Scott Gold of impact.com sat down with Jonathan Moisan, CEO of Advertise Purple, to discuss the agency’s approach to partner recruitment and how impact.com helps to streamline this process.
Scott: Can you share a bit about your personal background and experience with affiliate and partnerships marketing?
Jonathan: I fell into affiliate and partnerships marketing by way of chance. I was working at an outsourced accounting company in 2016-2017 with Advertise Purple being one of my clients. I was fascinated with the company and with the industry and ended up coming onboard full-time at the beginning of 2018. Since then I have continued to do everything I can to become an expert in everything affiliate/partnerships marketing related including writing articles for Forbes on the benefits of the industry.
Scott: You’re currently part of our Agency Partner Program. Can you provide a brief background on your agency?
Jonathan: Advertise Purple has been helping ecommerce brands grow their business by driving traffic and revenue through the affiliate/partnerships channel for well over 10 years. We employ a data-led strategy to identify partnerships that have the greatest chance of success and execute on securing those relationships with our team of experienced affiliate marketers to secure and optimize campaigns to drive growth.
Scott: What would you consider to be some of Advertise Purple’s areas of specialty?
Jonathan: At Advertise Purple we have been fortunate to work with brands of all shapes and sizes. We serve over 20 unique verticals (anything from Home, Beauty, and Wellness, to Financial and others). Our specialty is using our history and rich data to build a strategic plan to drive sales and revenue. We hone in and focus on those affiliate relationships that place the brands we work with in the best chance to succeed for sales and revenue; and by extension, we have forged long-standing relationships with many publishers in the space from all types of categories (shopping, loyalty, content, rewards, etc.). Our approach has been successful in working with brands of almost any vertical. Therefore we are eager to work across a broad spectrum of categories.
Scott: Let’s flip the coin and talk about partners. What type of partners does Advertise Purple typically work with?
Jonathan: With our long history, we have established relationships with all of the top-tier publishers for many years. This long-standing history in the space has allowed us to forge exclusive programs that leverage our reach and insights. We are also constantly discovering new and up-and-coming publishers, or publishers that might be more specific to a particular niche.We have a team dedicated full-time to identifying trends and up-and-coming publishers to forge new relationships with.
Scott: Prior to working with impact.com, what was the agency’s process for identifying and recruiting partners for client programs?
Jonathan: In those early days before working with impact.com, we would rely heavily on the existing partnerships at the time because there wasn’t enough data to utilize for discovering new and unproven partners. Any new partners that came to our attention, we would vet and work with on a case-by-case basis but it was a slower process than what it is today.
Scott: How were partners managed and optimized within programs?
Jonathan: We utilized our built-up agency partnerships as well as our collective experiences to cater to the management and optimizations of partners for the programs that we managed. We incorporated specific program objectives and made sure that aligned with any partner opportunities. This was mainly achieved through direct communication and was a more manual process in vetting opportunities and what kind of impact they would have on our partners’ affiliate programs.
Scott: How has that changed since joining impact.com?
Jonathan: impact.com provided us with the ability to discover new partners for those client objectives as well as truly analyze the impact that they had through their overall performance and the performance of any optimizations that we would secure.
Every partner was also made more accessible in terms of communication directly through the platform as well as the management of any creatives. Those are key features that we’ve been utilizing very successfully throughout these years that have allowed us to more effectively manage partners and grow the relationships.
Scott: Prior to working with impact.com, were there any partner-related challenges you were facing? How did impact.com help you solve those problems?
Jonathan: One of the biggest partner-related challenges we were facing from the beginning was the ability to utilize reporting and overall market data to effectively grow affiliate programs. We realized very early on that the old strategies relied too heavily on unproven partnerships which led to partners not realizing their full potential.
As a top-tier network, impact.com understood that and innovated their capabilities to adjust for those issues such as through their reporting capabilities and providing us with the ability to deep dive into specific partnerships.
Scott: Once partners are onboarded to a client’s program, how do you manage partner performance?
Jonathan: Each one of our partner brands has a team of individuals monitoring and looking for opportunities for performance in the space. Led by our Account Management team, they oversee the daily relationship and health of the program.
Monitoring the flows of programs and helping identify directions for potential growth. We also have a Growth team focused on the affiliate relationships and negotiating and identifying the specific performance of a program on that specific publisher—and where there are opportunities for growth through optimizations or extra exposure, negotiate and secure those campaigns.
Scott: Are there any features of impact.com in particular that help with partner management and/or optimization?
Jonathan: The impact.com Marketplace in particular stands out as a key feature that our teams are utilizing for effective partner management. New partnerships are essential in order to scale affiliate programs, especially with how prominent affiliate marketing has become in recent years and how many new partners are utilizing it. The number of content publishers, shopping/loyalty, influencers, and more have grown exponentially so using the impact.com Marketplace is crucial in helping research through all of that.
Scott: Can you elaborate on how the impact.com Marketplace helps to streamline discovery?
Jonathan: The impact.com Marketplace in particular helps streamline discovery according to client objectives. Through specific content objects, for example, we can use the discovery system to get incredibly niche with full detailed information on each affiliate. For this, we’ll use the recommendations but heavily rely on the robust filtering capabilities as well. This way, we can get granular with each affiliate partner and assure that it aligns with the strategy we’re working to build up for each program.
Scott: How does the impact.com Marketplace help streamline recruitment?
Jonathan: In general, the recruitment aspect of the impact.com Marketplace has a tremendous influence within our agency. While we utilize our own data, we also rely on the Marketplace recruitment function to be able to identify new and exciting partners that we can present to our partners.
Through each prospect and experience, we can then work with these new affiliates to expand their efforts with many other programs. We’ll specifically use the in-app messaging to efficiently introduce ourselves through the impact.com Marketplace, and then establish a partnership.
Scott: What are you most excited about in your partnerships program, and are looking forward to?
Jonathan: We are excited to continue to forge more strategic relationships with all of our partners in this space. As the space continues to mature and expand and touch almost every other aspect of digital marketing, there will be new and innovative ways to strategically work with partners. With the size and range of our portfolio, we have the ability to package and scale in this channel at a rate that gives us a significant competitive advantage.
We hope that we can continue to build on the momentum gained (especially over the last couple of years) to offer Advertise Purple clients access and opportunities that would only be available due to our relationship and standing in the industry.
