Agency Partner Spotlight: Affiliate Marketing Partners

Our Partner Spotlight series interviews experts from our killer network of agency partners and highlights their impact in the field of partner marketing. 

This month, we caught up with Jessica Robinson, Founder of AMP. 

Jessica has been in the affiliate marketing industry for 14+ years. The majority of her time has been spent in-house managing programs across DTC, B2B, retail and finance brands. As the former Head of Affiliates at PayPal, Jessica managed PayPal’s global affiliate program across their portfolio. 

In 2023, Jessica had the opportunity to consult on a Fintech start-up’s first dive into the affiliate channel and within a year, drove an 8x growth in revenue. That start-up was AMP’s first client and when another large opportunity presented itself, she decided to leave PayPal to focus on growing AMP. Now, AMP boosts a larger roster of clients on both the advertiser and publisher side of the industry and a full team to assist in program management and growth. 

Q: How did you get started in the world of affiliate/partner marketing? 

Well, like most folks in this industry, my route to affiliate marketing was not a straightforward one! I actually graduated from college with a degree in Music Industry and was looking forward to growing my career in that field. I worked at a few booking agencies and venue promoters getting paid next to nothing and decided that I wanted to get paid more than practically minimum wage + free concert tickets! 

A friend of mine was working at a call center for a DTC company. It was THE worst job of all time, but their marketing team had a role for an Affiliate Marketing Coordinator. I decided to apply, Googled “what is affiliate marketing” days before the interview and somehow got the job. I also met my husband at that company, so while taking those calls was BRUTAL, I walked away with a career in affiliate marketing and my husband, so it wasn’t all bad :-) 

After leaving that company, I went on to work at AWeber, QVC and finally PayPal which is where I was prior to starting AMP.

Q: Why should a brand consider working with an affiliate marketing agency? 

This is a business built on relationships. There is a lot of noise in the affiliate space and if you don’t know what you are doing, you can make major costly mistakes. Affiliate marketing agencies know who the right partners are and how to reach them. Almost more importantly, we know who to NOT partner with and who could potentially cause a reputational risk to your business.

Affiliate marketing agencies are often very analytical which is important across the marketing landscape, but particularly key in this space. The goal isn’t just to onboard a ton of partners sending clicks. Brands want quality conversions that fit at or below their CAC goals and are additive to their overall portfolio. 

Lastly, agencies speak the language of affiliate marketing. We know what is important to your brand and to your affiliate partners. We analyze placement opportunities and partner performance to make sure we are making the most of each partnership in a program. A good agency should have a pulse on your vertical and be able to share insights into key stats and partnerships to keep your program competitive and attractive to new partners resulting in overall channel growth. 

Q: What is AMP? 

We are a full-service, white-glove affiliate marketing agency specializing in the Finance and Fintech verticals. A lot of agencies claim to be white glove, but we truly are. Some of our largest clients have us fully onboarded to their ecosystem so our team can access internal tools. Others have had us present new strategies to their leadership teams. We’ve pitched new capabilities to internal product teams on behalf of our clients and helped to design internal reporting dashboards as well. 

We are VERY hands on. 

Q: What makes AMP so innovative? What sets you apart from the competition? 

We have extensive experience in our vertical which is often an underserved or less understood vertical in the affiliate industry. Managing Finance programs requires a deeper understanding of regulatory challenges, quality metrics and compliance requirements. We also have deep relationships with key partners in this vertical making many launches turnkey. 

AMP hand-holds clients through platform set-ups creating technical documentation along the way. We build out custom dashboards for each of our brands and create promotional material to better expose them to new partners.

One of the more interesting things about AMP though is that we operate on both sides of the affiliate relationship. Many of our brands are mainly app-based or have a large app component. They have a built in, engaged user base that visits their app regularly. 

It’s the perfect opportunity to monetize that member base by presenting relevant content and complimentary products that would be additive to members’ lives. We facilitate and manage those relationships for our brands all on a 100% pay-per-performance model. 

Q: What types of brands do you work with? 

95% of our portfolio is in the Finance and/or Fintech verticals. We work with companies of all sizes, from start-ups to multi-billion dollar legacy financial institutions. 

Q: How does AMP typically work with Everflow clients? 

AMP loves using Everflow to manage our brand and publisher accounts. We work with a lot of media buyers, so the data and tracking capabilities within the platform make it the preferred platform for a lot of our partners. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve told an affiliate that the program was on Everflow and the response has been “great! We love Everflow”. The flexibility you have created here is really special.

We also do a lot of work to ensure quality is up to standards in our programs (particularly lead gen clients) so we apply a lot of automations to help us. From offer caps during testing periods to applying traffic exclusions to make sure we aren’t counting conversions that we would have to manually reject otherwise–makes our lives a lot easier. 

Q: Please share a recent client success story. 

Here are two great case studies from our clients. Of course after speaking to our experience in the Financial vertical, one features our only eCommerce client, Ryder Toys, but it’s also a great story and win for the team. 

FloatMe revenue increase: https://www.affiliatemarketingpartners.co/ampcasestudies/floatmecasestudy 

Ryder Toys program growth: https://www.affiliatemarketingpartners.co/ampcasestudies/rydercasestudy 

Q: What is one unexpected opportunity for brands to scale up their partner marketing efforts? 

A lot of brands are starting to better understand the affiliate model and are more willing to test into co-marketing relationships than ever before. We love Brand to Brand partnerships because of the added legitimacy it gives especially to new brands and because of the seamless way to get your brand in front of highly relevant, captive audiences. 

Historically, these partnerships were large lifts managed by enterprise partnership teams, but leverage affiliate rails through platforms like Everflow make for a much quicker go-to-market experience.