying to get them to adjust that content, even if it could be like a 10-minute fix, so hard to get a hold of somebody. Even if they're in your affiliate program, you can lead a horse to water, is the real answer to that. Well, I love what you're doing. As we wrap up here, I want to let everybody know about GetResponses webinars. They are doing some incredible stuff teaching affiliates how to be good affiliates and make money out there, and you've got a series coming up that you want to talk about, john.

John LoBrutto: 42:01

Yeah, so basically we've identified the fact and this is fantastic from my perspective and again goes back to loving working for GetResponse and folks there We've identified the fact that a large group of our customers are affiliate marketers. Right.

Dustin Howes: 42:14

Not necessarily.

John LoBrutto: 42:15

GetResponse affiliates, but just affiliate marketers in general. So we're bringing in a lot of our top affiliates to do an affiliate marketing series, share best practices, basically talk about affiliate marketing. Talk about GetResponse and how it's worked for them, or all the different things that a new user or someone that's just coming into this really could be helpful. Or some seasoned affiliates coming in and getting best practices from folks that are making a lot of money, especially with us. So you'll be seeing that coming through, especially if you're on the GetResponse LinkedIn page. We promote that all the time. I try to promote that to our internal affiliates also. And again, big list 110,000 people hit. So that's. It's always a good thing when you want to communicate but you don't over communicate because we don't want to subscribe either. So that goes back to basic hygiene of email marketing. But yeah, so you'll be seeing that and we've gotten we've had about two done so far and we've really got positive feedback. So all of next year we're starting to schedule with select affiliates and just sit down and talk to them and understand their business and how it works and share best practices and you know sort of what you're doing right, only in a different kind of difference, in a different angle, you know but different, different audience for sure.

Dustin Howes: 43:33

But I'm trying to serve as many people in this affiliate management and startup community that is trying to learn about affiliate marketing as possible. But I love how you're servicing that other side and I'm really interested to watch these webinars coming up and maybe I can jump on as well as yeah we'd love to have you Awesome, fantastic. Well, as we wrap up here, new segment I've got going on. It's called Lesson of the Day and there's a lot of big takeaways. John, really appreciate your time and being here today and I think the biggest takeaway for me today is the consideration of a dual program having an in-house program and a program like on a CJ or an impact or share a sale and having them deduped. But this opens you up to so many more new possibilities. You can make it your farm for bringing the house.

John LoBrutto: 44:26

Right.

Dustin Howes: 44:26

Exactly Later down the line. So, and those partners that don't want to join an in-house program, the really big publications, they have an option. They have an option. I love that concept. Thanks for bringing that up. Last thing, john how do we connect with?

John LoBrutto: 44:41

you? Well, you have my LinkedIn profile up there. I think that's the easiest way to get ahold of me. I have all my contact information there. From a business standpoint, that's great. Otherwise, if you see me at an affiliate summit, grab me and I'll buy you a beer, or something We'll talk affiliate marketing until we're all blue in the face, but I always love seeing folks at the summits, especially when I teach. The nice thing about the sessions is all of the folks, because we basically, janine and I focus on publisher development, for the most part from an advertiser standpoint or from a network, so you get to see these people as they're new and then what they do, like later on. You keep up with them and it's really fun. The only thing I did want to mention before we go out and I think we're over one, but love what you're doing Hard to do this twice a week. Tell me about it. I mean, you're perfect for it. So this is great and really appreciate being on, and maybe we'll do this again sometime.

Dustin Howes: 45:41

John, it's great to have you. Thanks for all your guidance and information and spreading that good word. Next week are Affiliate Nerd Out Big week, with Brookshoff and Tied DeGrange out here talking about affiliate marketing. So tune in on Tuesday and Thursday for that. Lastly, affiliate Program Checklist. If you want my Affiliate Program Checklist, use this QR code or go into DustinHowes. com. Slash checklist and check that out. And until next time, this is Dustin Howes signing off for Affiliate Nerd Out. Go get some more Recurrent and Done. Take care, guys.

John LoBrutto: 46:18

Big money. Go out there and make some money.