Michael's Thoughts On This Chat
Want to build a high value affiliate program? Studying B2B affiliate programs like HubSpot provides better lessons towards scaling healthy partnerships.
eCommerce affiliate marketing earned itself a bad reputation, despite being one of the most cost effective and sustainable channels.
Misaligned incentives have encouraged managers to look the other way when coupon affiliates steal credit from other channels.
B2B affiliate programs aren't the same. They don't have the crutch of easily launched coupon affiliates nor the toxicity from the bad ones. They've thrived through high value slow-to-build partnerships with quality content affiliates.
It was an honor to get to sit down Daniela Kretchmer from HubSpot to learn more about how she built the B2B affiliate program for a massive company like HubSpot.
She shared one of her big goals for the year where she is already seeing massive success - building strategic partnerships.
She had a lot of smart things to say on this I hadn't considered, including: Introducing your best performing affiliates to strategic partners. The affiliate space is symbiotic - more money flowing to affiliates from specific verticals enables them scale up all of their promotions.
Strategic partnerships and referral partnerships is one of the reasons I'm bullish for Everflow's continued success.
The major affiliate marketing networks made the genius PR move of rebranding themselves as partner marketing ecosystems; however, the reality is that most 'partner programs' haven't evolved past working with the same batch of top affiliates.
Being able to go beyond traditional affiliates empowers affiliate managers to get promoted into leading all partnerships. The most effective way to make this happen is to onboard customers as referral partners and build out strategic partnerships.
Referrals will always be your highest quality source of customers. Combining referrals with the scale and cost-effectiveness of affiliate lets you become a superstar that manages the best performing channels.
This is where we at Everflow have a massive advantage by offering the platform instead of being a network: You can easily onboard your own relationships without a third party in the middle.
Successful B2B affiliate managers (and the best eCommerce affiliate managers) are masters at building powerful long-term content partnerships.
I'm excited to see how the role of the affiliate manager evolves when they can leverage onboarding more types of partners and track every channel with the right attribution rules.
To see the rest of the conversation:
One of the reason Daniela has had so much success building up HubSpot's affiliate program is she has a deep understanding of the affiliate partner's perspective and needs. She built this knowledge through her hands on experience launching our own affiliate website, focused on DIY crafting, which you can check out here: ABCrafty.com
Any thoughts on this topic or additional questions for our guest speakers? Share your thoughts by sending us an email at marketing@everflow.io.
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