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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 Lacie Thompson, the Chief Growth Officer at New Engen, a digital marketing agency servicing 120+ household name brands, Fortune 500 companies, and industry disruptors.
Lacie is an entrepreneur whose background in corporate and agency spaces alike inspired her to start her own business venture. In 2018, she founded LT Partners, an affiliate marketing agency that sat at the forefront of some of the industry’s most transformational changes of the last five years. New Engen acquired LT Partners in 2022, and Lacie’s affiliate expertise, leadership, and overall digital marketing savvy have been integral to New Engen’s industry-leading, full-funnel brand and performance offering.
Q: How did you get started in the world of affiliate/partner marketing?
I was working at a hotel company and had started researching innovative marketing strategies, which led me to forge partnerships with boutique airlines and theaters. Eventually, I saw an opportunity to join Blue Nile in an affiliate marketing role and decided to apply, despite knowing virtually nothing about the channel outside of what I’d learned from searching through Google. I was able to share the portfolio of partnerships I had built through my position with the hotel company and was brought on to lead Blue Nile’s affiliate marketing program.
Q: Why should a brand consider working with an affiliate marketing agency?
Affiliate or partner marketing is very misunderstood by those who haven’t worked in the industry. Although it can seem straightforward at first glance, there are countless complexities that you can only fully understand by working in the space (and making mistakes along the way).
Agencies come to the table with the expertise and strategy needed to ramp up quickly and find success long-term. Every brand will have its own unique set of considerations to make when choosing partners, and the advantage of working with an agency is that they have the ability to build bespoke strategies across a range of verticals. Plus, agencies that effectively leverage their data and resources will have established connections with thousands of publishers, which makes it easier for affiliate efforts to efficiently scale.
Agencies can also draw upon data from across an entire portfolio to offer pertinent insights around incrementality, analytics, and partner potential. Finally, brands that partner with agencies offering services across a variety of channels (like the AOR model, for example) can benefit from invaluable data sharing across teams.
Q: What is New Engen?
New Engen is a digital marketing agency driving impact for brands across every phase of the customer journey—maximizing it, measuring it, and repeating it. Through a genuine passion for building brands, a relentless desire to challenge the status quo, and deep digital expertise across hundreds of brands and verticals, we put our clients on the cutting edge of what’s possible in digital marketing.
New Engen, which manages approximately $1 billion in annual ad spend, received the 2022 Google Premier Partner of the Year Award for driving online sales, is an Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing Company, an Adweek Fastest Growing Agency, and has been named to Inc.'s 2022 Best in Business list. We also recently joined forces with Acorn Influence and LT Partners, adding influencer and partner marketing to the agency’s capabilities. Learn more at www.newengen.com.
Q: What makes New Engen so innovative? What sets you apart from the competition?
New Engen built a proprietary tool, LIFT, which normalizes data across all affiliate platforms and matches it with data from Google Analytics. Using our proprietary LIFT scoring system, clients are better able to find, evaluate, and negotiate with publishers.
The platform also provides comprehensive insights on placement and publisher performance, based on key metrics like revenue, conversion rates, ROAS, and more. Plus, LIFT users have visibility into the revenue and traffic performance of today’s top publishers and channels.
Q: What types of brands do you work with?
Our client portfolio spans industries, including active lifestyles, health and wellness, beauty, travel and luxury, and fintech. Check out some of the brands we work with on the New Engen homepage.
Q: How does New Engen typically work with Everflow clients?
We create bespoke solutions for our clients to ensure we can meet each individual business need. We have found ways to leverage our platform partners to ensure incremental value and bring true cross-channel consideration to our affiliate tactics and performance. We genuinely love finding the right solution for each client’s unique goals.
Q: What is one unexpected opportunity for brands to scale up their partner marketing efforts?
There are so many that it’s hard to pick just one. Opportunities will ultimately depend on a brand’s target audience and where their customers encounter affiliate content (out of the many places this can happen).
Generally speaking, though, I think there’s a huge opportunity to leverage partners’ third-party validation through additional paid media channels. Brands may be able to unlock a more performant approach by combining the cost of paid media distribution with affiliate commission instead of running paid media on their own, which, more often than not, results in much higher conversion rates.
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