Dustin Howes: 0:27

Hey folks, welcome to Affiliate Nerd Out. I am your Nerderator, dustin Howe. Spread that good word about affiliate marketing. You're gonna find me here on LinkedIn Live every Tuesday and Thursday at 12.15 or anywhere you get your podcasts or on YouTube for that matter, so please consider subscribing. My nerd guest today is Tyler Ryan, ceo over at LTV Numbers and former NASA data analyst. Thanks for joining me here, tyler. Welcome to the Nerditorium.

Tyler Ryan: 1:01

You got it, Dustin. Thanks a lot for having me.

Dustin Howes: 1:03

Awesome. So I've always had this statement never trust a guy with two first names. Now, what makes you a trustworthy character that I can change my mind about this statement?

Tyler Ryan: 1:16

Well, I think the first thing is actually have three first names, so take that Tyler John Ryan.

Dustin Howes: 1:21

Okay, let's just say one of them has each other's own. What was the middle name again?

Tyler Ryan: 1:27

John.

Dustin Howes: 1:28

Okay, yeah, one of them cancels the other out. We're back on good terms.

Tyler Ryan: 1:32

There you go.

Dustin Howes: 1:33

If you wanna hang out with me and Tyler, we have a live Q&A session going on in the chat, so please drop your questions. We're gonna be nerding out about lifetime value today and Tyler, without further ado, who are you?

Tyler Ryan: 1:49

Well, dustin, as you said, I'm a former NASA software engineer and I had the privilege of building spacecraft applications that helped spacecraft engineers design the rovers and put them on Mars. So because of that, I got to see in a very unique way, the type of data precision and accuracy that it takes to get a rover to land on Mars within a foot of its target landing spot. That level of precision and accuracy is really hard to comprehend, but my goal is to bring that level and that approach to the world of online marketing so we can do some great things.

Dustin Howes: 2:26

Goodness, all right, that's pretty impressive work that you've done in your past and it just exemplifies what affiliate marketing is and the natural career path of going from NASA into affiliate marketing. Of course, like everybody knows, that's the way it's supposed to go.

Tyler Ryan: 2:46

That's the dream track, right there, awesome.

Dustin Howes: 2:49

We got John Wright in here dropping the three first names amazing. Yes, I agree, john. I don't know what your middle name is. Wright isn't a first name, but so you get away with it All right. So I'm gonna drop a link to get ahold of Ryan.

Tyler Ryan: 3:12

I did it, I knew it was gonna happen.

Dustin Howes: 3:14

It was gonna happen. John, here we're gonna drop a link to his LinkedIn in the chat so you can get ahold of him very easily. If you would like to come onto Affiliate Nerd out and be my guest, jump into Tyler Ryan's seat here, go to dustinhoundscom, slash nerd and toss in an application of why you would like to be on the show. Oh, we've got some more live chat coming on. John Wright saying Curtis, andrew for my middle names, but appreciate people with that least two feet.

Tyler Ryan: 3:52

That's right, john.

Dustin Howes: 3:53

Respect All right fair enough, I guess you guys are hanging out together in that venue, so I'm gonna drop that link in the profile. But why don't you get a start as what lifetime value is and try to explain it like I'm five years old here, tyler?

Tyler Ryan: 4:11

Okay, you got it. So lifetime value, simply put, is how much money a customer spends with you over their lifetime. Okay, now, it's a very nuanced and complex metric that a lot of people misunderstand and don't quite understand fully how to leverage it and use it, and that's a big part of what we're gonna go into in a lot of depth today. But, simply put, how much a customer spends with you. So, if they spend $100 the first time they buy something from you and then 30 days later they spent another $100, their LTV is now $200. Now where it gets complex is when you start looking at large groups of customers. You have many different products, you have many different funnels, you have many different affiliates driving you traffic. There's different LTV numbers for every single one of those things, and LTV is a fluid metric that evolves and changes over time. So if we wanna go a little bit deeper than being five years old Dustin, we can, but that is what LTV is at a high level Beautiful.

Dustin Howes: 5:14

Then expand on that a little bit further, Like you guys. Well, we will get into it a little bit further here, but now explain what LTV numbers does. What do you do and who are you serving with these lifetime numbers?

Tyler Ryan: 5:30

So at LTV numbers, we help online businesses, in particular, those who run affiliate programs, understand their customer lifetime value at such a deep level that they know exactly how much they can afford to spend to acquire a customer. One of the most fundamental things in business is how much can I spend to acquire a customer? The answer to that is what's your LTV? We help businesses do that better than anybody else, and the name of the game is if you can spend more to acquire a customer, you'll be able to get more traffic, and the business that can spend the most to acquire a customer wins, and we help businesses do that.

Dustin Howes: 6:06

Okay, interesting, and so does this apply. The first thing that always comes to my mind when I think of lifetime value I didn't even know what this was until I started working for SaaS companies, and SaaS companies are very in tune with what their lifetime value of their customers are, because they're on a monthly recurring revenue, mrr model and they're trying to be as sticky as possible. They're trying to make their software as useful as possible and as hard to get off as possible, and that raises their lifetime value. But the clients you're normally working with are in the SaaS space. Is that right?

Tyler Ryan: 6:48

There are some in the SaaS space, but for the most part they're selling things like digital workout programs and coaching programs and supplements and online courses. So because of all that variance, it's not nearly as simple as how long do they stay in my monthly program? That's where a lot of the complexity comes in, but it's also where a lot of opportunity comes in, if you can understand how to use LTV properly.

Dustin Howes: 7:12

Great and the clientele that you're taking on. Oftentimes, I would assume that they have an established affiliate program where these lifetime value numbers are a little bit highlighted, or have some time within their business to actually have these necessity numbers. Is there a point in time in which you're working with these companies that they have to have this many months or years of service before you can start really evaluating it?

Tyler Ryan: 7:44

It really helps if there is at least 12 months of historical data to go off of. Okay, and just as a general rule of thumb, most of the businesses that we work with are doing at least a million dollars a year in top-line revenue and if they have an affiliate program, they're getting traffic from a wide-ranging number of affiliates and they have a multi-product catalog that they're sending their customers through. So that way, someone comes in and buys something. They can then market additional products on the back end. And that's where the LTV equation really comes into play. If you only have one thing to sell, there's not really much to look at. But if we do have this multi-step customer journey, which I know we're going to go into in more detail during our talk today that's where understanding LTV and optimizing for it becomes a real opportunity.

Dustin Howes: 8:32

That's well said. Great Looks like John Wright's just beaten up our chat here and he is anxious to get some questions in. Do you help affiliates understand their lifetime numbers as well? I know some big affiliates pay attention to this and measure it as it seems of deciding who to give more traffic to Great question. Thanks, john. Do you work with affiliates?

Tyler Ryan: 8:58

Generally speaking, we don't, but all of the logistics of it are exactly the same. The reason why we don't typically work with the affiliates is because, as a vendor, you own the customer data. So you know the email address and all the information about the customers who are buying from you. And when we look at LTV we want to look at you're acquiring 100 customers a day. How can we figure out how much all of those customers coming into your ecosystem are worth, so that you can figure out how much you can afford to spend to acquire those customers? On the affiliate side, it's a little bit of a different game because on that front you're not actually getting customer data. There it's more a question of which vendors are the best places to send traffic to, and, while it is ultimately still an LTV question, it's a little bit different of an application than where we typically focus.

Dustin Howes: 9:52

Absolutely, and on that side of the visibility to an affiliate is definitely limited. And then, secondarily, the affiliate job to merchants. Essentially, the partnership there is to bring the first-time customers. In all reality it's not a really consistent style or methodology for an affiliate to bring one customer that keeps on coming to their site, including those links for each one of those. It's the merchant's job to retarget them in the future and remarket them with email campaigns after they become a customer. So the lifetime value of each one of those not so prevalent. But I guess it could work if it was a recurring model, right, like if an affiliate was getting a recurring 20% for the lifetime value of the customers that they're bringing in. That might be part of the equation, right.

Tyler Ryan: 10:52

Yeah, absolutely. I think the main difference is a big part of what we're going to talk about today is creating strategic and optimized customer journeys. If you're an affiliate sending someone else traffic, you don't control that customer journey right. Your journey is like what's the nature of your relationship with the vendors that you send traffic to? It's not really as much to go into there as when I'm acquiring customers. How do I make sure that that customer has a great experience from the day that they come in all the way through the rest of their time with me, and that's what we're really going to focus on. Also, if you don't mind, john asked another question about how bad is the lack of awareness or knowledge on LTV.

Dustin Howes: 11:33

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, tyler, let's let the host do his job.

Tyler Ryan: 11:37

Sorry, sorry, I got excited.

Dustin Howes: 11:40

Oh, you're out of control. Young man John Wright asked another question. Also, If it's cool to ask questions, what percentage of affiliate programs actually understand their lifetime value? How bad is this lack of knowledge?

Tyler Ryan: 11:54

So I will answer this with a story.

Tyler Ryan: 11:57

I was at an event about five years ago listening to a guy named Joel Marion give a talk titled how to Scale your Business 10 Times Bigger, 10 Times Faster. And if you know who Joel Marion is, he built the company Biotrust from zero to $150 million in 18 months, which is just an insane speed to build something like that. And he did this demonstration. During his talk. There was about 400 people in the room and he said we're going to see how well you guys understand your lifetime value. So he asked the room. He said how many of you know your average customer lifetime value? So a single number, right like $100. And of the 400 people in the room, there were maybe 50 hands. So he said okay, not bad.

Tyler Ryan: 12:42

Now how many of you know your customer lifetime value at day zero, 30 days after the first purchase, 60 days, 90 days and 180 days? And there was maybe 20 hands. And he goes okay, not bad. Now how many of you know your customer lifetime value at day zero? 30, 60, 90 and 180 for each product, funnel, traffic source and affiliate in your business? And there were only four hands and it stuck in my mind because the room literally went from 400 down to four, which is 1% of the room, and he asked each of them how big is your business? The first one 15 million, 25 million, 35 million, 50 million, and he just goes. I'm not surprised. And then he goes on to give the whole rest of his talk, which is if you know your LTV better than anybody else, you will win. That's how we got to 150 million in 18 months. So 1% is my experience on this.

Dustin Howes: 13:38

Okay, gotcha Great answer to a crazy question. Appreciate the questions coming in here. John Jumping in. I don't know what he was LOLing. I'm assuming it's my joke of being a host here.

Tyler Ryan: 14:38

Yeah, it was me stepping on your toes and Tyler trying to be super rude.

Dustin Howes: 14:45

All right, moving into the front of it. Lifetime value to affiliate. Why is it so important to the affiliate channel of knowing your lifetime value?

Tyler Ryan: 14:55

With the affiliate world specifically, there are such tremendous variants on customer quality from one affiliate to the next. One affiliate might send you really great customers. Another might be just trying to inflate their CPAs by sending you a bunch of low quality customers who are just going to refund shortly after purchase. Because of that variance it's really important to be able to see not just how many customers do I get from an affiliate and how much initial revenue do I get, but what do those customers then go on to do after they are acquired. Ltv is the metric that encompasses that. It is the metric behind the customer journey. So with LTV you're going to understand how much those customers are worth on day zero, the day that they first buy, but then also how much they're worth seven days later and 14 days later, and 13 days later and 60 and 90 days later as they come into your back end and you then sell them other products. And if you're able to see on a per affiliate basis what those LTV curves look like, you will find that many affiliates curves. They look like a dip. They come in, they dip down because you have such a high refund rate and then you end up spending the rest of your time on the back end with those customers trying to make up for the losses. Those affiliates are very, very difficult to scale with because the customer quality is so low. And how would you know that LTV?

Tyler Ryan: 16:30

On the other hand, if affiliates are sending you customers who come in and then their LTV starts growing over the first 30, 60 and 90 days, you know that these are high quality customers that are engaged, that are buying from you again, which means you can then afford to spend more in commissions for the customers that come from that affiliate.

Tyler Ryan: 16:51

So really, what LTV does is it gives you a roadmap so who your good affiliates are, who the ones are that you should drop, and then how much you can tweak your commissions to be able to further strengthen your relationships with your best affiliates. Because if you knew that a customer from a particular affiliate goes from being worth $100 to $150 in 90 days, but you're only paying that affiliate a $90 commission, man, go back to them, bump them up to $100, they're going to be super happy, your relationship's going to improve, they're going to send you more traffic as a result, but you're happy to do it because you're still profiting $50 on every customer you acquire. But if you didn't have visibility into LTV, do you see how? You would have no idea how much you could actually afford to give in commissions? That's where most vendors find themselves and it's why their affiliate program is very difficult for them to scale because, they're just looking at things like number of customers and front end revenue.

Dustin Howes: 17:52

And you bring up some incredible points there, specifically what's your base commission and your cap commission really could look like. And if you're not evaluating what's your lifetime value of the affiliate channel altogether, you're missing out on this opportunity. So usually when you launch an affiliate program, you come up with some kind of number that you say, hey, we can afford to give away this much and this is what we'll give the regular affiliates, and then we can go up accordingly when we need to be more competitive. But you're saying you can evaluate all these numbers and see the general public and adjust your base commission first of all and is that one of the practices you go through with each client?

Tyler Ryan: 18:40

Yeah, one of the first things that we do is we load in all the historical data and we look at their LTV curves for each affiliate. So not just globally, because globally you can lose a lot of the insights. Ltv really needs to be broken down to the individual affiliate level for you to really get the value from that metric. Then, when you see that it's easy to go look these five affiliates or LTV curves all drop down after the initial acquisition While these five affiliates their LTV is growing strong over the first 90 days. Let's drop these five affiliates and let's go back to these other five and increase their commissions by $5, because we can see that we have the margin to do that.

Tyler Ryan: 19:26

That is a really great place to start because it filters out the bad ones from a customer quality standpoint and allows you to double down on the best ones who can then send you more traffic as a result of the higher commission. The other thing that gets lost here, too, is protecting your offer integrity, protecting your refund rates, protecting your charge back rates. Those things really make a big difference and a lot of times the customers who are resulting in that dip in your LTV if you can filter out those affiliates so you don't have those customers coming in anymore. It will allow you to improve the relationship with your merchant. It will reduce your charge back rates. These things really matter in the long term, especially as you're scaling up.

Dustin Howes: 20:12

And the partners that you are seeing that dip in where the return rates are up. This is a great opportunity for you to go and reevaluate their content, because if they're saying something incorrect about your product or offering something your product really doesn't do, just to sell it, this is watering down your brand or hurting it in some kind of essence. So it's a good indicator that you should be evaluating some of their content. If they're really high volume, right, because having that conversation with affiliate partners can be a little bit weird when you're telling them hey, we've got to drop you down and here's why, right.

Tyler Ryan: 20:55

Right, right, but if you can do it, speaking just from the hard numbers, because you have that visibility, it's a much easier conversation than you just coming and saying like I don't know, I just kind of feel like we're going to drop you down.

Dustin Howes: 21:07

So yeah, why so true?

Tyler Ryan: 21:09

Numbers say so, right, and that makes the conversation much easier.

Dustin Howes: 21:12

So true, All right, we're going to get into the customer journey here in a second, but I want to give a shout out real quick to our sponsor of the day Fresh Shales. They empower businesses to maximize the productivity and revenue growth through a robust CRM. I personally used this in the past as a CRM and it works great for affiliate managers. It has some seamless integrations with AI driven capabilities and providing a comprehensive 360 degree view of company and customer interactions. I'm loving that AI driven content scoring and it's built for the sales team, but affiliate managers can absolutely use this if they're on a budget and they can utilize the tools to stay organized with clients and partnerships as low as $15 a month. But you can try it out with a 21 day free trial.

Dustin Howes: 22:11

Go to dustinhousecom slash fresh to get started for free today. That is dustinhousecom slash fresh and getting back into it, You've got a little diagram that you'd like to share your screen with, and this is the customer journey. So we're gonna talk about what a customer journey actually looks like and what it does for your clientele here.

Tyler Ryan: 22:39

Absolutely, and we're gonna start off here by looking at what most businesses that I see in the affiliate world do with their customer journeys and how we can make them better. And the main thing that I wanna just get clear on here before we dive into this is when I talk about a customer journey, what I'm referring to is the experience that the customer has from the day that they make their first purchase with you and then through the rest of their lifetime with you in the business. This is the part that we, as the vendors, we control. We control what their experience is like after they make their first purchase. We control what we sell them and when we sell to them. And that journey is critically important for your LTV to be meaningful. And here's what I mean by that. If every customer who comes in has a different experience, then your LTV doesn't have any meaning, because LTV must be representative of a group of customers going through the same experience over the same period of time. If one customer comes in as a different experience, another one comes in as a different experience, and then we look at a day 30 LTV. What does that mean If all of your customers had a different experience over those 30 days. So a really critical prerequisite to get started here talking about LTV is having a customer journey that's strategic and repeatable.

Tyler Ryan: 24:08

So starting here, this is a typical ineffective journey where we state as business owners, our goal is to make as much money as possible, and here's how we're gonna do it. We're gonna do it with a journey like this and what you'll see here is the customer makes their first purchase, you send out the order confirmation and then you send them a three to four email indoctrination sequence. At that point the journey is pretty much over, because now they're going on to a broadcast list. You're cross-selling a bunch of other offers, whether internal or affiliate, and you're trying to make as much money as possible before they unsubscribe. The irony of this is, if your goal is to make as much money as possible I've seen over a half a billion dollars worth of sales data in this space the best way to do it is to actually care about your customer, give them a good experience and put them through a carefully crafted customer journey. This does not do that and the irony is the goals to make as much money as possible. This is one of the most ineffective ways for you to make money as a vendor. The data shows it. The data shows that your returning customer rate with a quote journey like this is extremely low.

Tyler Ryan: 25:17

And if you just think about it, come back to what I call the customer journey golden rule Treat your customers like you wanna be treated. When your customers go through a journey like this and they're getting bombarded with other offers before they even experience the value that you promised from your friend and offer, why would you expect them to buy from you again? I wouldn't, but for some reason we do. We think, man, I'm gonna hit them with this seven day sales sequence, three days after they purchased a supplement that they haven't even received in the mail yet. It just doesn't make any sense, and that is where we lose the customer. And if you lose them in that first impression, they're never gonna come back and buy from you again.

Dustin Howes: 26:02

Oh, amen. Now how do you come up with convincing people that this is not a great strategy for them? Is that in the lifetime numbers, like early on in that journey? Can you see that and spot it really quickly?

Tyler Ryan: 26:21

Yeah, and I understand where it comes from. It's like in this world. We're told every time we send an email, we make sales, right, don't be afraid to email your list, sell in every email. Email them twice a day if you need to, right? We hear these types of things so I get where it comes from, but the reality is, when I load in businesses' data for the first time and they have a journey like this, their returning customer rate is usually like 5%, which is extremely low.

Tyler Ryan: 26:51

The best businesses in this space that we're talking about here have a returning customer rate of 15%, 20%, 25%. But the way that they get there is by crafting a strategic and intentional customer journey. That's a good experience for the customer. So what I usually say is hey, look, here's the numbers. Your returning customer rate is extremely low. Your 10% below industry benchmark. Do you think it might be worth trying a different strategy? Because what you're doing right now is clearly not working if your goal is to make as much money as possible, right. So let's try creating a win-win here Good for the customer, good for you and, in the end, the way that we do that is creating a strategic and repeatable customer journey.

Dustin Howes: 27:34

Okay gotcha. For those of you that want that visible journey that Tyler was just talking about, go to the YouTube or the LinkedIn Live link to check that out. If you're listening on the podcast Now talking about that baseline number, what do you think? You mentioned industry standard and like baseline of what it should be, that lifetime value. What should people that are in trouble here that might be thinking, yeah, maybe I need to dig a little deeper into my lifetime value. What is that baseline that people should be questioning their business if they're underneath it?

Tyler Ryan: 28:16

So, from an LTV standpoint, what I have seen to be a good benchmark is whatever their LTV is on the first day, which you can think of as like your AOV. All right, let's call that a hundred dollars for easy numbers. If they come in worth a hundred dollars, we need your customers to be worth at least 25 percent more within 90 days. So it means taking the LTV from a hundred to a hundred and twenty five dollars. Now the key here is to recognize that I'm talking about all of your customers, right? Not the five percent who come back and make another hundred dollar purchase. When you average them all out together, okay, we need all of them to be worth a hundred and twenty five dollars.

Tyler Ryan: 28:59

So it's not as simple as saying well, they spend a hundred dollars up front, some of them make another hundred dollar purchase. Their LTV is two hundred dollars. No, no, no I'm talking about if you look at all of the customers you acquire, follow them over the course of 90 days, add up the total revenue that comes from all of those customers and Then divide it by the number of customers. That's what's going to get you your 90-day LTV. We need that number to be a hundred and twenty five if you started at a hundred. So that's a, that's a general benchmark, adding 25 percent to the LTV within the first 90 days.

Dustin Howes: 29:34

Okay, gotcha, and so you talked about that customer journey. That is traditional, but you have a new methodology of what that would look like, right?

Tyler Ryan: 29:44

Yeah, it's ready to go.

Dustin Howes: 29:45

What do you, what do you call this?

Tyler Ryan: 29:49

I just call this a strategic and repeatable customer journey. Okay, got it.

Dustin Howes: 29:54

And so tell us about what the life to LTV loop method is and the strategy behind it.

Tyler Ryan: 30:02

Do you want to go through the, the strategic and repeatable customer journey as well?

Dustin Howes: 30:07

Yes, absolutely Go for it.

Tyler Ryan: 30:09

Yeah, let's do that before we go to the LTV loop method.

Dustin Howes: 30:12

Okay, cool.

Tyler Ryan: 30:13

So there, it is All right. So we already talked about what the Ineffective journey looks like. That is more typical. This is the strategic and repeatable customer journey that I've been talking about. Here we have a different goal. The goal is that the customer experiences the value that they were promised, and and as simple as that goal is, there's a lot that we can do to help ensure the highest likelihood that that happens, and that should be the goal of the first 30 days, because what we're trying to do here is stick the relationship. They like us, they like our brand, they like our product and they're open to the next thing that we have to offer.

Tyler Ryan: 30:52

So what you can see here in this journey is the way it starts is reinforcing the purchase and setting clear expectations. What can they expect? When is their product going to arrive? When do they expect to experience the benefits that they were promised? What can they expect from you? In terms of the emails that are coming up, lay out those expectations. Talk to them like you would want to be talked to if you were on the other side. Then let them know that your goal is to deliver on your promise and support them. Stating that expectation really helps to get the relationship off on the right foot. Instead of letting them know that we're going to be bombarding you with offers, instead, let them know that we're here to support you on the journey.

Tyler Ryan: 31:31

Share why your company and your product actually exist. Give them a reason to care. Build that initial relationship Based on why you do what you do and how you're here to help them. Okay, then, share testimonials that highlight the benefits and create excitement for them to experience the benefits that you promised. Then share detailed best practices on how to get the most out of the product, and here I'm talking about things like a walk-through video on what their experience is going to be like when they receive the product, how to take it out of the box, what they can expect in terms of when to take it, how to get the most out of it and I know this sounds very Almost like you're going too far here, but trust me, this makes a big difference.

Tyler Ryan: 32:18

Show them how to set a reminder on their phone to take this every single day. Show them how to set a daily recurring alarm. Show them where they should put it in their house so they're gonna be most likely to remember to take it, yeah, and all these things that kind of make you chuckle because, like I feel the same way. It kind of sounds ridiculous. This stuff really does matter because it's what most businesses don't do. It helps you stand out. Did you want to say something?

Dustin Howes: 32:46

No, I mean, I've got my supplements on my desk and I Pick them up every morning, but I don't have an alarm next to it. I definitely never seen a business tell me to do these kinds of things. Which is revolutionary, like just and super smart from it just shows you care so much more.

Tyler Ryan: 33:04

That extra mile it really does, and especially many of us that serve an older demographic. You know, maybe your customers are over 50, for example. Give them something that they can print out and put on their fridge. I'm serious.

Tyler Ryan: 33:17

Yeah give them easy things that can keep their whatever the product is that they bought top of mind, because they will forget. So it's your job to keep bringing them back. Okay, so, whether it's videos, pdfs, printouts, think about for your customer what makes the most sense. Okay, then, we want to help them recognize the benefits that they may be experiencing. This is a really important one, because you might have promised, for example, let's say it was weight loss. It would be obvious to say, like hey, are you losing weight? But what if they're not, because of things that are outside of your control? What benefits can you point out to them that have nothing to do with that? Like are you more productive at work? You feel like you're in a better mood, you having better conversations with your spouse, your sex drive hire.

Tyler Ryan: 34:03

If you can point some of these other things out, they can start to associate them with your product, even if it wasn't the main promise.

Tyler Ryan: 34:13

So that way, in case they were thinking, oh man, I haven't lost those five pounds yet, if they say, well, yeah, but you know what I feel, great, oh, my spouse sure is happy.

Tyler Ryan: 34:22

Like, then they will start to give your product more consideration, right, and maybe they'll get themselves closer to experiencing that core value that you promised in the beginning. Then the last couple things here is creating accountability through a community, if you have one, so, for example, like a Facebook group and then providing them opportunities to ask questions and get help. So if, for example, they're not getting the benefits that they that they were hoping for, give them a place to be able to ask those questions, even if it's literally just reply to this email. If you have any questions and we'll do our best to help you, right, let them know that you're there for them and you actually care that they get the value that you promised. If you start out out the first 30 days of your relationship like this, when you get to the next 30 days, they're gonna be way more open to the offers that you make them beautiful, beautiful.

Dustin Howes: 35:11

Oh, man that's so smart and really appreciate that knowledge drop and giving the listeners out there that opportunity to like create this journey themselves. This is a much better looking Graphic than I ever imagined. Like doing with a customer in the affiliate realm. Well, that is awesome, thanks. Thanks for all of that and, before we get rolling and wrap this thing up, I want to talk about the lifetime loop method that that you have as well. So, if you have what that would look like, I Want to hear this methodology that you've come up with here.

Tyler Ryan: 35:50

Okay, you got it. So what? What we didn't get a chance to talk about in that last the, the last part of the customer journey I just want to mention quickly is the next part of the journey is when you start the selling process. And and there here's what you need to know if you did that in the first 30 days, even if you do exactly what you were doing before, in the next 30 days, they're gonna be more receptive to it. Your returning customer rate will go up. You will make more money. I know it now.

Tyler Ryan: 36:19

Now you can be even more intentional about how you sell and there's a whole art to that as well and and simply put, because you know, just because of time here, when you make that second offer to them, when you start selling to them, think about a logical next step that builds on and enhances the value of the thing that they already have.

Tyler Ryan: 36:44

Okay, don't think of it from the standpoint of hey, you're over 50, you got a weight loss offer, I'm just gonna throw you a back pain offer. It's like maybe that serves the same demographic, but that makes no sense. There's no connection there. So if you can create a link between the product that they just bought and say, hey, you know, there's something that we have that can help you get even better results from the thing that you just bought and give you all these additional benefits. Come from that standpoint when you present this offer, because the framing of it will be much stronger and they'll be way more open to it than them getting jerked in another direction with some loosely related offer. That doesn't really make much sense. So I'll just say that, and now we can talk about the loop method here.

Dustin Howes: 37:29

Okay, gotcha, yeah, get into this loop method. Well, we run down here.

Tyler Ryan: 37:35

Okay. So the loop method is built on the premise of something I mentioned at the very beginning, which is the business that can spend the most to acquire a customer wins. Your goal as a business should be to be able to spend as much money as possible to acquire a customer. This is a different mindset from what we typically talk about, which is I wanna spend as little as possible to acquire a customer right, cause that's what we talk about more often in terms of getting the cost down on the ad side or the affiliate side. Let's come out from the other standpoint. Let's make it so we can spend as much money as possible to acquire a customer. To do that, the first step, the prerequisite, is to have an optimized customer journey. Even if it's just your first stab at it, it needs to at least be strategic and repeatable, and not a three email sequence and then sending them into your broadcast list right, cause that is not repeatable. So we start with a strategic and repeatable customer journey that's optimized for LTV. That's where we start. Then, through those customer journey optimizations, our goal is to increase our LTV so that we can then raise our commissions. That is the goal.

Tyler Ryan: 38:49

Let's be able to spend more to acquire our customers from our affiliates.

Tyler Ryan: 38:54

When you can do that, when you can raise your commissions, that will result in you getting more traffic, whether it's going back to your existing affiliates and saying, hey, we're bumping you up by $5, let's get our next send scheduled.

Tyler Ryan: 39:08

Or if it's you making your offer more attractive to bring in new affiliates right, like, for example, if you're working with a network and you can go back to them and say, hey, we just raised our starting CPA by $5, that gives them reason to repromote your offer to their network of affiliates, right. Or to reach back out to your contacts wherever your affiliates might live. So raising those commissions creates more traffic. That then allows you to acquire more customers. When you acquire more customers, it's more people feeding into your customer journey that you are then continuing to optimize to increase the LTV. What's then allows you to raise your commissions again so you can acquire more customers and keep optimizing that customer journey. The more times you can go through this loop, the bigger your scale ceiling will be, because you're gonna be able to spend more to acquire a customer, which means you can command more traffic in the marketplace.

Dustin Howes: 40:04

Brilliant, brilliant, and there's a hidden ROI in there too. The people that are multiple buyers of products of yours are beginning to become your evangelists Not necessarily affiliates out there, but they're helping your brand expand because they're telling their friends, who buy from some of more of your affiliates, who become lifetime value customers. So there's a little bit of a hidden gem there as well with this whole journey, but super smart way to think about how do you increase your value of the affiliates in your program and how to make them more happy too, because you want them to be happy and make more money as well. So that's right.

Tyler Ryan: 40:52

It's a great relationship builder really, when you can go back and say hey, I wanna pay you more money right.

Dustin Howes: 40:58

Absolutely All right. Well, thank you for the graphics. Thank you for the knowledge drop there. Before I let you go, I just want to have you defend your post here and let's see what I've got. No, that's from last week. All right, Not sponsored by Monster. Five reasons why customers abandon their shopping cart. So you're holding a Monster and this looks like it's over a year ago and you recently had your first kid. But tell me how you're wearing dad gear before you had a child. Where do you get off? Where do you have the nerve here, Tyler, To be holding that Monster?

Dustin Howes: 41:41

No, no, like the shirt here the Dairy Dad friendly shirt. This is something that comes to your mind, buddy. Like you can't be spreading that dad vibe and drinking those Monsters like that before you have kids. How could you? I mean, I just kind of always knew.

Tyler Ryan: 42:00

I wanted to be a dad, so I was just getting started trying it on in public to see how it felt, and it felt pretty good. So here I am with a seven month old about a year later Awesome, greatest thing, ever.

Dustin Howes: 42:14

Well, if the shirt fits where and I think they used to say All right, tyler, how do people connect with you, how do we get a hold of you?

Tyler Ryan: 42:24

So best place to go is tryltvcom, slash, pod, POD, and what you'll find there is what I call the scale ready scorecard, and this is a scorecard that assesses your level of data visibility in your business to see how ready you are to scale your business and to scale your affiliate program. So you can think of it like a checklist. Can I see this? Can I see that? Can I see my LTV? Can I see it at day zero, 30, 60, 90 and 180? And if you have that level of visibility, it creates the foundation of everything that we talked about today. Because if you think of it in terms of a pyramid, visibility is at the bottom. If you don't have visibility in your LTV, you can't really do any of the things that we talked about today.

Tyler Ryan: 43:10

The next level of that pyramid is analysis. Can I take that data and interpret it in a meaningful way? That's everything that we talked about today. How do you interpret your LTV over time to see how well your customer journey is working, who your best affiliates are and who are the affiliates that maybe you need to have a conversation with? Then the top level of that is decisions. Once you have the visibility, you know how to interpret it, then you can make good decisions that allow you to scale up your program. Increasing those commissions that's a decision. Cutting off affiliates, sending in low quality customers that's a decision. And those three levels visibility, analysis and action those are the three things that create what I call the scale ceiling pyramid. The better you get at that, the higher your scale ceiling and that scorecard will give you everything you need to get started on that journey.

Dustin Howes: 44:03

Fantastic. I'm going to go do it myself so that I can get into your email drip campaigns and check this out for myself. Try ltvcom To go find them. Tyler, it's been a real pleasure. Thanks for being here, buddy. I'm going to let you go while I wrap up, because I know you've got to get rolling but thanks for being here.

Dustin Howes: 44:24

Man Sounds good. Thanks a lot, dustin. All right, wrapping up here with this episode. Thursday affiliate nerd out it's going to be Stephanie Robin. She's going to come on and talk about mixing your affiliate program with Amazon affiliates and how they coincide. Let's see. We've got one more last chat here. It looks like pure gold from John Wright. Appreciate you being here and jumping in today. Thanks, john, I'm going to save in this out here. And lastly, free 15 minute call with me. Go to Dustin housecom slash pod. Or, if you're not into talking no big deal, go get your affiliate checklist. This is a checklist that I've curated myself. It's a 35 point checklist that goes through every step before launching an affiliate program. So go to Dustin housecom slash checklist and go check it out for yourself. And thank you all for joining me on another episode of affiliate nerd out and happy recruiting out there. We'll see you out there.