April Agency Spotlight: JEBCommerce

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

This month, we caught up with Jake Fuller, CEO at JEBCommerce.

Jake started his career in digital marketing back in 2010 with Integrate.com, where his experience focused on affiliate marketing efforts, lead generation, and holistic digital marketing strategies. From there, Jake spent a short time at a digital marketing agency as the Director of Business Development, which led to the founding of his first company, RefinedLeads. For five years, Jake worked heavily in the finance, insurance, and home improvement verticals with several affiliate partnerships and owned offers until he had a private exit in late 2019.  

Starting in 2020, during the pandemic, Jake was brought in to lead JEBCommerce in a new direction as the Director of Business Development. After three years, he stepped in as CEO and, shortly after, acquired the business from its founder, Jamie Birch. 

Jake is now the CEO and Co-Owner of JEBCommerce - focused on driving the agency forward and continuing the industry leading agency practices and thought leadership that they’ve always been known for. 

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

When I first started in digital marketing, back around 2010, at a company called Integrate, I didn’t know anything about affiliate marketing. I had to quickly learn about how brand’s utilize paid search, affiliate marketing, email marketing, and display or programmatic. This helped me better understand how brand’s lean on several channels within their digital strategy, and I naturally gravitated towards the affiliate space during my time there.

As they say, it’s all history after that. From starting my first business to taking over as Co-Owner and CEO of JEBCommerce, I’ve always kept my focus in the affiliate marketing space and have always enjoyed the relationship-based effort that makes this channel work!

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

There are many reasons why a brand should consider working with a reputable affiliate agency. That said, not everyone needs to or may be ready to.

Brands need to take a quick inventory of their internal team, experience, bandwidth, and overall understanding of the affiliate channel before making the decision to outsource. We actually wrote a great article, 5 Reasons You Should Outsource Your Affiliate Program, that covers this exact topic and explores the reasons why you should, or should not, hire an affiliate agency. 

Q: What is JEB Commerce?

JEBCommerce is an affiliate marketing agency/OPM. We’ve been specializing directly in affiliate program management and strategy since 2004.  

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

I think one main reason we stand out is due to our unwavering focus on the affiliate channel and industry best practices over the past 20 years. We don’t try to offer services through other channels or break away from what makes us who we are. JEB has always had a heavy focus on data-driven strategy and processes, accountability, craftsmanship, and partnership as core values that help us truly understand our client’s needs and how we can assist them in achieving their goals within the channel.

These values are what we use when hiring, training, and developing our account managers and working with our amazing clients. 

Q: What types of brands do you work with?

We work with a large variety of brands, though our focus has always been on DTC brands with more limited experience in B2B.

We offer a unique, tiered service and pricing plan so that we can identify our client’s true needs, which allows us to work with SMB brands all the way to Fortune 500 companies. Our vertical specialties typically include travel, health/wellness, beauty/fashion, and EDU. 

Q: Please share a recent client success story.

We love highlighting client success stories at JEB. In fact, we have a great resource on our site and release mini-case studies every month that are directly related to recent client wins. You can find all of those here on our website.

A recent win during this past Q4 included a strategy to activate and recruit new partners for a client we have in the backpack/accessory vertical in their EMEA regions, keeping in mind that we couldn’t lean on any approved placement budgets (in Q4, this isn’t easy). The program not only outperformed expectations but also outperformed all other channels for the quarter to end the year strong.

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

I love this question. You can pull so many levers to start optimizing and scaling an affiliate program that I could take way too much time answering this question. You’re asking for one so here we go.  

One opportunity that many of our clients have never taken time to consider or test prior to our relationship with them is to offer something a bit more unique than your competition. By offering CPC to select partners or even a bonus that is based on an important KPI, you can entice more affiliate partners to optimize or join your program that they may not otherwise have. This is just one of many quick ways you can stand out and build interest in your program. 

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