Joshua Chin 9:20
Now, it sounds like you’re saying some guardrails around what’s what’s okay and what’s okay for an affiliate to do. And it’s it sounds like a lot to get into from, here are the keywords that you should not bid against your are the channels that you should not you should veer away from what’s on day one. On day one. What should I have before clicking launch?
Dominick Keenan 9:49
That’s a That’s a good question. So I would even say before day one, I would take the view that they should See it as an additional channel and that no, no additional channel is free. You know, if you said with your business, like I’m really good at YouTube, but I’m going to get into Facebook marketing. It’s it’s not cost free, it’s not without investment. So keep that in mind. For a lot of businesses, it’s a really valuable channel to get into because it provides a lot of scale and a lot of distribution and channels that the business owner may not be an expert in or have staff that’s an expert in. So I would say mindset first. But then beyond that, establish what you want to protect and how you want your brand viewed. So most most of our sellers will have affiliate tools pages. And in those in those cells, there’s quite a bit that goes into an affiliate tools page. And we can walk through that. But there is should be always terms and conditions that the sellers setting out. And that’s where you would put like, hey, no, no keyword bidding, no promotion on Facebook. And I would say those those types of things. I would put them based on what you’re already competent at, because you don’t want to increase competition there. But you were asking, you know, on day one to hit go. I would have that. That affiliate tools page set up so that people, the affiliates know what they’re promoting. And the affiliate tools page would include copy email, copies, swipe images, expectations on how they’re allowed to promote and also collect the the affiliates contact info so that you can stay in touch with them, say you’re using ClickBank and you decide ClickBank is not the best business for you, whatever affiliate network you’re using, you don’t want the contact info for all those affiliates to go away, right, you want to be able to talk to them. So make sure you get the contact info. Also the if you’re using a funnel style sales page, I would diagram that funnel out and show exactly what’s in it. And the links to the pages, the price points for those for those products on those pages, and the conversion rates and then the average order value. So in ClickBank upsells are post purchase. So an affiliates interested in what they see in your sales pages. If they want to see the whole funnel, they have to go in and buy it a couple of times because they would have to go see all the upsells and down cells. And that’s that’s a pretty come outside of the money. That’s a pretty cumbersome thing to do. And you’re just going to get some refunds that come through from affiliates do, they’re gonna see the page anyway, just link to the page and show them what they’re what they’re promoting, they can promote better so that the message is consistent all the way through the first click to the end of the funnel. And transparency works really well with these guys and ease of use. And then lastly, I’d say if you can do it, get a good affiliate manager and a lot of people confuse an affiliate manager with somebody who’s just calculating conversions making payouts, they spent a lot of time in spreadsheets and sending money via PayPal, right? Well, at least for us and several other affiliate networks like us, we take care of all of that. So turn that affiliate manager and as somebody, their job is to maintain relationships, make sure they know, hey, we’ve got a big promotion coming up, I need to call these 30 affiliates and make sure they’re aware of it. Particularly if you have email affiliates, their promotional calendars are scheduled the ways out. Make sure they’re working with phones, they have a good relationship with it. I tell you know, I, I tell our account managers and affiliate managers and same thing for your most valuable clients, you should know when their birthday is and what’s their favorite kind of bourbon and you know, their wives having a kid make sure you send something. So I would establish those types of relationships where you’re always top of mind for those people. Going back to the affiliate page and the affiliate manager, oftentimes people are just gonna want to get in touch with them right away. So put their name, I would put a headshot all their contact info right at the top, just make it as easy and transparent as possible. So that’s the affiliate page part of getting ready on day one. The other thing when it comes to day one, I would make sure that that sales funnel that affiliate traffic funnel that that you’ve got ready is tested and optimized for affiliate traffic. Testing with affiliate traffic is a really good way to not get any more affiliate traffic and test it beforehand so that you’re setting reasonable expectations for those affiliates as they come through.
Joshua Chin 14:55
It Now you talked a little bit about having a good affiliate manager And that was actually top of mind. For me, one of the things that I think about when scale scaling a brand is that at the beginning, the founder entrepreneur slash operator would probably do all the things that you’ve just mentioned. But eventually, we’ll probably have to build a team in the function department around affiliate marketing as a, as a sales channel. What does it team look like, over time? And at scale? Is it just still one affiliate lounger that can scale from six figures to seven figures to eight figures as a channel? What does that look like?
Dominick Keenan 15:41
I yeah, I mean, some of the bigger brands we work with have multiple affiliate managers and they tend to break out by Channel. Okay, you know, somebody managing specifically Facebook affiliates, because they’re very familiar with the challenges they work with, but backing up to kind of when the founder decides that they need to have somebody else bring this on. There’s a lot of people that work on contract, kind of think of like a fractional affiliate manager, they’re well connected. And I would reach reach out into the community into the connections. I mean, if you went to like traffic and conversion or affiliate summit and just started asking around, hey, I need an affiliate, you know, part time affiliate manager, you probably end up with about 30 leads. Right? There’s, there’s other people in the community, like, if you’re familiar with Amber spears and her traffic tribe program, she does a phenomenal job with this and kind of the community that she’s built up around. They’re just some of the best people when it comes to affiliate management. So that’s where I would not post a job listing on a job board and grab one I would certainly look for for references within the direct response community.
Joshua Chin 17:01
Is that the best way to when it comes to hiring a team or on a fillip marketing? Is that, is that what you found to be the best way to find good talent just tapping into the network in the community?
Dominick Keenan 17:14
Yeah, absolutely. It, Josh, it probably has been more benefit. Like I hired some phenomenal people. And I don’t know, 40 or 50 people over the past several years. But it’s also kept me from making some really serious mistakes, people that looked phenomenal on paper, they were great in their interview, you know, reach out to the community and realize, Oh, this isn’t gonna work. Right. So I would say that part was actually more beneficial in the long run than then hiring, hiring the right people.
Joshua Chin 17:54
Right, I just want to unpack that a little bit, because I think people just don’t realize how harmful having the wrong person the wrong seat is for your organization. Um, but yeah, I can definitely appreciate that.
Dominick Keenan 18:11
Yeah, it’s, we’ve, we’ve kind of just a side tangent, if you don’t mind on, on hiring people spend a lot of time doing this. So myself and in the directors that I work with, we all work together for five years. And I think back on how we first interviewed people, and you know, this kind of a brief conversation and well, did you like them? Oh, yeah, I did. And now it’s, it’s more of one, an initial interview. And it’s pretty standardized questions. You know, tell us about your career and all that type. And then we send them exercises. So one requires like, a little bit of reading to answer a hypothetical email from a client, right, so that they answer the question properly. But what we’re looking for is can they find it’s actually pretty easy to find the answer, but can they find the answer in the material we provided? And can they formulate a good email back out? It’s friendly, but informative and not too long on? Is I’ve had plenty of people that say, No, client, you’re wrong. Sincerely, so and so ClickBank, you know, that’s, that’s not going to work. And then we also send them an exercise that includes some calculations on like, average order value, or what commission you should pay this affiliate, if you want to hit this certain metric. It’s not that they need to get it right. They’re actually pretty tough questions to solve. It’s just that we need to know that there’s someone analytical that they can use excel at least a little bit. And then the last step of the interview process is if if they’re, if they’re not in town, they’re close by we’ll fly him into town, but we just take them out. for a drink or an appetizer, and really what we’re looking for there is we want to see how they treat the waitstaff. Are they pleasant to them? You know, do they say thank you? Do they? Do they drink too much I’ve had this happen where it’s we all know going into it, me and my coworkers, we’re going to have one drink. If that person drinks three or four drinks to our one drink? Well, you know, we do a lot of events and in person stuff. So that that makes me a little more cautious about hiring a person.
Joshua Chin 20:32
It’s the thing that’s really interesting. What’s your favorite question to ask during a verbal interviewing going on assessment
Dominick Keenan 20:41
is so we ask. I hope nobody listening to this podcast ends up interviewing because it’ll blow my cover on this question. But we ask people to tell us a story about their best boss. And everybody has some story, right? And that that’s actually I don’t particularly care about the answer to that question. But it sets up the question, tell me about your worst boss, and what we’re looking for. And that question is not the answer. Most people have some terrible story. But whether they have discretion, so if they say, My worst boss worked at this particular place, and his name was Steve, and Steve’s a jerk, because of this, I that makes me question their discretion. Instead, we want to say, Oh, back when I was in high school, I worked at a fast food restaurant and the boss was kind of a jerk. So that’s, that’s my favorite answer. And you get pretty, some pretty wild answers to that question. There’s some really terrible bosses out there, I can tell you that much.
Joshua Chin 21:49
thing that, like when you’re hiring for an affiliate manager or related role, you’re you’re looking for just general EQ, and people management type of just relationship management skills. Is that accurate to say?
Dominick Keenan 22:07
Yeah, relationship first, for sure. They, you know, that kind of going back to that we want them to know, when’s their birthday? And what’s their favorite kind of bourbon in their favorite restaurant, but that’s not quite enough. Because sometimes they are going to get those technical questions like, Hey, why is my commission amount X dollars? Yeah. And they need to be able to answer that or know somebody inside your organization who they can get that answer from. But they don’t have to be, you know, an accountant level spreadsheet person, which is people who are managing, managing smaller affiliate programs on their own are just kind of dipping their toe in it, it kind of goes to one of the accounting people who, yeah, just figure out how much we owe these people and send them money via PayPal, it’s pretty interesting. I had read a stat the other day, that it’s something like 78% of affiliate payments are still sent via PayPal. So there’s a lot of that, that goes out there where affiliate managers are just basically glorified accountants.
Joshua Chin 23:12
Right, I see. Um, now let’s talk a little bit of affiliate marketing as a, as a channel for ecommerce, their consumer brands, what type of brands would this work for? And other categories of products that just wouldn’t pan out? Well?
Dominick Keenan 23:34
Yeah, so on the ones that wouldn’t pan out? Well, I would say those that are hyper niche or don’t have broad distribution, tend to not do well. I got one a couple of weeks ago, that was an air compressor for welders. And it was like $5,000 Wow, you know, I’m sure it’s a great air compressor, but it’s not it’s not not broad enough appeal generally. So we don’t don’t dip into that. For ClickBank itself. We were pretty heavy in the in the health and fitness space. So we work with a lot of supplement brands. And in the in the supplement space of branded, branded consumables, there’s a lot of business that ends up occurring an ecommerce cart, so or I should say, like a Shopify style cart, where you go to the go to the web page, and there’s 15 different options, all these different flavors. And then as you scroll down the page, it’s kind of like, Oh, here’s the link to our blog, read our founding story. Here’s the link to our Twitter and Instagram and all of that. You know, that converts well with people that are seeking out your brand are already familiar with it or the customers appears. So, for ClickBank we talk about affiliates as a channel to acquire customers for that. And it’s typically what I describe as a three legged stool you have your Shopify or ecommerce Store that’s, you know, very traditional ecommerce Store. And then affiliates can direct traffic at a ClickBank or direct response style, single SKU funnel, which the goal is to break even and acquire customers. And as you your affiliates are going to notice that that single SKU direct response style funnel converts much much better than sending somebody to a Shopify style ecommerce store. Because the problem with the Shopify thing is particularly if it’s cold traffic, you’re gonna have all kinds of people clicking out right, like, they’re gonna read your blog, and then they’re gonna click on Twitter, and then they’re going to get distracted by what’s trending on Twitter, and they’re not going to convert, and all of us lose out. So a lot of those brands are viewing ClickBank or their affiliate side as customer acquisition. Most of them are profitable, but not that channel is profitable, but not as profitable as their Shopify store. And then they will, now that the customer is familiar with your brand and hopefully likes your product, then they’ll be market to that customer and direct them to the Shopify store where, you know, if they go click on your blog, or go start reading your Twitter, it’s not like they’re gonna forget about your brand. They’re, they’re already a customer that likes you. And then lastly, the third leg of that stool is, at least here in the States is Amazon. Amazon has such a massive presence, by my wife’s a great example of this, if it’s not available on Amazon, she’s not buying it. She’s addicted to this Prime shipping thing. And a lot of the brands that we’re working with realize that on Amazon, as I’m sure your listeners are probably familiar with, you don’t get the customer information, and you don’t get the opportunity to upsell them. So no upsells no remarketing. So the brands that we’re working with are charging more on Amazon, it has two effects one, hopefully it directs them back to your store, so you can get their contact info and remarket to them. If it doesn’t, then you’re going to capture a higher amount, or a higher day one value out of that customer on Amazon, because there’s not ever going to be any more days of value, right, there’s no day three value because they’re not, they’re not not able to be remarketed to. So all three of those together tend to work pretty well.
Joshua Chin 27:53
When it comes to two brands with multiple multiple SKUs and many, many skews, save, for example, fashion as a category fashion, specifically fast fashion. I presumably that wouldn’t work all that well, because there isn’t a single product that we could feed people into. Um, would you agree or is there work run around? on that?
Dominick Keenan 28:26
You know, I’m, I’m sure there is. I haven’t seen one work on ClickBank at scale. And so I’m talking about, you know, several $100,000 A day in sales. I have seen some fashion brands, particularly T shirts that are around really hot button subjects, oftentimes, at least here in the States oftentimes, you know, right around election time. Yeah, those tend to do very well, but they’re sporadic because there’s typically not enough margin to pay an affiliate a lot of money to drive that, that traffic. So it has to convert at a really high rate. And since it has converted a really high rate, it tends to have to be fairly aggressive or divisive or polarizing. You know, I see. Like Maga hats, we don’t sell these but here in the States, people either love it or hate it right. And so they’re they’re gonna buy it or click out. So fashion in general, not so much. And I did see a couple of weeks ago a really, really interesting business. It was a t shirt business that has a bunch of unique designs and they’re only available for either a day or a week. I think it was a week and something like 10 or $12 for a T shirt fulfill and the the problem with that is if you’re trying to get affiliates to promote it, there has to be enough meat on the bone for affiliates to be able to make money For the Facebook ads or email, whatever it may be, so at $12 for a T shirt, you’ve got the cost of goods sold the shirt, you know, maybe four or five bucks the printing whoever designed it, the fulfillment and then all of your overhead there’s really nothing left for for an affiliate whereas on on the supplement side or a higher margin product you may have a day one cart value of 250 bucks and then $100 in cost of goods sold so you can use a lot of the rest of the funds for customer acquisition or affiliate commission
Joshua Chin 30:39
that’s is there an AOV range that you um, that that you would say is the sweet spot for product to to work really well?
Dominick Keenan 30:49
I so AOV. It would be better to look at affiliate commission. Okay. Where we’re seeing affiliates attain really high scale with an offer keep in mind ClickBank is about half its affiliate traffic is about half paid media and half email. So some stuff works a little different on email, because you don’t you don’t have the hard cost but in general to attain scale with paid media. And our affiliate mix needs to be somewhere over $100 in in commission 110 with a 1% conversion rate 1% or greater. At that point. I say those types of offers go into orbit like they people see them other media buyer see them. And the whole thinking is well if he’s promoting it must be working. So I’ll give it a shot. And you kind of have this multiplier effect that takes off.
Joshua Chin 31:49
Makes sense. Gotcha. Um, no, tell me, what are some of the brands that you could that we could reference to when it comes to affiliate marketing and doing a flea market really well.
Dominick Keenan 32:05
So so some of the best Organifi sigh is green juice powder, they’ve migrated recently to an ambassador program but imagine some of their pages are still a phenomenal affiliate program I they actually launched their affiliate program about eight months after I started at ClickBank and just love working with those guys Mindful Health or Danette May Supplements is another one that has done very very well and they you’ll see they have a quite a bit of their funnels on Clickbank quite a bit off ClickBank and ecommerce environment they do a very good job at that business. A good friend of mine runs a company called Peak Biome that has employed the same strategy I would take a look at all of those Peak Biome is not on ClickBank but they do have really very good converting converting funnels that are we’re taking a look at.
Joshua Chin 33:04
By gotcha is that get biome.com?
Dominick Keenan 33:08
I would guess so. Yeah.
Joshua Chin 33:10
Right. Okay.
Dominick Keenan 33:13
Okay. Sorry. I can’t remember the URL. I’ll stop my head.
Joshua Chin 33:17
Yeah, I’m just looking at the sites and that should be it. So you mentioned Organifi, that’s organifishop.com, Mindful Health. And get PeakBiome.com. Yeah, I’m looking at your page. And it definitely looks like a super optimized. Single Page. Single Product lander. Yeah.
Dominick Keenan 33:43
The owner Peak Biome is a he’s brilliant. And one of the most precise when it comes to data and optimization. And one of the best marketers I’ve worked with. I know I’ve gone to him and I didn’t realize my numbers were wrong. And he knew right away came a little bit of an uncomfortable conversation. Fortunately, he and I are pretty good friends. So we worked it out. But I just love seeing that stuff. That’s so well optimized. It kind of goes back to it’s great to work with entrepreneurs, but he’s Yeah, he’s he’s a he’s a brilliant marketer.
Joshua Chin 34:22
What’s the what’s the worst fire that you have to deal with in your seven year career with with ClickBank? Anything that comes up?
Dominick Keenan 34:34
My pleasure. I’m trying to think of the worst fire yeah to learn from i i have seen it. This has happened with two clients of mine when I was working. Working in account management where ClickBank The tool that you use to set affiliate commissions used to be really complicated. There was three different places that could actually change the commission amount that was paid to an affiliate. And they tested things, they didn’t quite understand that one thing was overriding the other and so they’ve overpaid commissions to affiliates for quite a while, for like, eight or nine months, and we’ve done some in depth reporting for them. And, and they were like, Oh, I didn’t realize that. Fortunately, and because of those issues, we’ve completely redone that. So it’s all controlled in one place. But it’s kind of it’s a you know, it’s always disappointing to go to a client and say, I kind of set this up wrong here and you know, cost you cost you a little bit of money. So that’s that’s probably probably the worst worst fire I’ve ever put out here.
Joshua Chin 35:22
Okay. I’ll you know it with these things with with tools, replacing what used to be mental work and hopefully, making lives a little bit better. The pitfall of doing that is that we often don’t see the processes that go behind the scenes of bringing an outcome that we that we want to have. What’s, what’s your advice around? And because ClickBank is building a ton of different tools to enable merchants and affiliates to do their best work? What’s your advice for people new to the space coming in? Navigating the whole ecosystem? What’s the best way to approach that?
Dominick Keenan 36:44
Yeah, there’s so whether it’s ClickBank or any other tool out there, of course, they’re trying to market their tool, we are trying to mark our platform, all of that and they try to shed the best possible light on it, I would just say test the hell out of everything. Make sure just like the, you know, misapplied commissions we were just talking about, make sure it’s doing what you think it’s going to be doing. I had just had a conversation with a client who also uses a another platform in conjunction with ClickBank. So it really quick inside of ClickBank. Since we process all the transactions, we also collect all the sales are VAT tax, and we pay all of that on behalf of the sellers. And so this client was trying to replicate this off ClickBank in this ecommerce card, it might have even been Shopify, and they had this plug in, that was supposed to do the same thing. This has become a much bigger deal here in the United States because of a recent Supreme Court ruling. And these tools are all trying to catch up because the Supreme Court really made it so that everybody has to pay sales tax in every state regardless of where you live. And they thought that it was a calculating it, putting it on the order form collecting it and paying it to the individual states. Similar to what ClickBank does. What it was doing was it was calculating it. But it didn’t put it on the order form. So they didn’t collect it from the customer. And it certainly didn’t pay it to the States but it sent the reporting to the state saying hey, this person owes that state that much money. That’s a that’s a real terrible thing to happen. But even on the smaller tools, you know, the cost of those things can add up really quick. So make sure it’s doing what you what you think it’s going to would be would be my advice.
Joshua Chin 38:43
Fantastic. Dominick, thank you so much for people listening and interested in connecting with you and learning more about ClickBank and what you do. Where’s the best way to get in touch?
Dominick Keenan 38:53
Yeah, so if you want to see if your stuff is going to work on affiliate marketing, check out clickbank.com/podcast got a form there and we’ll we’ll certainly get in touch. We’re also really active on social media, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, all of that stuff. To connect with me directly. it the easiest is actually LinkedIn.
Joshua Chin 39:14
So yeah, Dominick Keenan Dominick with K at the end. Keenan that’s KEENAN. And as usual links will be in the show notes. You can go to chronos.agency/podcast to find out more. Dominick, thank you so much. I’ve learned a ton, and I’m sure our listeners have.
Dominick Keenan 39:37
Yeah, thank you Josh. Appreciate it.
Outro 39:42
Thanks for listening to the eCommerce Profits Podcast. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click Subscribe to get notified of future episodes.
