This is a podcast for digital and affiliate marketings in the IDM industry. Listen up as I explore the latest digital and affiliate marketing trends and give you the inside of group on what's supporting in affiliate marketing. Join us as we explore affiliate strategies, host expert interviews with leading affiliates and top entrepreneurs and discuss the latest affiliates and digital marketing trends. If you want to stay at the cutting edge of affiliate marketing, you're in the right place. Join me for this week's episode and let's get started.
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SPEAKER_02Welcome to Affiliate Insiders Podcast. And today I am super excited to have with me uh somebody that's a very, very important part of my team. Her name is Liana Klein. If you've never met her at an affiliate show, you don't know what you're missing. Um, she has been on our team and she heads up our agency service. And the reason why I've invited her to come on the podcast with me here today is because she's an absolute hive of information, and we're gonna deep dive Liana's mind and actually share some of the learnings and the knowledge of all of the clients that we manage so that you guys can benefit from some of the learnings that she's had over the years, growing successful affiliate programs. So, without any further ado, let me introduce you to the lady herself and we can kickstart this podcast. So, Liana, welcome on board. Thank you so much for coming to join me in this discussion today. It's absolutely great to have you here.
SPEAKER_01Thanks for having me. Um funny because I see you doing these all the time. This is my first time on your podcast.
SPEAKER_02I know, and hopefully it's not gonna be the last because um I know you're really busy running our agency for us, but I like to get you out from behind the screen every now and then to talk about all the stuff that you're learning and doing for some of our clients. So um tell our listeners a little bit about yourself in case they've never met you and a little bit about your background, and then we'll kickstart with some of the questions that we're gonna go through today on the podcast.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. So um I started in iGaming in 2006, um, started in customer service, moved my way up through sales, and eventually moved into the affiliate world where I've been for well, the past 10 years now. It's been a while. Um and I've worked with Leanne in the past at other companies. So um we met at Paysafe, uh, working on the NetTeller brand. Um, and now I'm working with her at Affiliate Insider. Lots of exciting things going on here.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. So today we want to deep dive some of the problematic things that we tend to help our clients fix in affiliate programs, especially when we've taken them over or taking them on board after they've been live for a little while. So the first question that I wanted to talk about was what we call program configurations. And these are really the functions upon which an affiliate program is built. So whether it's the technology, the infrastructure, um, you know, the setup, all of those types of things. And we've come to realize through managing multiple different affiliate programs that it's quite an important factor for a number of reasons, um, from time management to resourcing to you know uh margins on financials, and getting these things wrong can have a massive impact on your affiliate program delivery. So, talk to us a little bit about your experience in terms of program configurations and what are some of the common things that we tend to have to fix as part of our agency service.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I would say one of the most common things that we have to fix is the actual setup of the program. If an affiliate manager has set up their program so that it is by brand or by product, that's one way to do it. They can also set it up by country so that they're placing affiliates into different groups. And if they've gotten this wrong to begin with, it can be a lot to kind of clean up or organize later down the road. So it is important to really think about where you want your program to go before you begin the setup. Um, you know, think about where you want it to end rather than where you want it to start. Um, another thing that we do find commonly is that you know, program managers haven't really thought through all of the commercial functions yet. Um there's many of those. There are, you know, the NGR calculations, your actual commission structures, um, thinking about high-value players, there's a few different areas that you actually have to look at. Uh we tend to focus on the commission structures because that's the part that's going to draw affiliates to your program. Um, but you have to think about all of them.
SPEAKER_02So, why do you need to think about those things? I mean, give us some examples of some of the clients that you've dealt with, especially in the eye gaming industry. And remember, our audience is from multiple different verticals. So, you know, you you mentioned the kind of the NGR. What what do you mean by that in terms of like the net gross revenue, which is what we call that in in eye gaming, but in terms of um other programs, you know, what are some of the the costs that are involved in running an affiliate program?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. I mean, when you're when you're talking about your your revenue, um you want to think of of where you start in terms of what the um player or the end user is putting in versus what you end up with at the very end of the journey. So that means that you have to think about taxes that you're paying, um, bonuses or offers that you're giving giving that are taking away from that end number. Um, even things like you know, your marketing costs that you're putting into acquiring a new new player or a new end user. Um, all of those need to be considered when you're when you're doing your calculations. Um if you don't consider those, we've seen programs where they're you know they're bringing in they're bringing in users, but at the end when they look at their their reports, they're not making money.
SPEAKER_02They're profit margins, which is a massive um thing that people often forget. So, you know, are you paying affiliates 50% commission, which is great because that's what everybody else is paying, but 50% of what exactly? Are you paying on your gross revenue? Are you paying on your net revenue after all of your costs and deductions? And some of the things that programs forget to add in are the things like um you know promotional costs, and um even sometimes they forget about the fact that players that are referred by affiliates can also have VIP costs associated to them. So often we dig deep into the numbers on an affiliate program for an iGaming client, and we'll see, you know, they haven't actually included all of their marketing costs in the calculation, they've only looked at you know the player bonuses, whatever the customer gets bonus direct, but not on the generic marketing that the business is doing as well. And in terms of um commission models, because we we did talk a little bit about you know the setting up of commissions in your um infrastructure and in your platform, often what we find is when a program gets integrated, um, at that point you don't really know how to run a program properly. So you're following the directions of either your dev team or um you know the technical support team at a you know platform provider or at the network if you're choosing to run your program in a network. And sometimes there's a disconnect between the practical functionality of what an affiliate manager has to do day to day to manage their program, and it can get lost in translation from the configuration stage when we're actually doing the program integration into the practical applications of how you run your program every day and the administration tasks that you need to do. So, talk to us a little bit about some of the common things that you've seen on affiliate programs that we've taken over where setup has gone horribly wrong and how that can impact the program.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, definitely. I mean, there's a lot of things that can impact a program. I think one that sticks out to me is localization. So if your product is being sold in different countries, um perhaps the way that you set up your platform can help you to manage those affiliates differently. Um so when we're talking about countries where maybe there's um certain legalities in the way your affiliates are going to advertise, you want to set up your program so that you're helping your affiliates to actually achieve what they need to in order to promote your product, but still stay in line with you know your your rules and and the regulations that you have to follow so that they're effectively promoting your product and bringing you the right customers. Um we've seen, you know, we've worked with large brands that have uh had programs in many different geos, so you know, across the UK or Europe or in Russia, and and one brand that sticks out to me the most, um they had everything set up so that you know everyone was going into one group. But what they needed to do is they actually needed to separate those affiliates so that they can look at the reports separately, see what type of revenue is coming from each of those geos and manage the affiliates separately so the user experience for the affiliates and the players was different for each of those geos.
SPEAKER_02And one of the and one of the things as well is that when you're looking at a multiple geo program where you need buckets, you need to be able to segment your affiliate portfolio into buckets, is um also takes into account the costs, because the costs to run a program in the UK, i.e. the taxes, is very different to the costs to run a program in Russia. And your your technical platform needs to be able to account for all of those different types of calculations because otherwise you're eating into your profit margins when you you're tarring everybody in the affiliate program with the same brush.
SPEAKER_01Definitely. You also have to be able to cross-sell. So if you have different products, um maybe some maybe you have a geo where multiple products fit and you still want to be able to cross-sell those products in that geo. So you have to think about all of this before you configure your platform. Otherwise, it's difficult to number one report properly and figure out where your profit margins are coming from or not coming from. And it's also difficult to cross-sell or have an affiliate sign up to sell you know different products or different brands for you because it becomes too hard for them.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I mean that the that is the biggest thing. It's almost like town planning. It's like when you've got a a space that you want to put, you know, houses on, a park on, um, you know, a school, a church, you've got to think about like how is the flow, how how is the flow of of the people of the traffic gonna move through that space, and what can you do to help them save time? Because what you don't want to do is, for example, which is this client that you were talking about, um, set up an individual program per geo. Because then if an affiliate has traffic from multiple sources, they literally have to go and pick 10 different tracking lengths from one program in order to promote the different geolocations. Um, you know, they and that makes it incredibly complex for affiliates because they're already working with 50 to 100 different clients. So when you structure your program properly and you think about the hierarchy that exists within your program, it actually ends up making a much better user experience for affiliates. Now, user experience is something else that we've come across that is um something that's often forgotten in affiliate programs. Um, it really is.
SPEAKER_01It really is. I mean, you have to think about it from the very beginning, from when they come across your site and they are looking at the information that you're providing them about your affiliate program, you have to think about that to when they click the sign-up button and they actually go to register. What information are you asking them for? Is it easy for them to provide that information right up front? Is that something that you might need to collect later? Um, you know, once they get into your affiliate program as well, you want to make it easy for them to grab the marketing materials that they need to find what they're looking for, to really understand your product so that they can put it out there effectively.
SPEAKER_02And essentially understanding the product is probably the biggest hurdle that you need to cover when you when you're launching an affiliate program is actually making sure that your partners understand how to accurately promote you. So, some of the things that we do and recommend to our clients is that we recommend that they create an onboarding sequence and also a marketing automation sequence because what you want to do is make sure that you streamline the user journey of your affiliate into your program in as quickly and simply as possible without taking up any of your own team's resources and time. Now, a lot of platforms out there have very sophisticated emails that you can set up as a string of kind of marketing, very simplified marketing automation. But we actually suggest that clients go a step further and they actually build automated email sequences that take an affiliate through the journey of the startup from the education piece with you know onboarding packs, for example, through to how to actually promote the program and where the program is strong. So often you know, we've discussed this how programs don't see their their USPs the same way that an affiliate would, or or actually as a player or customer would. So, what are some of the cool things that you've seen through your experience in the industry working with multiple different programs that you can maybe share with our audience today?
SPEAKER_01Um, you know, onboarding packs are a great one if if there's a good onboarding pack that gives uh the affiliate all of the information they need about your products, your services, your pricing, that can be really helpful. Uh, but I think the coolest thing I've seen is those programs that actually have a blog. They they continuously teach, they continuously give information to their affiliates about what's happening in their space, um, you know, who exactly they're targeting. Information like that can be valuable. And if you do it on a continual basis, you keep doing it even after the onboarding is complete. I think that's really effective. Um, and it's really special, it's not something that every affiliate program does. So your affiliates feel like you're partners, they're not just there to, you know, pop a banner or a link onto their site and hope for the best. You're really partnering with them to create a mutually beneficial relationship. Um and and that can also come in the form of you know continual communication because often we get a partner onboarded and we forget to talk to them after because we're so busy trying to get more and more new partners. Yeah. Um, you have to keep keep going back to them and letting them know that you're you're there for them, there's you know, resources, you're you're there to help and to assist in in their goals as well. Um, and things like weekly, weekly newsletters, uh, blog articles, and of course that ever-essential welcome pack when they come come on board, those are all really important pieces that could be very helpful.
SPEAKER_02I mean, some of the other things that we've seen some of our clients do very well is uh create telegram groups where they can easily chat with their partners and and affiliate managers kind of segment their portfolios as well, depending on how companies run. Either, I mean, the most common way that we've seen companies do that is either by geolocation or by product. Um, and some of the things that make it easier for affiliates to stay in tune with you, even if they're not actively managed in like a person's portfolio, is just to have these group chats where people can just dip in and dip out, whether that's on Facebook or Telegram, or I mean, we're even seeing people use Clubhouse now, which is you know, it doesn't really matter the channel, it's just getting everybody there, getting everybody centralized. So, what are some of the other things that you've seen you know affiliate programs do that make them stand out and and how do they use their communication tools?
SPEAKER_01Um, those who are active in forums tend to have quite a bit of luck as well because you have to think of where your your partners are hanging out. Um, maybe they're in forums looking for information about affiliate programs. And if you're in there and you're able to give them that information or answer their questions, um that can be really useful. Uh recently, I've seen I've seen affiliates hanging out on Twitter, making statements on Twitter, so that's an interesting new development. I I wasn't seeing that as much before. Um, so not only can you find new partners on Twitter, but you can also communicate with the partners that are already in your program. Um so yeah, any of those channels are are great tools for you to use. Um and I and I think that you should use all of them as much as you can, um, or pick a couple to focus on and really get good at using them effectively, and then your affiliates will kind of know where to find you if they have questions.
SPEAKER_02And what kind of like because that we talk about the onboarding process, but sometimes there are processes that aren't followed where affiliates, you know, often we find programs still today, and I really can't believe that this is happening, where affiliates are auto-approved into a program. What are some of the things that can really be detrimental to a program if they are just allowing anybody in?
SPEAKER_01I mean, if you don't know who your partners are, how do you know that they're going to promote you in an honest way? Um, it's important to know them from the very start. So often you can use a KYPC process for that so you can make sure that you know who the affiliate or the partner is before you actually begin working with them. That can be anything from just checking their site and making sure that it fits the audience you're trying to reach to actually asking them for documents to prove their identity. Um, it depends on where you your your program wants to go and what um you know what locations you're actually working in. Some locations will require more KYC than others. Um but yeah, it's it's important to get to know your your affiliates. Um, I think it's important to ask them for a couple of channels of communication. Maybe email isn't the best channel because you'll never actually get to speak with your affiliate directly. Um you can ask them for a Skype or a Telegram handle so that you can actually chat with them, get to know them, ask them what they need from you. Um so yeah, that's it's very important to know your know your customer.
SPEAKER_02And the other thing about knowing your customer is that you can build a rapport with them a little bit quicker. And I'm all about, you know, engaging affiliates and making sure that you understand how they promote you, what their business is all about. But simple things like super affiliation or refer a friend, do those things still really work? I mean, are there programs, are programs still offering that as a whole?
SPEAKER_01I've seen quite a few refer a friend programs that seem to be working quite well. Um, usually the those who are referring don't earn as much as they would off of an affiliate program, but it is also a good way to seek out potential affiliates for your program for the future. Um yeah, I mean I think some of those programs do work, but they have to be again the same as with an affiliate program. You really have to think about what is it you're offering, how are you communicating with those who are going to be referring your your product and how how you're setting it up. So what are your margins and how are you going to help them to communicate it properly?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So out of all these years of affiliate marketing and all these programs that you have fixed or um, you know, integrated or set up or migrated, which is another thing that we could probably deep dive in a whole separate conversation, um, you know, what are some of the biggest mistakes that affiliate programs have that can be costly and resource or labor intensive to fix later on?
SPEAKER_01Well, I I would say that uh the most costly thing to fix later on is probably your your um commercials, so it's really important to look at those first. Um I think one of the hardest things to fix later on is your reporting because sometimes you can't get back the historical reports that you might need in order to drive your affiliate program in the proper direction. So when it comes to configuration, um, and you you've mentioned this to me or taught this to me so many times, is start at the end, look at how you want your affiliate program to look, what you want your reports to show you, um, how you want your affiliates to work with you. Start at the end, build the picture, build the plan, put it on paper, and then work backwards. I think that's the most valuable piece of advice I've ever. Given and it works with our clients, and I think that it really does make a lot of sense. You you think of the end goal and then you find your way back to the beginning.
SPEAKER_02And often we find that when we're managing integration projects as well. So, you know, there's multiple touch points of people that are involved in launching a successful affiliate program from the web development team to the games platform provider to the agency that you might be using to project manage the piece to the technology partners that are actually providing all of the tracking. What's the one thing that you and I always make sure our clients get from a technical integration project at the very beginning? A project plan. And talk to us about a project plan and how that can help stop costly mistakes from happening.
SPEAKER_01A project plan is very important. It actually keeps you on track in terms of dates as well. So if you don't have a project plan to begin with and you don't know what dates certain um key milestones are meant to be met at, then you're going to end up taking way more time than you need to to actually integrate a platform. So having a project plan in place is very helpful with that. It also helps you to call out those stakeholders. Like you said, you have your technology provider, you have those in-house, like your BI team is going to need to be involved, your IT team. You'll also need likely to have your marketing team involved because you'll want whatever marketing or promotional materials that you're putting into your affiliate program to complement the things that your marketing team is doing outside of your affiliate program. So it's very important to have all of the right players involved and a project plan can help you to kind of lay that out from the beginning.
SPEAKER_02Alright, now the last thing that I want to ask you because we're coming to the end of this podcast is about affiliate recruitment, which is a big part of the first kind of three to six months of any affiliate program. What are some of the things that we've discovered on programs that come through our door that often are not considered from kind of like types of traffic and where all the eggs are in one basket through to the strategic growth plan in terms of you know where to actually look for the right traffic sources next.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, recruitment is a huge, I mean, once all of your configuration is done, your your program is ready to go, you have all the best marketing materials in there, it is the key element to running a successful program is to bring in the partners. Um, as you said, there are different sources of traffic, so you could work with the traditional affiliate type site where it's one-to-one and you're you have, you know, your information up on their site, perhaps banners, links, or uh details about your product, or you could work with a media site who actually goes out and and um puts your offer out on mass on multiple different sites. Um but it's important, I think, to have a good mixture of those uh partners because you do want even even the smaller affiliates, you you want a few of those because you don't want to be wholly reliant on a couple of partners. If they fall down for any reason or perhaps stop promoting in the areas that you are looking for, um then you lose a big chunk of your revenues. So you need to diversify, you need to go to all of those different types of partners, and you need to have a good mixture. Um, in terms of finding those partners, that that could be a whole other podcast, I think. There's so many great tools out there or um ways to find the partners that you're looking for. Um so you know, I think if you have existing relationships with affiliates, that's probably the best place to start because you know how they work, you know what they can offer you. Um and then casting a wide net. You should really just uh go for um, you know, go to start the conversations at least with with all types of partners and in all different geos that you're working in and across all the different products that you're trying to push.
SPEAKER_02Okay, so have a well-rounded approach to affiliate recruitment. Don't just focus on the you know top traffic drivers because you might not be able to either afford those guys, and then in which case you're not really putting the resource and the effort into grow the long tail, and or you know, you might just have to wait a little while to get your bride a little bit more established before those guys will consider to promote you. So, in summary, I mean we've discussed quite a lot of things that often we have to fix on programs, and hopefully, this is going to be helpful to you know people listening to this podcast. But the key things that programs need to consider prior to launching to make sure that all their building blocks are in place. Um, are you is it safe to say that that would be structure? So, you know, figuring out what is your affiliate program needs to look like, and how do you use the structure that you have available, whether it's a network or a direct tracking service provider, to provide that good user experience for your affiliates? Reporting, so you know what do you want your affiliates to see, what do you not want your affiliates to see, and what do you need to see from an administrative perspective? Um, and how do you actually configure that so that it's easy for affiliates to get the information that they need in order to promote you? Accessibility, so the user journey of your affiliates partners and the onboarding process that you're giving them, which ultimately is their first taste of you and your brand. Um so thinking about that marketing automation piece, thinking about what do you actually pull together for your onboarding packs, um, and thinking about that UX experience. There's actually one more thing that I want to um talk to you about in the UX experience, and I know you're gonna bring it up.
SPEAKER_01I I I think I know what you're talking about, and I think that would be payouts. I I think I think your payments to your affiliates is very important, and I think that uh we forget to really communicate with our affiliates when they should expect their payments and and then stick to that date. So we need to have a good solid process in place when we're paying our affiliates. We need to say we're going to pay our affiliates by X date. This is your minimum amount that you're going to be able to withdraw. Um, this is how our payouts are going to be processed. So I think payments are also very important, and they are one of those factors that we do check when we begin working with a new client is what does that payment process look like? You know, there's a lot of different moving pieces to payouts because you are likely going to have to work with your finance team to ensure that everything is pushed out in a timely manner and everything is correct. Um, and you definitely want to have your reporting team involved because you need to look back and be able to see exactly where the payouts went and what exactly the ROI was when after you've completed the payouts. So it is a very important piece of the puzzle as well.
SPEAKER_02And considering in the payout process, because this is often something that gets forgotten, not just the revenue share component that you're paying out, but also the fixed fee component if you're doing hybrid deals. Because what you don't want to do, and this is something that we learned the hard way working working at you know the companies that we worked at before, is measure the ROI of your program with half of the payments sitting in the platform and in the reporting and the other half being paid outside with your finance team. Because whenever you pull reports in your affiliate program, you always want those reports to be as accurate as possible so that you know you're comparing a previous month to a previous month and there aren't missing payments or you know ad hoc payments that weren't captured into the reporting platform because then it impacts what your profit margins are, and it also impacts what you can go and give affiliates in terms of commissions or you know upgraded uh terms for campaigns that they've run. The last thing that I wanted to say, and I think you'll agree with me on this, is that the more complex you make things, the more difficult it becomes to make it successful. So keeping things simple is a big part of our agency model. And even simple things like making sure that in the footer of your website there is a link that says, here's our affiliate program, and that link doesn't just go to a registration page, it tells you nothing about the program, but actually takes you to a mini site within your own site that details the USPs of why an affiliate needs to work with you. I mean, countless times we've taken on clients where there is just a very basic landing page and there's no affiliates are getting no understanding or feel of what this brand is and how they can partner with them.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, if those are things that you don't have right now, it's a good place to start. One item at a time. Just keep adding, um, giving that user experience to your partners.
SPEAKER_02Awesome. Thank you so much for joining me on this podcast and sharing some of this insight that is the stuff that we deal with every day behind the doors of our agency. I'm hoping that this is going to help people listening to understand what they can look out for and what they can overcome and how they can stop hindering their own growth in their affiliate channel and start making profitable partnerships, which is what we're all about. So it's been lovely to have you on the podcast. I'm looking forward to getting you on to discuss more things like this in future. Um, you know, you're at the forefront of our agency and in the thick of it every day. So all these learnings are incredibly valuable. Thanks for joining me on the podcast today. Thank you, Lee. If you've loved listening to Affiliate Insider's Affiliate Marketing Podcast, stay tuned by subscribing to our podcast channel on either Apple or Spotify and never miss another exciting episode. We'll be bringing you more interesting interviews with industry legends like Calvin Air and deep diving community and social engagement with channel leaders like Lad Bible and delivering a host of in-depth interviews with digital marketing experts, blue chip brands, and new innovative product owners helping you keep ahead of the latest digital marketing trends. Subscribe to our newsletter at www.affiliateinsider.com forward forward slash newsletter and join us for the next exciting season of the Affiliate Insider Affiliate Marketing Podcast coming to you real soon.