In Q2 2024, impact.com welcomed hundreds of new clients, delivered new innovations and product enhancements, expanded its senior leadership team, and was again recognized by leading award programs for the excellence of its partnership management platform.
NEW YORK—August 6, 2024 – impact.com, the world’s leading partnership management platform, announced today continued strong performance in Q2 2024 driven by client and team expansion and new product enhancements, including impact.com/advocate, a fully customizable customer referral solution, further cementing its position as the global standard platform for partnership management. impact.com empowers businesses to manage all types of partnerships — traditional affiliates, influencers, publishers, other businesses, and now customer referral marketing — in one, unified platform. During the quarter, impact.com welcomed more than 600 brands and partners to its total client roster, including leading brands The Container Store, Gopuff, Kühl, and Hack The Box.
At a time when consumers are increasingly weary of and don’t trust traditional advertising, more brands are looking to form authentic partnerships with the affiliates, influencers, creators, and customer advocates that people increasingly turn to for product advice and recommendations.
“Today’s modern consumer craves authentic recommendations from real people they trust before making a purchase. While at the same time, the simple fact is that acquiring new customers has become increasingly challenging and costly. This means it’s crucial for brands to get creative with their marketing, ” said impact.com CEO David A. Yovanno. “impact.com’s continued growth is proof that brands are embracing this trend and leveraging our platform to unlock the full potential of partnerships, which is essential for reaching new and highly valued audiences in today’s fast-paced market.”
impact.com/advocate empowers brands to turn customers into advocates and foster trust with new audiences. Brands can now build flexible, fully automated referral marketing programs that are straightforward to manage and easy for their customers to use. The platform streamlines customer referral marketing, known for its ability to drive customer advocacy, community, and attract new customers entering the discovery phase. The announcement comes at a time when research also reveals that 86% of consumers say recommendations and reviews are important in their purchase decisions, while only 2% consider traditional ads influential in their buying choices.
impact.com also announced it will power the new influencer marketing platform launched with livestream video shopping and storytelling platform, HSN, HSNfluencer. HSN can now recruit, engage, manage, and analyze its creator partners through a fully customized experience, in one place for optimization and scale. The technology allows HSN to streamline direct relationships with creators and influencers to build its own network with more visibility. Within the platform, influencers and content creators can collaborate with HSN and use carefully curated product collections to inspire their next content story and generate affiliate product links for their posts. Creators from any background can access the right resources, tools, and support to gain consumer momentum. HSN will also leverage on-air personalities as creators within the platform, who will have their own storefronts, allowing customers to interact with their favorite HSN personalities and shop their curated collections
Additional highlights from the quarter include:
- Hosted the annual flagship Partnerships Experience event, iPX, in New York City and London. The events brought together more than 900 attendees and over 50 speakers from every aspect of the partnership economy to share knowledge, learn from industry trailblazers, and build connections for the future. iPX Sydney will be held on September 5, and iPX Shanghai on September 26.
- Released product updates and enhancements to Creator including two new powerful ways to discover creators across the ecosystem through enhanced extended search and social listening, while improving tools to zero in on relevant creators for campaigns like filters, data, and navigation. Improved brands’ capacity to streamline and customize campaign workflow, including flexible statements of work, product gifting, and audience targeting, and upgraded key performance reports by creators, posts, and social platforms, and new performance summary report. Also expanded the universe of fully supported performance partnership types, including Card-Linked Offers within Performance. Introduced greater flexibility on contract management via Scheduled Terms and enhanced tracking efficacy through enhanced mobile app deep-linking, where a brand can capture higher-intent customers who convert at two to three times the rate of a social app’s browser. Also improved the marketplace partner discovery experience across the platform, making it easier to find, compare, and select partners based on demographic, engagement, performance, size, and relevance.
- Expanded senior leadership team in North America welcoming SVP, Sales, Justin Morrison, to lead the sales and revenue organization, AVP, Enterprise Sales, Rush Williams, and AVP, Solutions Consulting, Angela Gann.
- Released research including the 2024 Mother’s Day consumer trends report, which showed that many shoppers planned ahead and took advantage of deals leading up to the holiday this year rather than decrease their spending. More transactions and lower average order values (AOV) suggest more shoppers may have purchased from multiple retailers this year, too. The 2024 Mid-Year Consumer Trend research study of partner sites — including content reviews, loyalty sites, networks, and deal sites — looks at trends from 2023-2024 and uncovers which tactics work best for advertisers. The report shows that as more people shop online, partner sites are an increasingly important channel for advertisers. From reviews to loyalty and deals, advertisers benefit when they get in front of consumers during their online purchase journey.
- Recognized by several leading industry awards including being named the #1 Best Affiliate Program by HubSpot on its list of top 50 affiliate programs, featured as a 25 Best Instagram Marketing Platform and 23 Best Click Fraud Software by CMO.com, nominated by the Influencer Marketing Show Awards for success with client Ellos, and impact.com Managing Director EMEA, Florian Gramshammer, was named to Performance Marketing World’s PMW 100 Powerlist 2024.
- The Partnership Economy podcast, halfway through its fifth season, recently surpassed 250K+ downloads. Notable recent episodes feature guests including Jeanette Okwu, CEO of BeyondInfluence, and Dan Armstrong, EVP of Distributed Commerce at Ticketmaster.
- Developed the Agency Coaching Program, which transforms how impact.com partners with new agencies, fostering long-term partnerships and driving mutual success. The program helps agencies new to affiliate marketing by guiding them through the basics rapidly so they can roll out new services and boost their revenues faster.
- Relaunched the impact.com referral program and affiliate programs, with new landing pages on the impact.com website and an email campaign, explaining the benefits of working with impact.com, in order to recruit new referral and affiliate partners.
More information on the company’s momentum can be found at impact.com.
