You're listening to the Affiliate Marketing Podcast brought to you by Affifirst.com, the chapter and verse of everything you need for running successful affiliate programs and partnership management. This is a podcast for digital and affiliate marketers, publishers, networks, agencies, and Martech providers who operate in affiliate marketing. If you want to launch, scale, and grow successful affiliate marketing programs, you're in the right place. In this podcast, you'll learn how affiliate and partner marketing is changing. Gain behind the mic access to affiliate marketing veterans. Listen and learn tried and tested program management tactics. Discover what's new and trending in affiliate and performance marketing. The truth is, you simply won't find this information anywhere else.
SPEAKER_00Welcome to the affiliate marketing podcast of me, your host Leanne Johnston, and today I'm super excited because I've got somebody that I've known for a very long time, and B, who's incredibly knowledgeable about the topic that we're going to be speaking about today, which is e-commerce and lots of other things. So welcome Sheree Sharmer to the podcast. It's absolutely fabulous to have you here with me today.
SPEAKER_02Hey Leanne, thanks so much for having me on the show. I know you've been very successful over the last few years, so it's great to be able to be invited.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. So Shri is the co-founder and CEO of increasingly.com, which we're going to talk about in a little bit. But I've known Shree for probably nigh on about 17 years, since we both were very young and working in the digital marketing industry. And we've recently come back together just to kind of connect and network and talk about things that are happening in the affiliate space. Shri, before we get started, I want you to just tell everybody that's tuning in a little bit of your backstory because it's very interesting. And tell us how you landed up being the CEO and founder of Increasingly Today.
SPEAKER_02Sure. I'll try and keep it brief because as you said, it's been a few years now. I first got exposed to digital technology and marketing in the early 2000s because of my first job, which was at Accenture in consulting. And so I was kind of in the high-tech space. And so I saw Google very early on. I saw through some friends the opportunity of affiliate marketing and connected the two and started being one of the first users of Google AdWords in the UK. That led to NMP, which became Incubita. It grew as a PPC player in the affiliate space for many years and still is, and then a digital agency too. And that was one hell of a ride because I started with £30,000, my life savings, or about $50,000, credit card loans, and basically grew it to a multi-million dollar business, helping brands find new customers globally, which was very cool, and a great learning curve. Then from there, since I sold and exited, I then was fortunate to win a scholarship to study AI and futuristic technologies at Singularity University, which is hosted at the NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, which was a phenomenal experience. So that got me exposed to another new technology. So if you imagine Google AdWords was a new technology in the early 2000s, as was the internet. This got me exposed to another new technology. And I really wanted to use this common theme that I had, which was use new technology to solve a problem. And so a problem I observed was we're driving heaps of traffic to businesses, but they weren't always innovating to grow the performance on the site. So the question was: is there a way to boost performance on the site? Which means that you don't have to spend more, but you just eke out a few extra percentage points, which makes all the difference. And I came across a data point which was from Forrester that said retailers are really good at selling products, consumers really want to be helped with their mission. And that got me thinking. And what occurred to me was that if there is some technology out there that really helps fulfill the mission, not just sell products, then that's something we should get behind. And we observed something called product bundling on Amazon. So when you see an Amazon on every page frequently bought together, that uses neural networks to identify what customers are likely to buy together, which is actually technically a real complex problem. And that's why only Amazon were doing it four or five years ago. And so we said, could we scale that into a technology not just for the website, but also for marketing and also for in-store? And that's what we've been on the journey of for the last four or five years. We've now got about 100 plus customers. Customers see 10% increase in site revenue by boosting the metric of AOV. Some examples, Sephora has seen a 5% boost in AOV based on a Google Optimized Split test. We work with Pets at home, we work with Better Minerals, we work with Samsung and many others. So it's been a very exciting journey.
SPEAKER_00I can see so. And super interesting the way that you've taken the way that customers want to fulfill a journey when they're shopping online. And if you think about when we started in the industry, it was point and click. It's I want to buy that product and click it. And now we're talking about neural pathways and how do we connect with brands and what is the color of your website? There's so much psychology that sits behind this e-commerce journey that we're presenting to customers. It's not just a website anymore, it's like all the plugins and the tools that you've created that are enabling customers to have these wonderful experiences online. And affiliates sit right in the middle of that because they're part of that customer journey. And whilst there's a lot of businesses creating products for brands, are you seeing affiliates adopt some of these technologies as well into their websites to enhance that customer journey?
SPEAKER_02I do. I do see affiliate marketing and particularly publishers, like learning to use, for example, AI for content, you know, without laboring on about ChatGPT that everyone talks about pre-Chat GPT. You could do things where you could test copy, be it for email or be it for landing pages. You're using AdWords already. AdWords is all machine learning. Um it's just now that with ChatGPT you can do even more things, and you can do it by asking verbally, not having to write down, you know, that is the next evolution. So it becomes simpler to do. So yeah, affiliate marketing is already using it. And I do think that affiliate marketing is at the center of all of this. Uh, I think sometimes it's not used enough strategically. You know, you said it's a complex I know before it was just use SEO and then PPC, and now it's well, where does your customer journey start? Is it Amazon? Is it TikTok? Is it Instagram? Is it YouTube? Is it SEO? Et cetera, et cetera. And and affiliate marketing can sit actually at the confluence of all of that because it's about saying to the advertiser what problems do you face? And actually, how can we help you right from saying, where is a customer starting, and how can we find more people who are there in terms of publishers, um, through to all the way to the end, which is where we sit, which is, well, actually, you're bringing somebody to the site. Do you would you like to actually improve the performance? Um, would you like to eke out 10% more AOV?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and it's I think it's quite promising because we're working in a really volatile market right now, and I want to touch on this point because there's a lot of e-commerce people that are tuning into this podcast each week to learn about what's happening, what's trending, and how they can actually move their programs forward. So, can you give us a sense for what you're seeing in the retail sector right now? Because people want to elevate their performance. And as you we've got a really cool summit coming up in in two months' time, which is going to be talking about just this. So, what are some of the volatilities that you're seeing with retailers right now and what are they doing to combat this market that we're working in?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so from a customer standpoint, I think some of the key trends are that I'm sure many people have heard of the concept of essentials, extendables, and expendables. So essentials are, for example, the things that you need for your kids, you know, you need food on the table, things interestingly, also your pets are part of your essentials. Uh extendables are things like holidays, and expendables become your personal accessory choices. So, you know, a new top, you know, some new hair product, you know, those become expendables. You know, you can really push them out into the future. So from a customer standpoint, that's what you're seeing. And that's why when you see, you know, in our data, there are definitely trends where many retailers are seeing a downturn in traffic. Because depending on the sector they're in, uh, they're facing that. But in some sectors, they're not, because they are clearly essential to the consumer. And then from the retailer landscape, you're seeing volatility because in the US, you would have seen things like Party City or Bed Bath and Beyond. In the UK, Misguided and Jules who have filed for bankruptcy. And that's been because of heavy, heavy debt, also for some of them, stores, uh, inflation, and supply chain costs. So it has been a really, really volatile space. Now, that doesn't mean there aren't people who are succeeding, uh, and it doesn't mean there aren't people who are struggling but managing to keep it together. And there are some definite ways that people can do a better job of that. And that's the challenge, isn't it? It's like, how do you ride the storm? For many people, it's how do you ride the storm and how do you find the opportunities? Because in every downturn, there is an opportunity. When you then look back in a few years, every single person will go, Do you know what it led to something? And and I'm and I've seen that because I've been through more than one downturn.
SPEAKER_00Well, I was just gonna say that you and I have been around long enough that I think there's been two recessions in my lifetime, and every time we've gone through, we've learned that continuing to spend. And I'm talking to a lot of affiliate managers right now through our training courses, and even with our clients in our agency, and a lot of them are saying, Oh, we need to pull back, we need to pull back and not spend. But actually, in the last two recessions, and I think there was some science that I read about this, either through Harvard Business or some journal that I've had a look at, they've actually proven that when you spend through a recession, your brand actually comes out stronger on the other side. So, is that some of the stuff that you've seen with like retailers that you've worked with in the past?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and and even back to my digital, you know, strategy days. I think that is true. I think it's about how you do it, right? It's about going back to what is the central theme that you're trying to tackle. So, for example, if you have a business that's struggling, it's about saying, well, who is my core audience and really focusing on them? And again, you can use affiliate marketing for that because you can say, well, let me find some lookalites who are similar audience. If you know that your target audience are starting their journey on TikTok or on YouTube, again, you can use affiliate marketing for that. Likewise, it can be about amplifying your cross-sell approach. So, you know, increasingly it's all about doing that. It's about actually saying, how can we help you sell more accessories or additional things? By the way, these are the things that have more margin. It can be about re-evaluating your website and how you're doing it, because it's times like this when you can actually go back to basics and say, are we overcomplicating things? Could we make things simpler? Could we have better imagery, simpler text, a cleaner journey through the path to conversion? So I think there's always ways that you can take these opportunities to find growth.
SPEAKER_00That also depends on how good your data is, because a lot of programs I speak to as well, they don't actually have lifetime value reporting within the platforms that they're using to track, and they're not really marrying their Google Analytics app. And I know GA4 has come is coming into play very soon, and there's a metric in there that tells you first point of access or something. I think it's called or Yeah, first touch. First touch, that's it. And I think what affiliate managers need to do now is not pull back spend but spend it more wisely in terms of where is that customer coming, or what customer is it that I want to bring in, and where does that customer come to me from? Because at the start of this call, you said affiliate marketing's become more complex. Where does that customer start? Where does that customer journey start and end? It's not as simple as I need to go to Google to find the product that I'm looking for. So I think the key thing here is to really get deep into your data and to understand where is your traffic coming from and is it the traffic that you want? Because you might not want repeat customers. You might be targeted against finding net new, in which case, where do you spend your money and which partners do you go and bring in? And I think you also said it correctly. It starts with knowing your customer. A lot of affiliate managers are going, oh, I need to go and find all the top affiliates with the highest traffic. That is not where you start. You start with who is my customer and where are those customers hanging out online. Then you go and build your partner recruitment plan to actually find the publishers that are going to bring you the customers that you're going to be KPI'd on. So I love that. I love that analysis. And that actually brought us to our next question, which is what are some of the common problems that you're seeing retailers make which hinder their performance in partnerships right now? So having been on the affiliate side, having grown your agency and worked with clients, are we still making some of those typical problems now today? Have we moved on since 10 years ago? What are your thoughts on that?
SPEAKER_02I think that's a really interesting point. And of course, there are lots of different things that people can do to improve. I think there's one theme that I wanted to pick up on here, which was that I know a lot of retailers now. The common thinking is I need more revenue per customer. So what I do is I'll discount. And that is the common wisdom. And I really want to make the point that that is not the only way. And I'd love it if affiliate managers were able to communicate that upwards to their clients, because when you do that, you end yourself on a journey of spiraling downwards. And everyone knows this, but you kind of feel like you've got no choice, and that's why you do it. It's like always spending more on Google, it's because you feel like you've got no choice. What the customer wants is to be helped on their mission. And I go back to that because the work of increasingly drives greater revenue per customer without discounting. It's just by helping the customer fulfill their mission and then making it super convenient. And that takes technology so that you have relevancy and then the ability to flow through the journey really quickly. But whether you use increasingly or not, I really just put out the point that if you could step back in your business and say, what is the customer's mission here? What is it they're trying to do? You will sweep up 10% more revenue. And if you use technology to help you do that, great. But even if you do it on your own, if you do that, you don't need to discount as much, which therefore also helps your cause, which is you want more revenue and frankly, you want more profit in today's market. That's probably the biggest thing I would say is an instant feeling that you must discount to drive more revenue per customer. And actually, there is a different way.
SPEAKER_00I agree with you because I think discounting is actually lazy marketing. It's not actually using the data to tell the story, and it's not actually thinking about what the customer really needs and wants. And that's actually the focal point of where everything starts in our journey, whether you're in affiliate, in search, and paid media, whatever it is, it's what does the customer need and want. And often we look at it through our own eyes and not through our customers' eyes. And that's where we get boxed in, is where we start having that like blinkers on like horses have. They can only look in one direction. So I encourage you, if you're listening to this, to actually listen to what Shri has said here and actually go and do a strategy session with your team. Go bring your SEO team, your BI team, your paid media team into a room with you if you're in the affiliate team and actually talk to them about what's working and what isn't, and use the data that they have in order to make educated decisions to push your own program forward. Because discounting isn't the way to go. Now, I'm not saying don't work with discount sites. That's not what I'm saying, because that's also another debate that constantly gets brought up is how much of my traffic should be coming through voucher codes and everything else. There's a time and a place for every single publisher that you're going to be working with. And there might even be seasonality that feeds into that conversation too. But what we're talking about is actually making sure that the customer's journey is met through the online experience that they're having on your site. And that is through multiple touch points and finally to the end basket, which is kind of where you do the upsell and support that process. Now, I want you to talk a little bit about the AI because that's kind of why I brought you on here and that's your kind of area of expertise. So tell us what you think AI will do to push this industry forward, not only in product development, which is where you're currently existing, but you've kind of been there from the start and obviously you've studied this intensively. Like, how do you feel the future of partnerships will evolve with AI and where do you see that actually heading? Like it's great that it's saving us on resources and it's quicker and we can move faster and create content better. But where do you see that AI evolving in the future? I mean, are we really getting to have robots that do our jobs?
SPEAKER_02I think there's a short term and there's a long term, right? So a few years ago when I got into this space, AI was, if I wind right back actually, AI was at its infancy in the early 2000s. And people like Peter Norweg, who moved from NASA to Google, pioneered a lot of it in the technology world, particularly for internet. And so it was in the early, early days. And then it's kind of advanced, but it really is data science in effect. And it's about number crunching or reading text or reading images and producing some sort of outcome. And all of that has added value, and you see it in Google AdWords, so or in Google Analytics, so you see it now in their bidding and their creatives in their audiences and in their budget allocation. So I then think the next frontier I think has been Chat GBT because it's made it more mainstream, it's made it accessible because of being able to use natural language to request things or simple commands, you know, verbal or text. And that's a huge frontier. By the way, for everyone listening, it's not 100% effective, it's about 80% effective. So take it all with a pinch of salt. But that's still pretty incredible. The last 19-20% is a tough journey to get through. But nonetheless, it's really helping people do their jobs and be even more efficient and effective. That means in the short term, for if we think about affiliate marketing, what that means for everyone's jobs is the ability to do reporting more easily, uh, creative, get a better input on creative conceptualization, actually, budget allocation, sourcing of affiliates, all of that you can use technology to help you in the short term, right? You can do some of that better now, right now, uh, because of ChatGPT, quite frankly, and AutoChat GPT, which is its latest incarnation. If we then fast forward, what that really means in business is it means that lots of the day-to-day manual work, being frank, in the day-to-day job world, it means that lots of the manual work will be removed. And what it'll mean is we'll need people who are power users of tools like ChatGPT, power users of the software that will evolve that plugs into these AI technologies, be it BART from Google, ChatGPT, or whoever else. Now, it's unfortunately going to be a few giant companies again, because they have the resources, the data, the processing power, and you know, into the future, quantum computing will also be owned by them, which means again, processing power will come from them. But then we will need people who are power users of these applications. So, you know, we won't be replaced by robots walking up and down the streets, but we will have to use our ability to collaborate, spot patterns, be creative, because then you still need to see what the system says. And remember, there's that 80% effectiveness, but 20% it can't do. You still need people on top. So the skills to improve on would be your ability to be a power user of technologies that evolve. So if I was you, I would be looking at Chat GPT. There are plenty of interfaces that have been built that mean you don't have to be a developer already. So people are jumping on it, so why not jump on, you know, stand on the shoulders of the giants and and you know, and everyone is. So then go and play with it, see how you could use it for your work. The opportunities will be for people who are power users of this technology, people who can collaborate with other people, people who can still hold relationships, and don't forget, affiliate marketing is about relationships, you know, first and foremost. The technology is an enabler. And and they're going to be the winners because the industry isn't gonna go, because relationship is still the key central theme of the industry. But then the technologies to help us is going to evolve.
SPEAKER_00So I love that you said that because a lot of people think that affiliate marketing is all about data analysis and commercially sucking out the best margin from every deal that you do, but it's not, it is still about relationships. And unfortunately, any which way you look at it, you're not going to be able to replace that with a computer because humans still want to speak to humans. And the way that you've explained it now actually takes me back 20 years because the same thing applied 20 years ago when there was no algorithmic search and the paid media was all done, throw a couple of thousand impressions at a wall and see what sticks. There wasn't any like tools that were used to optimize campaigns and things. We all had to do that stuff manually when we first started. And slowly over time, we had to learn how to use all of these tools. And we even find now some people in our teams are experts in certain platforms because they live in that platform all the time and they bastardize those platforms a million ways to try and get the technology to do what they need them to do. And the same iteration of the internet is now happening. So don't get concerned if you're new in the industry. Like there's a lot of stuff to be learned. The tools are being created in order to enhance the experiences that we can give to our customers at the end of the day and not to replace the experience that they have. I want you to give us one last piece of advice because of where you've come from in the industry and how you've grown up in this industry and where you think the future is headed. What does affiliate marketing look like five years from now to you?
SPEAKER_02Oh, that's a great question. I think That a lot will be consistent with today, which is central theme of partnerships, trying to achieve revenue for advertisers. I think what it will evolve to if we continue to innovate will be used more strategically. And I know that gets banded about, but I think there is a case for that to be true. And I think that's by really being able to get in a room with advertisers and actually go, well, what's central to making you successful? And if I take that case of a retailer, it would be being where the customers, their customers are starting their journey, and then saying we can solve for that. Then can we actually find you more customers that look like your existing customers? Because it's always better to talk to proven track record participants. And again, affiliate marketing can go, yes, I can find you more people who are similar. And then it's about saying, Well, can we get you volume? Again, affiliate marketing can do that. And then probably the latter two would be okay, the customers are near the ending of the journey. Can we eke out more? And that's where tools like increasingly come in, because then we can help on-site and in marketing to boost more AOV, cross-cell, etc. So I actually think affiliate marketing, if positioned, can continue to grow because it can be seen as strategic, because it really has that opportunity, and I just don't think we're shining a light on that enough. And that's the opportunity for the next five years.
SPEAKER_00Love it. I'm definitely in the right job because I plan to be here for another 15 years at least. So I'm very excited about what's coming. Shri, it's been an absolute pleasure to have you on this podcast today. Thank you so much for sharing all of these nuggets of wisdom in terms of what's happening in the volatile market that we're working in right now, what affiliate managers should be looking at in terms of working with their publishers, and how e-commerce clients are navigating this recessionary space that we've come out of after COVID. So it's been great having you on this podcast. Thank you very much for your time. I've absolutely loved having you here and looking forward to seeing you at future events.
SPEAKER_02Thanks so much, Leanne, and thanks everyone for listening in.
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