Hey folks. Welcome to Affiliate Nerd Out. I'm your Nerdarator Dustin, spreading that good word about affiliate marketing. You're gonna find me here every Thursday at 12 o'clock Pacific Times. Put it on the calendar. Join me and a guest. And my guest today, Michael Cole, SVP, over at Everflow. Welcome to the Nerdatorium, Michael. It's great to be here. Awesome. You and I have met a few times at conferences and hung out a little bit in the Everflow like. You guys always do it up sweet and have a nice environment to go hang out. And we nerd out a little bit and I'm excited to have you ever. Flow is one of my absolute favorite platforms to be promoting for clients that I have and just anybody in general just excited to talk some affiliates with you today. Yeah, I'm excited to be here. And it's always fun how, like affiliate especially is it's a small world and it revolves around, you go in and out. Like I actually got my start I don't know, 14, 15 years ago at straight outta college. I started working for affiliate management agency back in Santa Barbara where there was a lot of affiliate business going on. And it's just exciting that those like skills and experiences, like not only were they valuable for the companies and startups I did after that, but it's fun to be at Everflow now for five or six years. And it's seeing all the faces again, in like the industry continue to evolve and just like having fun with all the ways that we can take it the next level and break through like the silos of traditionally held back affiliate marketing. Oh, for sure. And I didn't realize you and I had some Santa Barbara overlap. Like I was there working for CJ and Impact back in that day, 15 years ago. We might have played some slow pitch softball together and I didn't even know about it. I was in lo folk. Oh, you were in the punk. Okay, gotcha. Yeah. What did you do back 15 years ago? Yeah, so we were a little boutique affiliate marketing agency. It was basically a joint project from a former CJ or, and vc. And basically we had a lot of the companies at that time coming in and we launched affiliate programs for some brands you probably never heard of Shopify and BigCommerce and Quest Bar, like things that became a lot bigger once we launched the affiliate program. So naturally we, we caused that. Oh, amazing. Good names to have on the Rolodex. That's great. Without further ado let's talk about you tell us about what you do and who you serve. Yeah, so I'm the head of marketing at Everflow. We're a partner marketing platform. We're quite a bit different. It's always important to remind like how we're different, like we are truly like a SaaS platform play, which means that our goal is to provide you a platform to manage your own partnerships, your own affiliate relationships and everything else. So whether it's paid ads, organic traffic. All your one-off email campaigns, everything can be tracked and managed through Everflow. But let's be realistic. If you're gonna do this and you're affiliate marketer, you need to have the revenue you expect to, so we've developed a marketplace that makes it easy to go direct with all of the like super affiliates you expect. And for any of these relationships everything can be paid natively through the platform, but it's really like on the technology side versus us being a network in the middle. For sure your guys' marketplace for finding affiliates, I find to be the easiest out there. I'm really been impressed by the clients that I've had on that platform and the ease of use of getting a hold of them. I feel like I get more responses on your guys' platform for whatever reason. But you guys just make it easier on the affiliate manager, which I really respect and appreciate. Thanks for explaining what you guys do out there. Our topic of the day is really about affiliate managers and the actual referral program and developing that. And the real question here is, should the affiliate manager be handling the referral program as well, is the good fit for. Everybody, every brand out there. And we're gonna dig into that a little bit. Why don't we start off small and talk about the difference between an affiliate program and a referral program in your mind. Yeah, so I think the difference is who are those people? So an affiliate is someone whose entire business is being a marketer, promoting products, having distribution channels, being able to deliver traffic. A referral partner can be a lot of different things, but that's not their main job. and I think that's the big distinction of 'em. But I will say that the reason I think that these go together is because the affiliate compensation model. Actually unlocks a lot of the referral and ambassador model. And a lot of times those are two separate totally. Managed by different people programs. And that's a lot of missed opportunities. So that's why I want to talk about this in the first place because we see a lot internally about the success of bringing those worlds together. For sure, and I've often said that, there's a huge missed opportunity in taking your clients and bringing them on as some kind of referral or affiliate partner. Now money always speaks, so I'm always talking like, get them to join the affiliate program if you need to. Zero out the commissions if they don't like money for whatever reason. But I find it complicated to create two programs rather than just. The one, what's your theory on this? Is it easy to make an additional program just for referrals? Yeah, I prefer it to be one, but again, you have to work with what platform and capabilities you have, because if you're using a network. And the network has to manage all of the payments and all the contracts, this is gonna be the same with influencers, but referral partners too. If their business is not affiliate, asking them to sign a contract with a third party is a very painful process. Teaching them how to use a platform, they never use a really painful process. So I think that kind of is what holds it back to requiring two programs in a lot of places. But from my perspective, it's one program. The commissions get changed around. Based on their promotion method, but they functionally work the same. They have the same goal of what you want them to be driving, which at the end of the day is leads or purchases or some sort of revenue thing. So they make sense to be in the same place if you have the functionality to do it. Okay. And you guys have built your business up by using referral programs for clients that you have. And normally this would be in a B2B sense, but it also works for any e-commerce product as well, right? Yeah, so the B2B use case I think this is one of the, it's always fun. I'm, from like the start, I've done lots of startups. I love the startup world, and you're always like looking for what are those like repeatable processes where any future company I did. I would continue to do, and for me it was, the referral program has just worked out so well for us. Okay. And we're a very like customer success product led company, so we put a lot of effort into making customers really happy when they come to Everflow. And when you have a really happy customer, you basically reach out to them, ask them to become referral partners. That's a natural flow. They wanna reciprocate a good experience. They're happy to become referral partners. So that flow works well. You can do that with just a formula, really need a technology for that. And then in our case, what really took it, the next level was like, I think two years ago we were doing like a 10% rev share and the beginning of 2024, we switched to this like tiered structure of like whenever someone refers business to Everflow, you get two 50 on the qualified lead you get.$500 more on the opportunity stage, which for us is like sales feels like they might win that deal. They're pretty confident, and then they're a thousand when they become a customer. So in total it's 1,750 for every referral that becomes a customer. So there's a few pieces to that one and this it's funny, I talked to a lot of CMOs and stuff and their minds are blown by this idea of like when you get a referral pay on that lead. They're like, what? That's so smart. Let me take down notes on that. Which is really funny because obviously the affiliate industry, that's like how it always works. So having that upfront payment really helps get referral partners next level. So when we did this, I think it increased oh man, I forgot the number. But it's something like I. Between 70 to like a hundred percent, like more customers coming from referral partners when we switch to structure, because the two 50 upfront means that a lot of our like happy customers, they'll be on a call with a buddy in the industry and before they'd be like, oh, I should have mentioned Everflow. Now it's if I spend two more minutes on this call and mention Everflow, that's like another$250 and the chance to get this. So that little money moves enough that like you move the needle. And the second thing is like you get some people that get competitive about how much money they can make, and those people become like amazing referral partners once you have this more affiliate type structure. And then the third part is like you're really. Paying the most to the people that actually are driving steady customers. So it becomes really valuable for publishers and agencies to refer over Everflow because now that's actually a decent amount of money on top of all the promotions they're doing. So that's like the B2B example of this. But I do think. Yeah, there is a place for this on the e-commerce example too, which is just like anytime you have a happy customer giving reviews, giving you good feedback, repeat purchasing a couple times, like those people should be ambassadors. They should also be promoting you on social. Everyone has some friends that if they really feel passionate about this shirt, they can say Hey, like buddy have you heard about this brand? This is my favorite brand. You wanna check it out, send over a link. Like I think that the model works well there, but. It's a different world. So that's why I wanted to hash it out with you too, Dustin.'cause I think it's an interesting topic. Oh, for sure. Let's talk about the timing functionality. I've got something in my mind for the e-commerce side of the equation. But B2B is a little bit questionable in your mind. when is that customer become a happy customer enough to start sending you referrals? Yeah, so it's. It's easier in B2B because you have more places where you naturally do it. So there's a couple points where almost all B2B companies have a net promoter score where they basically like, we'll be like, oh, like what do you think about us? And so anything over seven we ask them to join a referral program. That's a pretty easy like standard process, right? It's also like when we complete a really good onboarding and the customer's really happy at that point. We ask for if they wanna join a referral program like a great migration. Or just like they hit a certain scale of like revenue and they're really like hitting traction, or they get connected with a really good marketplace partner that's doing a lot for them. There's all these moments where, you know, someone from your team was somewhat involved in that situation, in that moment. Really easy for that person to naturally ask for the referral. Another example is like our sales team, like if they close a customer's really happy, they'll keep that relationship going and they will also nurture that. So it becomes like a, both a Cs and sales way to generate more revenue while still being like fully authentic. Okay. And when you're sending out that NPS score. A questionnaire or form, whatever it may be. What's the timing on that? Should that be two weeks after they sign a check? What does that look like in your mind? Yeah, I think we do it about quarterly to every, like half a year. We basically do like quarterly reviews with a lot of people, and then there's also, we have support in the platform. And when you have a really good customer experience we'll sometimes push the NPS survey at that point. Okay, that's smart. In e-commerce it works a little bit different. Like after you send that product, you should be sending an email I don't know, maybe two weeks or a month later is probably a good strategy. And it's Hey, how are you enjoying this product? Based on that answer you get from them, ask 'em to join that referral program. Right. Yeah, and I think anyone that is a repeat cut, like in this day and age with e-commerce, if they purchase a second time, you might as well reach out to them and see if they wanna be ambassador at that point. Because most people like they're, it is transactional, they're just fighting something. In purchasing anyone who shows any additional interest or raises their hand in any way, like you might as well see if they wanna be an ambassador at that point, because they've at least shown some passion for the product. And there's lots of ways to empower that passion to basically do a win-win. Yeah. And that's one of my favorite things about Everflow and your guys' platform is you guys have that capability to go on beyond that first initial sale and keep track of that client or customer as it will be in the future. And not every platform is built and designed to do that, but do you find a lot of your customers. Yeah, it's an ongoing process. Obviously with any of these things that are newer, you have to get used to it. But we do have a fair amount of customers doing it, and depending on what vertical they're in, they see a lot more revenue. So when we look at e-commerce as a whole for companies that actually track event revenue outside of just the purchase, they're seeing about 30% more revenue on top. And most of that additional revenue is either repeat purchases from affiliate sent a purchase. Repeat purchases from that same user that the affiliate sent, we can attribute that back. And you don't have to include payout on that, but it's good to have that revenue data internally to know, Hey, this affiliate's actually delivering a much higher value user than say, a paid ad channel. So that's one example. And then the other side is All of your upsell subscription boxes, cross sells, et cetera. So when you start looking at Nutri to health and beauty, it's 50 to 70% more revenue from all the stuff that happens outside of the initial purchase or lead. For sure. And that's something you really should be tracking, like the lifetime value of the customers that are coming through the affiliate channel is a metric that is so overlooked in this industry. And you brought up a good point of Hey, do we continue to pay the same commission structure for repeat customers, or do we just want to pay for the first time customers? I feel like the default is going to be. Hey, let's just do new customers. Or every customer gets a, straight 15% in the e-comm space. But is that the right strategy to come out the door with? Yeah. So I think out the door that is the best strategy is you just pay up front, but you should always be tracking it because if they're driving a lot of repeat purchases, you should be increasing their commission. Like you have a lot more margin to work with. So that makes sense. And then when you start talking about more of a lead gen case we did a case study with Unlock which has home equity loans. And on that one they have the base, like I want to get a home equity loan. You start that process. You have all this event stages, all the way to process approve. The money was actually paid out. All of these steps in between, like they track all that. They share it with affiliates, they let. affiliate? whenever any data is rejected there. So it's a good example of these more complicated event flows, and as they do this with certain partners, they actually pay on much later stages because they know that partner can consistently deliver that late stage and it's so much closer to their revenue that they can pay way, way more on that stage. So that's like a easy way that once you have this stuff in place, you can switch your payment to later down the stage. And for things like a very Subscription oriented, upsell and stuff like that. you should definitely be commissioning them if that's what they're good at driving. Oh, that's interesting. So many different ways to go about it. You could do a repeat customers, get a decrease commission and keep on. You know that customer is cookie by that affiliate for their lifetime and every repeat customer that comes through, or repeat sale that comes through get a smaller percentage. Or you could just do it super high up front and we're only paying for the first time customer. There's a. Numerous ways to go about it, but like collecting that data is the important part before making those decisions, right? Yeah. And like still serving. Like the nice thing about this is I think that this is very valuable for the affiliate marketing industry as a whole because I. Again, like this isn't being tracked right now. And when you don't track stuff and you don't report on stuff, someone else within the company or org is getting credit for it. Like the marketing as a whole is taking credit for all this additional revenue, but like the affiliate channels not getting that because it's not in your reporting. So like we see a lot of value from just like people with existing programs like expanding onto Everflow and having like our analytics and event attribution on top of it because you could just keep doing what you're doing and show 30% more revenue and something you look like a genius. Without doing anything new, and then you start doing stuff with that data to grow beyond that. Yeah I've often found that. The rest of the market team isn't willing to do things like that because affiliate might be already the golden boy of the company. And there a lot of marketing teams that I've worked on. It's almost like a battle against them for the attribution that make whoever wants to look good. But an ideal world, everybody's bucketing into the same thing and we're all playing for the same team. Yeah, that's one. Goals at Everflow is just, it's very important that we serve more than just the affiliate manager and partner manager. And by serving that first, like it means that we are providing data that no one else does because all these other like analytics and attribution tools out there, affiliate is always like second or third fiddle because It's just a data point within them, they don't really know that much. Whereas Everflow, because that's front and center and we can track paid ads and organic, you can start having more people from the same company logging in, looking at different data points on this, seeing how all performance marketing is going across all channels. And that's gonna really help with breaking down these silos. Because again, if you have an analytics platform that's different than everyone else, it's really hard for you to say I am the most important person for the growth of this company when everyone else wants to take credit for them being the most important person. So we see a lot of value there to get to this next level affiliate marketing where it's not that different, but it's more of like actually getting the credit it deserves. For sure. And that's what we're all looking for. Alright. As we wrap up on the referral portion of this one more question on, do you feel like. The referral program should be a part of the affiliate program, or do you think this should be separated out? Yeah, so I definitely think that if you can make it within the same program, they definitely should be together. And I think the other piece of this is a lot of times in most companies just there's no one owning the referral or ambassador piece. It just happens, but there's no one actually directing it. So I would always encourage. Basically, if it's not being owned by anyone else, it should be in your, like under your purview. You should be managing it because it's a really good revenue channel. It brings a lot of additive value because it's basically people that you wouldn't reach otherwise. And it's at these are new people coming in and when we look at least from the B2B side, like the conversion rate of someone that comes from referral is I think 3.4 times higher than any other channel. So because it's trust and loyalty and they know more about the product and they're coming from a place where they're coming with they're excited about it, they've heard good things, they just, they're so much more likely to become a customer. So it's just an awesome channel and if you can take credit for it, you should. Yes. I love that concept. Firsthand experience is super useful and finding those if you're an affiliate manager in tuned enough to like, ask the marketing team for those leads to ask them for joining the program. It's super important. I've seen a lot of. Refer a friend. Programs fall flat on their face because nobody's paying attention to it because the affiliate manager doesn't have time to focus on that. So if it's in the same program, I think it's a really good habit for them to, find the customers that. Wanna be part of this program, give them a link, but nothing else is probably the best practice early on. And when they're, they wanna know about if they're getting paid or not, then we can get 'em into the platform. But they just don't know how have the wherewithal to understand what affiliate marketing is for the most part. Yeah. And compensation makes a big difference. We just did a internal product marketing survey, like getting feedback from some of our customers and we sent it out. And got one submission and then we did a follow up the next week saying oh, and also we forgot to mention the $25 gift card and we got 35 submissions like in a day. So it's just like even the littlest of incentive makes a huge difference towards The impact of these things. Yeah. People like money. Go figure. Awesome. Turns out another part of this strategy is two tier programs. I'm a big fan of letting affiliates. Recruit other affiliates for you into the program and getting a percentage of their cut. What are your thoughts, yay or nay for? For any kind of platform or program? Adding the two tier factor in? Yeah it never hurts. I would recommend that in that situation, like you just pay on top. Everflow doesn't power this, and it is just, it's better for those to be separate. Like the affiliate that they recruited still gets the full amount and then you're paying a little extra as like the finder's fee for driving them to sign up. And we've seen some programs be very successful on this. I do find that it's. Usually pretty hard to make it happen, like it should be thought like any other referral thing. Like most affiliates, this is not their day job to refer other affiliates. Yeah. It's not where their head is at. And they'll do it if it's the revenue's suite enough and they know a good fit, but they also don't have that much transparency into which niches you're missing, like what verticals and promotion methods do you not have in your program. So it's typically hard for an affiliate to do that unless you're going. Directly saying Hey, you're killing it. Like you're really connected the industry. I'm looking for some emailers. Do you know anyone, like if you're not actively asking them, I don't think that most affiliates can actually do the second tier referral 'cause they just don't know what you're looking for in the first place. So that's like kind of the challenge there is like everything else, like it's all about the relationship. Yes. So tapping into your affiliates and asking them the right questions is a big portion of this. And they can be super powerful if you let them be and let them into your world. on that there's like a sort of a side that I thought was pretty genius and I've heard from some agencies and stuff is that they'll ask other, like agencies and brands that they're good friends with oh hey do you have any other affiliates that you would recommend? For this type of advertiser and like that sort of like cross exchanging of like similar types of advertisers that are non-competitive is really valuable for finding new affiliates. And that might be a place where the second tier is really good is like just sign up the agency as like a partner within your program and then have them refer over other affiliates because sometimes that's very easy lift for them, especially in a program where. They feel confident recommending an affiliate do that. So just think a little outside the box here of who knows the affiliates that are a good fit and it's a win-win. That's super smart. Love it. Alright as we wind down here I know Everflow is, always on that cutting edge of technology and cool bells and whistles for affiliate managers out there. Anything, any new features popping up that you guys are working on that's, that are new? Yeah, we just made an exciting announcement that we're now fully integrated with Skimm Links, and what's really cool about this is that unlike the current setups of Skimm links that exist out there, we provide full transparency. So every single click, you know exactly what domain it came from. You have. All the knowledge about every single publisher, you understand exactly what's happening. And because you have this full transparency into it, it's really easy to control commission too. So if you see like this one publication is doing really well or driving a ton of engagement, you can increase the commission on that URL so that anytime you receive it, you pay say twice as much. And then say you see a bunch of other ones that are. Coupon bloggers, you can investigate 'em. Maybe some of them, like they're driving new shopper intent, but if they're not driving shopper intent, if they're just like bottom of funnel and the, it's someone clicks and then purchases, you can actually lower the commission on those ones. So you have a lot of control to make sure that the premium publications are getting paid more. The like loyalty websites that are driving shoppers to start the shopping experience and getting paid more. That last part is through click to conversion time. So aside for like coupon and loyalty, there's a difference between like I was about to buy and I used a promo code versus I want shoes and then I see a discount for this brand. So I start shopping for it. And you can actually see that data when you look at click to conversion time because if you click on affiliate link and spend 30 minutes on a website. You were shopping. If you click on Affiliate link, you spent 30 seconds on the site you were about to buy. You just got that code. So really easy to understand which publications and placements are driving shopper behavior, and especially with something like I. Skimm links. Now you have that transparency where you know exactly what all those publications are. You know how long the click to conversion time is for all of them. So you have this really easy way to go to your boss and be like, yes, this one is like a blogger who talks about coupons, but every single person they've sent is spending a ton of time shopping on our website, which means that they're finding a cart, they're adding to it, and then they're purchasing. There's a lot of awesome things for this transparency towards again. Understanding that affiliate adds a lot more value. You just weren't seeing it before for sure. And it is so hard to determine whether or not that coupon site is the first click or not in most methodologies. And love that Skim links is integrated with you on now. I've always been hesitant working with sub affiliates altogether because of that. Because the lack of transparency and you guys are forcing the methodology to show you as the affiliate manager. That's huge. Love it. Any other sub affiliate platforms on the horizon, you're gonna do the same with. Yeah we have a few other ones. I don't know if I can announce them yet. That's fine. But we have a couple of those coming on and just, we continue to, again, with the marketplace, we're never gonna be the same as an affiliate network. We're never going down like the 10 thousands of affiliate. Like we really wanna make sure that the cornerstone affiliates you expect are there, and that we have a really good diversification of affiliates. So we have a lot of more like emailers and media buyers and stuff that. Again without having any sort of protections and rules around like coupons or attribution control, like so much of the revenue keeps going to coupon websites. When you have the ability to break out the additive value, make sure that all of your media buying affiliates have like first touch protection over these other channels and versus your other like own media buying and stuff like that. These are all things that allow these like very proven types of affiliates. To thrive within a program where they've just disappeared from certain verticals because they just weren't getting enough credit. Yeah. We see a lot of opportunity to make it really easy to find those and to fill any gaps in your program for scaling. Awesome. Michael, this has been great. Appreciate your knowledge today. How do people get ahold of you? Yeah, you can always connect with me on LinkedIn. Just look up Michael Cole Plus Everflow. I have a generic name as I always mention, so you have to include Everflow to find me. So connect with me on LinkedIn. Feel free to reach out to me there and you can always check out Everflow@everflow.io. And yeah, we'd love to see how we can support you and help you with scaling whatever program you have, whether it's on a network or not. You can always add us on top. Oh, smart. Awesome. Thanks Michael. Appreciate your time. For those out there that are affiliate managers, keep on recruiting and we'll see you next time. Take care. Cheers.