Personalized Marketing Strategies & Building Partner Programs from Scratch with Noah Rahimzadeh - 103

Join Brandon Amoroso and Noah Rahimzadeh as they dive into the world of personalized marketing in e-commerce. From Noah's journey in health IT to Digioh’s innovative approach, discover how zero-party data is transforming customer interactions. Explore the nuts and bolts of building a partner program from scratch, emphasizing clear goals and streamlined processes. Don't miss out on insights into co-marketing initiatives and the value they bring to agency partnerships.  

Timestamps

🌟 Introduction and Background of Noah Rahimzadeh (00:00:00)
🔄 Transition from Enterprise Martech to Entrepreneurship (00:01:37)
🔍 Overview of Digioh’s Focus on Marketing Efficiency (00:04:19)
🛍️ Product Offerings: Zero-Party Data Suite and Identification Layer (00:05:03)
🤝 Approach to Partnerships: Tech vs. Agency Partners (00:10:15)
🤝 Leveraging Shared Merchant Opportunities (00:16:13)
🤝 Importance of Mutual Success in Partnerships (00:17:00)
🤝 Building Agency Relationships and Driving Referrals (00:17:52)
💻 Technical build-out and partner program structure considerations (00:18:59)
📈 Lead requirements and partner enablement (00:19:47)
📊 Tracking referrals and managing agency relationships (00:20:33)
🎁 Prioritizing benefits and perks in the partner program (00:22:10)
📣 Co-marketing strategies and joint initiatives (00:22:59)
📈 Case studies and success stories (00:24:37)
🎯 Importance of clear goals and streamlined processes (00:26:11)
📋 Lightweight case studies and marketing opportunities (00:35:05)

Noah Rahumzadeh

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-rahimzadeh-91667bb1/

Digioh - https://www.digioh.com/

Brandon Amoroso:

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonamoroso/

Web - https://brandonamoroso.com/

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/bamoroso11/

X - https://twitter.com/AmorosoBrandon

Scalis.ai - https://scalis.ai/

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

I'm Brandon Amoroso, and this is the D2Z Podcast building and growing your business from a Gen Z perspective. Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in to D2Z, a podcast about using the Gen Z mindset to grow your business. I'm Gen Z entrepreneur Brandon Amoroso, founder and president of retention as a service agency Electric, as well as the co-founder of Scaless. Today I'm talking with Noah Rahimzadeh, which is always a tongue twister for me, but I think I got it there. Head of partnerships at Digio, which is a platform that helps drive conversions everywhere for e-commerce brands. Thanks for coming on the show.

Speaker 2: 0:42

Happy to be here Great coming on the show.

Speaker 1: 0:44

This is a repeat appearance.

Speaker 2: 0:45

Yeah, how many repeat appearances have you had? I was wondering that.

Speaker 1: 0:49

there's no way I'm the only but I could lie to you and say that you're my first but, there were. There were two or three others, but in a hundred and whatever episodes plus it is at this point, that's, that's, it's still episodes plus, it is at this point.

Speaker 2: 1:05

That's, that's, it's still. You can add it to your resume. I feel pretty good. Might put it on my LinkedIn in the title.

Speaker 1: 1:10

So can you just give everybody, before we dive into things, a quick background on on yourself and then also Digio, yes.

Speaker 2: 1:21

So background on myself. We'll try to make this brief. I actually co-founded a health IT company out of college that was called Safekeeping. Basically, the premise is if you had a grandma in a nursing home, for example, you could download the app and get daily updates on her health and lifestyle. My co-founder still runs that business today, and I'm going to circle back to Safekeeping, so I promise it has some merit. It's not just like a brag. Uh.

Speaker 2: 1:43

Then I I went on to do uh three enterprise martech stints all in partnerships, actually, and I was heavily involved in the partnerships uh angle at my company as well. But first up was return path, which is an email marketing deliverability company. Worked with a lot of enterprise brands and I focused on our salesforce marketing cloud partnership, which was the biggest revenue driver for Return Path. After that I went to Airship, which is a mobile app engagement platform. Competes with the likes of Braze or Iterable, for example, and led partnerships in North America there. And then I went over to Movable Inc, which is a dynamic email platform that focuses on the enterprise side as well, and was associate director of partnerships for them. That all was great. Learned a ton at these bigger well-oiled machines, so to speak, although I don't know how well-oiled the folks running them would say they were. To me it felt very structured and I actually wanted to sort of get back to my roots of entrepreneurship.

Speaker 2: 2:52

So Yao called me from Malomo, which is an order tracking solution focused on the Shopify ecosystem, and I told you I was going to come back to safekeeping. So Yao actually helped me launch safekeeping out of college, me and my co-founder. He was running a dev shop with his co-founder, anthony, and Matt, or I, my co-founder. We weren't technical at all, so he had to outsource dev for our app landed on Yao and Anthony to do that, and so we had known each other for man about 10 years, which dates me and when he called to head, up partnerships at his startup again Malomo, I took the leap of faith. I was only at Movable Inc for a year after I did that, which was not my intention when I started, but I was really excited to get back to sort of my startup and entrepreneurial roots. At Malomo I was the first partnerships hire. I was there for two years. In that two-year span, partnerships went from the lowest source of pipeline and revenue to the highest, contributing over 50% to each. So really happy with the results there and that's a testament to just like the partner-centric nature that we were able to build at Maloma over those two years and then recently made the jump over to Digio and we can get into that a little bit more.

Speaker 2: 4:12

But, as you mentioned, brandon, the whole idea of Digio is to drive conversions everywhere. So we think of ourselves as a marketing efficiency platform more than anything, and we can talk about what that means, but really what it boils down to is empowering brands to know more about their customers in a day and age where it's really hard to know who your customers are, what they like in this like cookie-less world with GDPR changes and privacy changes and all of that but not just know more about them, actually use that data, so personalize at scale and then, as a result, convert more, while also building more profitable and lasting consumer engagements. So similar situation, head of partnerships. Here I'm the only partnerships person, but we have a rockstar team of people who have come from the partnerships world. So we've hit the ground running seven weeks in and we're uh, we're making some big moves already, so I'm really excited.

Speaker 1: 5:11

Yeah, I feel like your org is already pretty partnership uh centric and oriented, or at least bought in on the uh thesis and idea of partnerships so you don't have to do the like internal selling of you know why partnerships is important.

Speaker 2: 5:28

That's already sort of jam, the partner pill down their throats.

Speaker 1: 5:31

Yes, everybody.

Speaker 2: 5:33

Yeah, very partner centric, which is great.

Speaker 1: 5:36

I don't know why it's such. I feel like it's such a dividing issue sometimes for some people, like some people especially at like, larger enterprise companies. I don't think they give enough credit to partner programs.

Speaker 2: 5:48

But I think a big part of that is not to go down this rabbit hole, cause we could do a whole episode on it, but I think a big part of it is attribution. Everybody wants to fight for you know where leads are coming in from and where the best deals are coming in from, and where the highest, highest value deals are coming in from and where the highest value deals are coming in from, and the reality is that partnerships and marketing are both going to touch a ton of deal flow. And what I actually love about Digio is Allison Kelly. Our CRO has set up a dual attribution model, so two different sources can actually get credit for the same deal, which negates like a ton of friction between go-to-market organizations.

Speaker 1: 6:30

Yeah, no, I think that makes a lot more sense Because, you know, I've run into organizations where there's probably more time spent around like who got attribution than actually going to close the deal itself, which is obviously counterproductive and counterintuitive to to what you actually want to do. So what? What are some of the like, I guess, tangible product offerings that Digio has in the market that, like a Shopify brand, would be leveraging?

Speaker 2: 6:58

Yeah, so I guess maybe just even taking a step back, like why I, why I made the jump from Malomo to Dishio and Brandon, you and I obviously go like way back to there. Uh, you and I were the. I think that you were the first person I met at Malomo and then, like a week into the job, you and I did a Malomo podcast together and I was super nervous because you were uh, you were already a ingrained partner in the malomo ecosystem but became good buddies as a result.

Speaker 2: 7:28

So it's pretty awesome that it's all come full circle. Um, but, yeah, why I made the jump? Like I, I kind of saw this shift in the e-commerce landscape and I talked a little bit about this in my way too long opener, but things like the iOS privacy changes, gdpr, deprecation of third-party cookies, huge right Competition at all-time highs just led me to think that the whole way in which e-commerce brands have done business really since inception of e-commerce is about to change, really since inception of e-commerce is about to change and zero and first party data is going to go from nice to have to like an absolute mission critical essential. And so what excited me about Digio beyond the people like Allison, kelly and Blake and Pearl, who I know you know well and I think a lot of your audience will too is that they thought about going about capturing that sort of stuff, allowing brands to identify more and personalize more in a completely unique way.

Speaker 2: 8:32

So there's kind of two ways to think about Digio.

Speaker 2: 8:35

One is the zero-party data suite of products and features and the other is the identification layer.

Speaker 2: 8:41

The zero-party data suite is exactly what you would think Quizzes, forms, preference centers, pop-ups, exit intent sliders or banners and we do all of that in a sort of different way, in that we brand everything unique to each merchant that we bring on and we provide completely white glove onboarding for brands to get up and running. So that excited me right. It reduces a lot of friction but still still allows brands to have a completely like unique experience on their site that fits their branding. And then the identification layer is basically activating existing data within a customers or, sorry, a merchants tech stack to identify more site traffic to then be able to use to capture more zero party data and target more, both in that site session to drive more conversions, but also afterward in email and SMS, for example, to drive conversions through those retention channels. So because they kind of are out in front of all of those changes taking place that are going to change the e-com landscape, I was really excited to make the switch.

Speaker 1: 9:54

So it sounds like it's very much so like an all-in-one platform, or at least trending towards that in terms of product development, which is an opportune time to do so, as a lot of brands are consolidating their tech stack, not making it larger. But you're in partnerships and there's obviously agency partners and there's also tech partners. So how are you approaching that when you know, hypothetically, there might be like four or five Shopify incumbents that do one or two of the things that your platform does within its full suite of products? So, like, are you more focused on the agency side of things or are there still strategic ways that you can work with tech partners? Like, how do you, how do you balance that, because it's not like it's just you that's dealing with this. Like there's other platforms that you know. I think everybody has like surveys at this point in their platform, or everybody has, you know, insert slight feature here that has started to encroach. So how are you thinking about that as you continue to grow the program?

Speaker 2: 10:54

Great question. So first, to kind of talk about your first point 100% true that we do consolidate apps. I don't think we think of ourselves as an all-in-one solution, but we do think of ourselves as a solution that can consolidate up to five e-commerce apps, especially in the Shopify space, and we've seen that right with merchants. A lot of consolidation because you're, when you combine all those identification or the identification layer with the Zero Party Data Suite, you can see how that, like you said, can provide consolidation.

Speaker 2: 11:28

The way that I think about it, one you know, is both. We have to do both tech and agency, and we're excited to do both. I'm a big believer that they feed off each other and the tech partners that you align with should sort of guide your agency strategy, because if an agency doesn't work with the same solutions that you're integrating and going to mark, going to market with, it's going to be a really hard time to get them to adopt your solution and recommend it, market with you. Um, so how we sort of approach that is, in a number of ways, one for the most part, we don't have very much overlap in products or features with the core tech partners that we want to go to market with this year, so we've sort of avoided that as a strategy. But there's also just not a ton of people doing exactly what we do yet, especially when we think of our specific partner, landscape and even more specifically, partner landscape in the Shopify ecosystem and then on the agency side.

Speaker 2: 12:29

It's something that I think about a lot. What's really nice is, like you and I go way back Malomo days, it was really hard for us to send leads to agencies and I think a big part of that is, you know, just the cost of the solution, the ease of implementation, right. The fact that we could do it at Maloma or a merchant can do it pretty easily didn't provide a lot of wiggle room for agencies to come over the top and provide a ton of value. They could if they spent a bunch of time on it. But it was a little bit more challenging With Digio because of the massive suite of products and how they connect across the entire tech stack. There's actually a ton of opportunity for agencies to provide services, even on top of the white glove onboarding that I talked about earlier, to get a lot more value out of Digio as a whole and even think about ways to get value out of unlocking the data that Digio is collecting. So, for example, we do help with very basic email and SMS flows and triggers and templates, but really only for something like a quiz being completed. So we'll build a template brand specific for a quiz being completed and a trigger for that in Klaviyo, let's say. But we're capturing all the zero party data that could actually be used across every single flow that you have set up. So your welcome series to your abandoned carts Right, and you could use that to personalize those highly engaged messages a lot more.

Speaker 2: 13:57

When brands do that, we're seeing them drive 20 percent of their email and SMS revenue by using that zero party data in those flows. And the reality is is that we're not doing that for them. So we're going to need to rely on agencies to sort of. You know, we're going to pass the torch to agencies and say, hey, like we got this brand set up for success, now it's time to go make it like super sophisticated and knock it out of the park. So I think we have a lot more opportunity here, and that's no fault. To like the smaller apps like the Maloma is just in terms of a cost and sophistication standpoint. It's just the reality that there's a lot more functionality to add value on top of in this situation.

Speaker 1: 14:39

Yeah, that makes sense, especially with the release of programs coming from like Sendlane or some other partners, like Rebuy, where there's agencies that are tapped in to provide like launch packages or special offers for enablement on the product, and you know the agency can make a little bit of money on like the one-time project, but ultimately, you know, maybe 10 or 20% of those customers will then turn into recurring customers, and I think the metrics from Shopify around partner attachment to brands those that do work with an agency stay with the platform for much longer. They're worth more to the platform, because I think a lot of it comes down to product adoption and how well somebody is using the solution, especially with something like yours where there's so much you could do. Yes, you actually have to implement it, though, and think through how to put that into practice to get results 100%.

Speaker 2: 15:43

That's actually. It's interesting. You say that. I just had that thought after speaking with I forget which agency it was, it was last week, but I was in New York for the Triple Whale event and it hit me that a really great sort of like low-hanging fruit way to hit the ground running with agencies is just to look at existing merchants, existing shared merchants today, and give them sort of the playbook to be able to say existing shared merchants today and give them sort of the playbook to be able to say, hey, like spoke with the Digio guys, here's what you're missing out on there. We can help you get that implemented so that you can get more value out of the platform right away. And that way you know we're not starting from scratch with any brand. We're not asking for a referral, they're not asking for a referral, but we're getting a mutual win right off the bat and it's directly related to client success. So it's really a win, win, win, which is the whole idea of partnerships, and it's sort of an easy way to go about that.

Speaker 1: 16:36

I think the first shared merchant is always the hardest anyways, so you're just finding them, and if they're not there to begin with, then they have to be created somehow, and it's either created by the agency or by the tech partner. And I think what like Sendlane is doing, where they are creating that shared client I mean to be determined how it actually plays out, but I think that's going to gain a lot of traction because, at the end of the day, what agencies care the most about is clients, and so if there's a program where you're literally being handed a client, well you're not going to integrate that into your tech stack now and have that be something that you'd recommend to other tools. Like there's no way, which is what Klaviyo sort of did informally back in like 2020, 2021, where they would bring in a ton of partners to help with migrations and things of that nature. So yeah, I think it. I think it makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 2: 17:34

Yeah, I totally agree. And the nice thing is too, I think, even going beyond your own product, um, like at at Digio so far. Well, I just looked. Actually, we've sent 11 referrals to agencies in my first uh, six weeks here, and it might not seem like a ton, but for you know, an organization that doesn't really have a partnerships program in place, that's a really exciting number. And it might not seem like a ton, but for an organization that doesn't really have a partnerships program in place, that's a really exciting number and it allows us to gain some trust with our agencies right away.

Speaker 2: 17:56

But, more importantly, I think what's interesting is these merchants are coming to us and asking for agency recommendations or expressing challenges that they're having that aren't necessarily directly related to Digio, and what that tells me is our CS team is doing an amazing job and our sales team of, like, uncovering pain points across our merchants, businesses that we can actually provide help with, even if it's not necessarily our solution. That does that, and for that reason we've been able to give out referrals for things that aren't necessarily Digio related, but we know our agency network can help with. So I think that combining those two things that we just talked about allows us to drum up some really, really solid agency relationships pretty quickly here as I ramp up.

Speaker 1: 18:43

Yeah, and if you have good referrals, the clients in turn will be stickier with you in the long run and that'll lead to even more requests, which will lead to more referrals, and it just sort of snowballs on itself.

Speaker 2: 18:57

Totally Exactly.

Speaker 1: 18:59

How are you thinking about the sort of technical build out of the partner program? Because there's all the things that happen sort of behind the scenes and you have the extremes of the world with like a an all-bound, which is what clavio and and attentive use all the way to somebody just sending an invite to some like super shoddy, basically just affiliate link generator. You know that's how they're tracking clicks and there's no real referral process, there's no partner enablement, there's nothing like that. So there's pretty much. You know that's how they're tracking clicks and there's no real referral process, there's no partner enablement, there's nothing like that. So there's pretty much, like you know, a full gamut. Um, how are you thinking about setting that up? And then, how do you think about what the partner program comes with? And, like you know, walk versus run, cause you could have like nine tiers out of the gates or you could just have.

Speaker 2: 19:44

You know regular partner and elite partner or something. Yeah, one thing that's interesting about what you just asked specifically is I've been shocked by how many agencies I've talked to in these first few weeks that have been like so what's the lead requirement? And I'm flabbergasted by that question because I'm like there is not zero, there's no lead requirement. Like we can find wins for each other without sending leads right away and we're building this program from scratch. So the idea that, like we would have a lead requirement at this point is insane to me. But I think that's a testament to some of the bigger programs that do have lead requirements, that lead to the tiering, and some of them it's really successful that they've been really successful in doing that and their agencies have as well. So I'm not knocking it. I'm just a little surprised that that's become the expectation, I guess, for us.

Speaker 2: 20:39

From a technical standpoint, we are crawling so we're not walking. We have nothing in place today and actually from a partner relationship management like an all-bound or a partner stack standpoint. But actually I've spent a good portion of my first few weeks on the op side just making sure that we have everything in place to properly track referrals, even without any sort of like formal tool for that. So that's things like you know, simple forms that we can send to our tech partners. We just spun up a tech partner, spif, which I'm really excited about. That we're going to roll out soon. And then on the agency side, we're handling a lot of it manually so far and I think we're going to hit a critical mass pretty quickly where we're going to need a tool to manage it.

Speaker 2: 21:29

But right now our CRO is saying she's got it. I'm going to trust her until then. I know she does. But I think that we're having so many great agency conversations and building so much great momentum already that we're going to start seeing that deal flow hit a point where it's going to be a bigger and bigger pain for us to manage manually and we'll probably start looking at PRMs. Which leads me to a question for you when you've yeah, like you're working with these bigger organizations like Klaviyo and Attentive that have all bound, I imagine, a ton of your merchants or your partners, like we had at you know from, you know vendors that you like but then also like, what do you? What value do you get out of a PRM? Is it just a place to collect, you know empty, empty into your bank account, or do you? Will you actually go into there and and like use the learning tools or the you know the badge badging stuff or anything like that badging stuff or anything like that?

Speaker 1: 22:36

Yeah, so, um, I think that the PRMs, at a bare minimum, you know you have to have the ability to log leads, and I like it when the leads are able to be logged via, you know, manual submission into it, but also, uh, via referral link, because, you know, we create a lot of resources and content as well, and so, you know, maybe the first click is on a piece of content that created or, you know, something falls through the cracks, like it's just very easy if both are there. I really dislike the programs where you have to send a manual email intro, because half the time the merchant isn't even to send a manual email intro, because half the time the merchant isn't even ready for a manual email intro yet. But maybe we were presenting an audit to them and we just pitched your solution, so we shouldn't be logging it now. We shouldn't log it two weeks later, when they're ready for a referral. We're going to have to worry about following up. If I was the tech partner, I would want to know. You know, hey, brandon just presented us to them. They're not ready to get in contact with yet, but, like, let me follow up with Brandon in two weeks to see if now is the right time. Yeah, so having some sort of you know, lead tracking and obviously the payments.

Speaker 1: 23:50

I don't look at any of the content and frankly, I think the content could be just put into like a Google drive folder. So I think all the all bound resources, frankly it's more of a pain in the ass to get it that way because I have to like log in and authenticate and then like find where the resources. So I'm not a huge fan of that. The partner trainings I've never done any of them. I just get into the tool and figure it out. But when the agency grew, those were helpful because we would make them a requirement for our new team member onboarding and also like continual education for the team. So I see the, I see the reason why they. They would be important and are important, I think, but they're just not, you know, not for me. I'd rather just give like, give me the test, don't make me do all the videos.

Speaker 1: 24:39

Type of deal, uh, to get that certification and then, uh, I mean all bound, does this where you can see referred and managed MRR? Um, if it's accurate, I think it's great. Like Shopify's partner portal is not accurate. So we'll refer in a deal, it'll close, they'll be paying Shopify for like six months. I'll log back into the partner dashboard and it still says it's an open opportunity. So if your PRM isn't a source of truth, that also leads to a bunch of issues, because then you start creating these spreadsheets and people are doing all this manual administrative work even though you just invested a bunch into the PRM.

Speaker 1: 25:19

Yeah, so the way that I like architected it with drinks was to go. You know no software. Yeah, because at the end of the day, what the agencies care the most about is winning business together and you know all the other stuff is nice to haves, not need to haves. Create a Google Drive folder with all the assets Track. Spit it out from your revenue tool what the actual referred amount is. I think you can be pretty scrappy without paying, and I think partner stack is very expensive, um, at least from what I've heard. So before before rolling up, uh, before, uh, spending up a partner stack account, I bet there's a lot of ways that you can. You can partner outside of that. Plus, I think less is more. Like I doubt you're going out and acquiring 150 agency partners so that all of them can do nothing, versus you know acquiring 20 and they're all just killers and are really bought into Digio. So yeah.

Speaker 2: 26:25

So how have you done it? Like no, no software, um on the referral link side, or is that not really a that not make as much sense at drinks?

Speaker 1: 26:35

It's not a big thing, uh, in drinks, just because the market is is smaller, um, but for a referral link, if I was going to do it for like a scaleless, I would just straight up sign up with like reversion or one of these affiliate networks. Yeah, cheap like dirt cheap. I think it's like 60 bucks a month, or maybe 90 bucks a month and you know you can do your 10% bucks a month, or maybe 90 bucks a month and you know you can do your 10% for a year, or whatever the commission is, through those already uh, established affiliate programs.

Speaker 2: 27:06

Yeah, yeah, I think hopefully we have the the good fortune of having the problem of manually tracking payments becomes a burden pretty quickly, Um, yes, but outside of that, I I fully agree with you, man. Like we, I think a lot of partner programs, including myself has spent so much time building like enablement resources that are accessible by every partner, and the reality is is that most partners are never going to view it. But the 20, you know, the 20 of the thousand that do are the ones that you need to spend the most time with and they. You shouldn't be training those 20 completely in a like third-party solution that you have no visibility into, like what they're actually doing and how they're doing and and so.

Speaker 1: 27:51

I mean, you can always build your own right Rebuy. Rebuy built their own. Um, it's super easy to use, Very intuitive. It is basically just cuts out all the fluff and they handle the payments via via PayPal, and the only downside to it is that no other tech partners are in it, Right, but they're large enough where you know, we're going to log into the thing to see what's happening and what's up.

Speaker 2: 28:15

But I would expect nothing less than from John and James. Let's just go.

Speaker 1: 28:24

No, they should spin up a partner stack competitor. That would be lovely. Well, in terms of the outside, of just the technical setup, since you're kind of architecting it from the ground up, how are you looking at the actual benefits and perks that come with the partner program, Whether it's, you know, commission discounts for the brands that are being brought in co-marketing? Are you formalizing those things? Or what is what do you prioritize in terms of the pecking order of what you're rolling?

Speaker 2: 28:58

out definitely, um, definitely formalizing a like a structure, right, like at least a foundation that we can build build off of, as we scale, both the team, the business and the tech stack that accompanies it. So I was just talking to allison about this today, so it's fresh, but we think about, obviously, from the agency perspective, what's in it for me, and we think about that in three angles from Digio, through Digio and with Digio, and the from bucket is referrals we can send out, and RevShare, which we think of RevShare as table stakes, and it definitely should not be the crux of the program. In fact, because it's table stakes, we offer it, but everybody else does. We actually think about that as like the thing that we should talk about last, or we should talk about first but completely skip over as a program benefit Through Digio services right, digio services right, I talked about that earlier. But we think about agencies that can offer retention, marketing services, cro services and data activation and or enrichment services as the ones that we can go really deep with, because those agencies can bring a ton of value to our merchants on top of what Digio is providing from a platform standpoint and a in-house services standpoint. And then, with Digio is the co-marketing piece and we've already sort of templatized what we're able to offer from a co-marketing standpoint even this early on, because of Blake's background and he also has Raquel with us now who is a very experienced partner marketer in her own right, and so we're all you know the whole kind of Digio go-to-market strategy, at least for the Shopify ecosystem, is partnerships and partner marketing, and so we're all really bought into building out um sort of a formalized co-marketing um program.

Speaker 2: 30:55

So as a result of that and Brandon, you and I kind of ran the same playbook in the Malomo days but we want to have regular things that we can offer to our agencies to get them exposure to our massive list of merchants and prospects right On top of the referrals and rev share and the services as well. And what that looks like is like you and I let's say that you and I work on a merchant together. We get them set up right away. We want to be able to bring that merchant success story and what electric did to bring that success to market right In some way. Even if it's a one slide right or like one little image post on LinkedIn, that goes, but it's visible to our network and we give you the assets to be able to reshare goes, but it's visible to our network and we give you the assets to be able to reshare it. And it's a very quick and easy way, and even templatized way, to get quick wins and get our agency's exposure and thank them for working on a merchant with us.

Speaker 2: 31:52

The sort of one step up from that is doing like a fuller case study where you know we do a full article, we list it on the site, we give you all these assets to promote as well, and then we do a bigger push through email and newsletter and that sort of thing.

Speaker 2: 32:06

And then there's the more like less merchant focused stuff but still really impactful. Right now we're building like a thought leadership piece with five of our existing agency partners where it's very simple. We give them a form. They answer four or five questions. We turn those four or five questions from five agencies into an awesome ebook with awesome graphics and really great insights from some of the leaders in the space. But then we chop up that ebook to do LinkedIn content, twitter content, email content and we give them each their own personalized content to be able to promote as well. We're going to fire back up the 2% podcast via Blake, so that's a great opportunity to get merchants in front of our, our customer bases and as well as Blake's massive network too, and then just continue to think about sort of repeatable ways that we can bring value to our agencies through exposure to our network.

Speaker 1: 33:06

Yeah, I think the co-marketing stuff is the coolest and was the most helpful at Electric, with being able to do joint webinars or joint case studies, things like that, because the tech partner is always going to have more reach than the agency and I don't know if that's true for you in particular, but most of the time yeah.

Speaker 1: 33:28

It is helpful. So like, from a merchant standpoint, like paying merchant standpoint. You know, an agency is never going to have 10,000 paying merchants. An agency is never going to have 10,000 paying merchants on an email distribution list that can get sent out a Brandon's hosting this masterclass on how to use our platform type of deal. So that was always one of the ones that I really enjoyed and I liked when it was well put together in terms of how it was going to be created and when it was going to be distributed.

Speaker 1: 34:03

And like, also, you know, maybe you, you you don't get a webinar yet because we haven't had enough. You know, wins together or you know you, in some instances it is tied back to how many clients you're managing on the platform or how many clients you've referred over. So like, obviously there's a. You know, I like to have very clear goals. So the structure with Klaviyo's program back in the day was pretty much as straightforward as it could get. You know, as soon as you hit $20,000 of man, of referred MRR, then you became an elite partner. So like, then all of our efforts were around doing that and then, once that happened, then you know, a host of things came with it, but uh, that is, that's definitely my preference.

Speaker 2: 34:49

Yeah, I like that too, and when I'm having these early conversations, the first thing I lead with is the idea of, like a lightweight case study and that sort of is. You know, it's not necessarily that you need to send us a lead to do that, but in most cases it probably will be that way for the time being. Right, like we. Obviously we need a shared merchant to be able to build a case study and as we build out this idea of like services packages on top of Digio, that's going to be an iterative process that we've really just begun. So if you want to start doing co-marketing, like very quickly, there will be these non-merchant related opportunities, but if you want to do a merchant related one, it's likely a referral from the agency that we then do the heavy lifting on the case study with.

Speaker 1: 35:35

Yeah, that makes sense. Well, hey, thank you so much for coming on. This was really insightful. I'm excited for the, for the new chapter and to see how things pan out over the next couple of months here. But before we hop, can you let everybody know where they can find you and Digio online?

Speaker 2: 35:52

For sure, linkedin is easy, my email noahdigiocom also easy. Um, and then digiocom D-I-G-I-O-Hcom.

Speaker 1: 36:07

Awesome, cool man Again for everybody listening. As always, it's Brandon Amoroso. You can find me at uh, brandonamorosocom. And. Thanks for listening. We will see you next time.

Speaker 2: 36:17

Thank you, uh, brandonamarosocom, and thanks for listening. We will see you next time.