SAM: [00:00:00] Hey Rob.

ROB: Hi Sam.

SAM: We've obviously been spending a lot of time talking about our Think Tank event in Portugal, and it made me think about when we were together in Chicago in 2024 for the US Think Tank event and some of the- I wanna say cultural differences that we experienced?

ROB: Gimme an example.

SAM: I was thinking about how you ordered a bottle of water one time and the waiter couldn't understand you.

ROB: Oh, okay. I think I know where you're going with this. This is the whole water, water.

SAM: Water, water. And I remember you were like, oh, can I get a, oh, this is me debuting my British accent, but, oh, can I get a, a-

I can't do this with you looking at me, but, a bottle of water and- straight from Mary Poppins. And I was like, "He'll have a bottle of water."

ROB: Bottle of water.

SAM: A bottle of water.

ROB: Hey, I'm Rob. [00:01:00] And this is Sam.

SAM: Hi.

ROB: You are listening to Awin-Win Marketing Podcast.

SAM: On today's episode, join us for a candid conversation with OPM Agency, RevWise and their client alcohol retailer, The Bottle Club to see how the right people, partnerships and platform can breathe new life into a stagnant affiliate program.

Lot of Ps.

ROB: Hell of a lot. It's a great example of what's possible when a brand takes a fresh look at the affiliate channel and then brings in the right support to unlock its potential.

SAM: We dug into the common pitfalls that slowed down growth. Why consistent optimization matters, and how RevWise and The Bottle Club worked together to rebuild performance from the ground up.

ROB: So whether you're running an underperforming program or just curious at what smart strategic agency collaboration really looks like, this one's for you.

TIM: So we're a multi-brand alcohol retailer. We are basically selling everybody else's products. So there isn't so much about brand acquisition and top level brand stuff. It was all about trying to get people to see the products that they need.

SAM: That's Tim [00:02:00] Martin-Harvey, head of e-Commerce at The Bottle Club.

TIM: We had quite an off the shelf affiliate program beforehand. Originally we were on Webgains and then we moved over to Awin and just had a very basic platform. And then when we met RevWise, they went through the platform and just made us realize how much we were missing out. And we just thought, as a lot of people do when you're brand-side, see affiliates as like a lesser channel, not something you need to be focused on.

But yeah, I didn't realize how much we were missing out on.

SAM: Yeah. it's a great segue to these two gentlemen.

GARY: Well, that's really common as well because there's this break neck speed of kind of evolution happening in the affiliate industry, but it's catching brands off guard.

SAM: And that's Gary Winter, co-founder at RevWise.

GARY: And it doesn't matter if you're a household name brand, all the way down to SMEs, medium-sized brands - we're seeing this happening. Obviously some have been ahead of the curve, but most brands just started looking at the affiliate channel recently as a totally different beast.

JAMIE: Specifically in The Bottle Club's case, like, the brand was very well known, and yet we saw this program, which was very basic, and again, unfortunately that's commonplace, when we come across a brand or they come [00:03:00] to us and we audit their program.

SAM: Also with us is Jamie Brucey, co-founder at RevWise.

JAMIE: But, we knew the opportunity for changing the variety of the publisher mix and also going into new areas.

SAM: So if you can please describe the challenge that The Bottle Club was facing, and how did affiliate marketing help the brand solve that?

TIM: We've always relied on our C-P-C-C-P-I model. We've learned over the last year that it just wasn't in line with our business. And I think, brands like multi-brand retailers really need to be on a CPA model.

SAM: Can you explain for anyone who's not familiar, what like a CPC versus a CPA model is?

TIM: Yeah, for sure. So like Google Shopping is a cost per click. So regardless of you're actually converting your playing for the number of clicks that happen, and then you attribute that against the number of sales that you get, and then it levels itself out as a normal ROAs.

Then your CPI is your cost per impression or cost per CPM cost per milli, which is normally your Facebook, et cetera. But in both of those models, you are not paying for the sale. You are paying for the visibility of your brand. Which is great, if you're in a growth model, if you are trying to make yourself [00:04:00] really visible, it's really relevant. But we are selling everybody else's product, so people already know, have an intent about what they want, they know what they're looking for.

It's making sure that you are in the right places at the right time.

SAM: Yeah.

TIM: And as we go into this whole multi touch attribution period of time, I think you have to be on a CPA model. Because whatever the actual true contributor was, needs to be what's getting the share of the commission.

SAM: Yeah, absolutely.

And I know something you mentioned when we initially had a conversation was that The Bottle Club as a business was growing but not necessarily profitable. And how do you think this like CPA versus CPC model was maybe contributing to that?

TIM: If you are operating on a 10 ROAs, a 10% cost per acquisition, and our business, operates somewhere between 20 and 30% margins, quite low margin business. You need to look at what that cost is against the margin.

So we had crazy growth that came from Google Shopping. It came from, yeah, COVID was great for e-commerce and alcohol sales, and we luckily were in the position to be in both of those industries. So the growth was phenomenal.

But the problem was as you scale, you don't necessarily know what you need to be doing. So the warehouse was inefficient, the advertising was inefficient. We didn't know what we needed [00:05:00] to be focusing on because we weren't sure where we were gonna be or what the lockdown was gonna be, et cetera. So the growth was crazy, we did a really good job of maintaining the performance and the customer satisfaction of it. But by doing that, we didn't grow profitably.

When we finally realized what we're doing, we reduced revenue and we looked at our profitability as our focus. And I think revenue nowadays, unless you are a VC backed business and a growth business, revenue's a vanity metric. There's no point being a high revenue business if you've got no profit.

SAM: Yeah.

TIM: At the end of the day, even if you're VC, at some point, somebody's gotta pick up that bill because the person that buys that business has to pay off all the debt. So we're a profitability focused business. Then when we went and looked at what we were spending on the click and the impressions versus our actual revenue and the actual sales we were getting, it was just, it wasn't 10 ROAs.

And I think there's just so much incorrect attribution against that spend and the ROI is really poor.

SAM: So you had a program on Webgains, moved to Awin. Weren't really utilizing it to its full capacity. And so you've brought the RevWise gentleman on your left and your right on board. But really, what was it about the RevWise team and Jamie and Gary here that you were like, this is the partner to really help us [00:06:00] drive that forward momentum?

TIM: For sure. I think they are similar mentality to our business, they're hungry people. They see opportunities. And actually Gary made us very aware of the things that we were missing out on, all these opportunities, how basic the actual program was. And then as we've started growing together, the growth and the performance and then aligning with the kind of CPA mentality that we've got- it's just really been a perfect partnership.

GARY: Yeah, we've been going for just over two years.

But there's so many brands in that position where you just turn around one day and the founder says,

"What the hell? Where's our new wave affiliate program? Why do we have a program that's made up of the same old publishers that were around 10 plus years ago? When our competitor, I can see that they're out there, they've got all these long tail bloggers putting out recipes, cocktail recipes, doing partnerships. They've got influencers, they've got brand partnerships, they've got all these perk schemes."

And they look at their program and think, "What the hell is going on?"

And I think that's probably fair to say, you guys turned around and said, "Well hold on, we should start looking at this a bit closer."

TIM: Yeah.

GARY: It's basically doing a 10th of what it could do.

TIM: I think as well, like as a brand, affiliates is always synonymous with discounters, voucher codes, last click, [00:07:00] and all of the things that we think about are really owning that pre-purchase phase.

But actually affiliates is cross- yeah. Post-purchase is something we focus on massively. Point of purchase as well. And I was chatting to your CTO last night and I was saying that for the last five to 10 years of e-commerce, everyone's been focused on acquisition, acquisition, acquisition.

SAM: Yeah.

TIM: Actually, it's like a bucket. And if you've got a hole in your bucket and it's just pouring out of the bottom and you're not plugging that up, you're just topping it back up again. It's just a complete waste. And that's where this year actually we've turned off all of our CPI and CPC marketing and focus on CPA. Because what we wanna do is have that operating efficiently here, and then focus really on like nurturing the customer base that we've already achieved.

And that's where those other touch points and the other, really interesting sides of affiliates comes in and the long tail stuff and the post purchase.

SAM: Yeah, absolutely. I think as marketers, whether it's here or in previous jobs and past lives, we're also focused on getting that customer and then like, I don't wanna say forget, but like really in some ways forget what to do with 'em once we have them.

I think regardless, it fits like sometimes B2C or even like B2B to a certain extent. It's [00:08:00] once you have that sale for lack of a better turn, you're like, great, I've got it. I'm done. It's Actually there's still like a lot of nurturing that needs to happen there.

TIM: Yeah, for sure. And that's why I'm really excited about, Klaviyo's just done a new launch on Klaviyo CRM, which is, we all know what CRM is from a B2B model, but we don't really ever look at consumer level, or like normal retailing on a CRM level.

Like the amount of touchpoint we have in e-commerce is so impressive, but we don't necessarily utilize 'em effectively. That's something we've been spending the last year doing is pulling in as much data as possible, building really in depth segmentation on top of it, and then using it like that.

SAM: Gary, Jamie, I would imagine listening to Tim talk about how he's aware that affiliate is more than just like discount code and cashback partners, and it really is full funnel marketing. Is that a common experience you have with the clients that you work with? Or is this more of a unique perspective?

JAMIE: Yeah, it's great to have a, like-minded person. We are really working together and we both appreciate that affiliates can't work in a vacuum.

You need to consider the full marketing mix. So it's not just publisher types, but we need to consider what you're doing with [00:09:00] the other channels and how can we optimize what we are doing with the affiliates to help with those channels as well.

GARY: I remember when we first met, so it was probably a year and a half ago, Tim probably wasn't seeing and experiencing the things that he is now, but you had a hunch, and this is quite common to answer your question about, is it common?

SAM: Yeah.

GARY: It's common for brands to have a hunch and brand, and I say brands who haven't got a mature affiliate program that is getting the most out of every possible partner type is what I'm talking about. Those brands normally quite frustrated.

SAM: Yeah.

GARY: When we meet them and our sales and partnerships team are meeting dozens of brands every week and I see the same stuff coming up and, even some pretty big companies all the way down to smaller ones are frustrated with their program versus what they know is possible and they have a hunch, let's say that it could be better and then hopefully, turn that hunch into, okay, this is a reality now. The channel is doing all the things that we know it can do, and it's also never ending, which is great for us because we get to stay on board long term as their affiliate managers.

But it's a constant battle to bring on more new and better partnerships and [00:10:00] strategize around the channel, like you just said.

SAM: So when you walk into a prospecting meeting with brands, what is that pitch to be like affiliate is actually more than what you think it is.

GARY: Quite often what we see, and I'm being a bit generalizing here, but let's say 70 to 80% of the brands we meet, they say our affiliate program is not giving us value.

We just have partners that we feel are maybe extracting more value than they're giving us, and we're thinking about shutting the whole thing down, or we're thinking about doing this or doing that. And we've tried this, and this. And what we come on board to do is to keep what they have, improve it, but also build on top of it massively.

SAM: Yeah.

GARY: So that they are getting their fair share of value from the channel. They're giving loads of value back. They should be rewarding partners massively and investing more and more into the channel, but it should be a fair exchange of value. And quite often brands are giving more value than they're receiving and getting frustrated.

But it's not bad actors taking advantage, it's just there's not enough expertise yet. It's not kept up with the development of the channel. So the channel's exploded.

SAM: Yeah.

GARY: In the last sort of five to seven years, and there's not enough affiliate managers doing the right [00:11:00] stuff and putting in the unsexy legwork that is required to go and get those partnerships. So brands go round and round in circles getting frustrated.

SAM: Yeah.

ROB: Just interrupting Sam for a minute to tell you that Awin-Win Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Awin. Now you might be listening because you're an e-commerce retailer, struggling to grow your brand awareness, get more customers, generate additional sales or maintain your bottom line with marketing and advertising. Using the Awin platform, these challenges go away as you unlock unlimited pay on performance partnership opportunities, and promotional spaces that reach consumers everywhere.

Choose which affiliate partners best match your marketing objectives. Control your costs by defining how you pay these partners. And customize your affiliate marketing program using Awin's tech to mirror your unique goals, whatever they may be. Visit awin.com today. And start growing your own way with the Awin platform.[00:12:00]

SAM: We've got Tim, he's brought you two on board. He's laid out his goals, and I would just love to have a candid conversation with three of you of like, how did you tackle this? What did you do to bring in profit as much as growth and really shift to this like true CPA model.

JAMIE: One of the, our big hooks and what we are set up to do based on our resources and the people we have in the company is go after that long tail of content publishers.

So you might have had some publishers on the program before who, again, go back to what Gary said, their publishers have been in the mix for 10, 20 years even. We're talking about cashback, voucher code, et cetera. But we know based on our experience and based on where we've been before, that it's not just about the purchase, but also getting that awareness out and you can get in multiple blogs. This is a great product to get in those sort of BBC Good Foods, but not just the big BBC Good Foods like the lower down, the more sort of long tail.

GARY: Yeah. And also like Google shopping, like a lot of lower margin resellers, they don't have all the margin to work with as a direct D2C [00:13:00] brand.

I dunno this, you could say this, you guys always had a up and down relationship with paid? With, with PPC, and, but yet they weren't properly leveraging CSS partners in their affiliate program. So we came along and said, Hey, they've got some there, but what work is being done strategically with these partners to get them a really transparent feedback loop so that they feel like we're a trusted partner they can go to town with and arbitrage? And that's happened.

So CSS was big one, but like Jamie said, the single hardest thing that brands who come to us experience is the tenacity, the character and the man hours required to go out and bring on that long tail.

SAM: Yeah.

GARY: Of content publishers that is never ending. And include influencers in there as well. And obviously your legacy media too, there's fewer of them, so they're easier to work with strategically.

But those long tail that might have a hundred thousand monthly visits, but they're gonna be the most engaged partner that when we've got something going on, we can just chuck them an update. Maybe send them some product and get them posting and, doing it all on the CPA. That's like the gold mine to most marketing directors.

SAM: Yeah.

GARY: And also founders. Now, if you look at The Bottle Club's program, it's a really healthy pie [00:14:00] chart of different publisher types. It's now become a different phase where we have to make sure those content publishers who are doing great work aren't being penalized for being an early in the click journey.

So that's the next challenge that comes is creating a healthy ecosystem once you've got the right partners on.

TIM: I think as well, like from a brand perspective with content publishers, a lot of the logic of it comes from what channel does it get attributed from. So I think when we originally did it, we were doing, we had traditional PR agency first.

SAM: Yeah.

TIM: Then we had a digital PR agency that was going after your SEO. So you don't know which channel it's supposed to be working with. And we were almost duplicating the level of work and the level of conversations and go, the traditional PR agency's got us this, but they've shipped the skim link on.

That really should be managed by the affiliate agency. And I think brands forget that those advertorials can be updated as well. I think, I didn't know that until speaking to you.

GARY: Yeah. The PR agency might just, stick the link up there and move on because it's just like a byproduct of them doing their PR, doing a great job.

But if the brand is focused on tracking CPA sales, then it's actually we're below the fold. I'm gonna use BBC Good Foods as an example. we might speak to them and say, "Hey look, we're below the fold on this gin gifting [00:15:00] article."

SAM: Yeah.

GARY: "What would it take and what do you need to get us up the page?"

Whether it's paid placement, whether it's a higher CPA, whether we need to send products or educate them so they can improve the content.

TIM: Yeah.

GARY: All these legacy media brands are investing heavily now in CPA revenue.

SAM: Yeah.

GARY: Since 2017, they've been getting absolutely battered because of Facebook instant articles cutting their traffic source.

And that's part of this evolution. They've moved towards getting really good at monetizing affiliate programs.

SAM: Yeah, I mean it's super interesting. I think just to see the shift of like editorial and advertorial in general. And it's often something that even, from my perspective, really operate in very different silos and those that are successful have that like integrated approach.

TIM: I think the thing that excites me the most is where I see a lot of kind of brand awareness coming from now is from those advertorials and those content publishers, and as we move away from algorithmic SEO and people like as mentioned this morning about using LLMs to actually find what you're looking for tailored approaches, all of that data is gonna come from content publishers.

SAM: Yeah.

TIM: So actually nurturing-

SAM: Not necessarily coming from your own website.

TIM: Yeah, no, [00:16:00] exactly. And I think realistically, most businesses are in a position where they've spent the last five years building technology and platform for old tech. Like we've just rebuilt recently. And it was focused around core web vitals, it was focused on backlinks and all of this. But realistically, the algorithm won't be like that if LLM is the way forward.

SAM: Yeah.

TIM: And where is it gonna pull the data from? It's gonna be from content publishers realistically.

SAM: Yeah, exactly.

TIM: And the visibility, as you said, the volume of that needs to be as many different places and different audiences as possible.

GARY: We were having this conversation yesterday about AI results. The three of us were sat around, pulled up Chat GPT, and what did I say? Best place to buy alcohol online in the uk. And it just came up with the results and it was like, Bottle Club number one.

TIM: Yep.

GARY: And so that this,

SAM: I mean you guys all high fived and

GARY: We did.

JAMIE: Yeah. We really did.

GARY: Screenshots, yeah. Sent to team. So it is understanding that and also understanding that publishers need a stronger ally than ever.

SAM: Yeah.

GARY: To survive, when they're constantly getting knocked by Google, by Facebook, they need to be able to get the best yield [00:17:00] possible from their views. And affiliates has come in to do that.

TIM: Yeah, and you've gotta remember as well, if anyone keeps up with the Chat GPT updates that literally last month, they've now integrated Shopify directly into it. So Chat GPT is most likely going to be a front end or that's what people are gonna be interacting with to purchase. So how do we prep for that?

Obviously Awin's whole thing with this launch that's coming up is about making sure that the Awin platform is ready for an AI future.

SAM: Yeah.

TIM: And is your affiliate program ready for an AI future? Is your website ready for an AI future, if you're not doing the right stuff that the AI is looking for? And you are still doing legacy SO work.

SAM: Yeah, I think something else that you had mentioned earlier in this conversation that preparing The Bottle Club for an AI future forward is you've turned off a lot of other advertising spend and really, again, consolidating that investment into these longer tail content partners and things that are being trolled by LLMs. So talk to us a little bit more about what that is.

TIM: Yeah, so we in January, turned off our Google Shopping through Google and also Meta. Reason being is when we did the analysis of where our spend was versus our profit, it just wasn't true and [00:18:00] that's where we get into the Multitouch attribution piece.

We're still doing Google Shopping because that is where our customers are.

SAM: Yeah.

TIM: Where people are looking for results. But we're doing it on a CPA model, so we're using, Redbrain and Shopify as our two main partners with that, and CSS partners. And it's been really helpful to see that it is part of the journey.

I think that's the thing is that Google Shopping, Facebook, are all part of a customer journey, but are they actually the reason that people converted? So turning that off has been the big change and we saw an initial drop, but now we're really tracking against last year with a considerable lack of spend and a huge increase in profitability.

SAM: And when you say you're using partners like Red Brainin, that's through the affiliate channel?

TIM: Yes.

JAMIE: Yeah.

GARY: He did something so radical that it would make most marketing directors go completely insane. Because it seems incredibly brave. But in, in his case, being a multi-brand retailer and sometimes struggling with, with PPC profitability, just to turn that off and trust that the affiliate program that's now more mature is gonna pick up the slack.

Was an incredible live experiment [00:19:00] that has thankfully gone very well for them.

JAMIE: Obviously means that our team have to be like all over the product feed, making sure that you know all of the information that's going through it is correct and 'cause you've got tons of skews and

TIM: Yeah, we, hold an inordinate amount of data against every product.

SAM: Yeah.

TIM: So actually the way the site's built, it's built on this really in depth pi so we can enable them to be as efficient as possible.

But I challenge any brand to really look at any of their channels. And I'm not saying turn it off. 'cause obviously that was a bold move from us. But I do think sometimes if you're trying to work out the relevance of something, the only way of seeing if it works is not having it.

SAM: Yeah.

TIM: So I was chatting to a Scottish fashion retailer and they'd accidentally turned off a week's worth of Facebook ads and they saw a revenue hit. So actually they accidentally did that test to realize how important that channel was to their acquisition and their revenue. But it's true for anything.

Voucher codes, for example, are normally your last click. But if there wasn't a voucher club, would that have stopped the conversion or did you just give it away?

SAM: Yeah.

TIM: And like you should be challenged to go and say, "Should we do this or should we not do this?"

SAM: We did an analysis of [00:20:00] Awin advertisers a few years ago and essentially grouped everyone into two different cohorts. Because I think with affiliate it's easy to be complacent, you set up affiliate links and it's a bit evergreen always on type of marketing activity. And so like very much a set it and forget it mentality. We have certain advertiser programs where like brands literally never log into the platform and the publishers either never log into the platform.

And we basically grouped our advertisers into armchair advertisers, those that were a bit passive kind of sat back. And then these adventure advertisers and the uplifting results were like so stark and incredibly different because it's, as you say, like you really have to examine the data and get hands on into the program. And it's like with anything, like the more you put into it, the more you're gonna get out of it.

TIM: For sure. Something we've done that's been hugely beneficial for us and that we're gonna be working on a lot as a team is we now gather at checkout with a hundred percent completion rate's our mandatory - one mandatory question and it's, is this purchase for yourself? Is it a gift or are you hosting or is it trade?

And the reason that's so important to us is that when you start looking at the data and looking at your customer segmentation, the repeat purchase rate [00:21:00] of gifting customers is either, annually or in key buying periods, whereas you're a repeat purchaser is actually 60 days, 90 days, et cetera. So that means the customer lifetime value is different. The cost of acquisition is different.

But when you work out what that question is for your business and then you start applying it, you can start to - so our email marketing, for example, we ex- now excluding those gifting customers because they don't care about new releases 'cause they're not buying for themselves.

SAM: Yeah.

TIM: And then we need to do a load of post-purchase work to say how do we get them into becoming self consuming regular customers? But then what we can also do is now that we've built a cohort of gifting customers, self consumers, then we can start building that audience into affiliates and say, okay, where are the lookalike audiences?

Or where are the publishers that are gonna work really well to get more of these gifting customers? And then when do we do the publications, when, like gift guides, et cetera, in content or close user groups and, stuff like that. So it's like when you build out like key segments of your business and then apply it to all of your channels, both in email and in affiliates, it's a really exciting time.

GARY: I heard a really good phrase that sort of sums that up, which is what isn't [00:22:00] measured isn't managed. And I love that. And that's exactly proof of it there.

TIM: Yeah.

GARY: Because that's creates this lovely feedback loop that can come from which publishers are driving, gifting customers and self purchases.

And then put that back into the affiliate program. We know which audiences to go and work with.

TIM: Yeah. Like in the, I've got a lot of friends in, obviously retail media's becoming this huge buzzword and this huge thing and it was previously shopper marketing. What I find super interesting about retail media is, unless it's in a store that's kinda, its cameras on every R, which it hasn't.

Most of it is just conversion data. So I think it's like the stat is currently 20% of all retail sales that are online. It's still 80% in store. But actually we've got the most amount of data of anyone. We've got impression data, we've got click, we've got view data. We're not just relying on did it sell, did it not?

So I mentioned earlier is actually the amount of data that we're gathering, not using it is a waste. You need to actually understand that data. So we're doing that on a segmentation level, but then we can also get down to what area of the UK buys the most whiskey in our customers, and then segment that gifting and things like that.

SAM: It comes back to the point of like multi-touch attribution too. 'cause you're gathering all this data and then you're able to see like, where [00:23:00] are our customers shopping? When are our affiliates interacting with 'em? And then like, how do we need to be more targeted to like ultimately get them to convert and then get them to come back?

TIM: Something I've been doing a lot of as well and pushing the merchants to do is look at their trending products versus their bestselling products. So we have a lot of people that say, "This is our best seller. This is what we need to spend loads of time on because it's been selling really well." But actually that's a product that you've already done really well on.

So that doesn't need nurturing. There's a load of products that are gonna sit in your portfolio that are trending products that have loads of clicks, loads of impressions, but are not converting. What is the reason for it? Is there negative reviews? Are you outta market? Is it not in the right places? Are you not marketing that product to the right person?

SAM: Yeah.

TIM: Versus the product that you have? And people don't necessarily do that change of analysis and then bring that into the work that they're doing.

SAM: And then it's matching those like affiliate partners to like where they're at.

TIM: One insight that we unlocked with our gift for host self thing was we categorize anyone that bought something that was in a gift box.

SAM: Okay.

TIM: As a gifting customer before we had the data.

SAM: Yeah.

TIM: But actually we have like collectors edition gift boxes. Actually most of the people that were buying those were self consumers and they were [00:24:00] the highest volume of sales.

So even though they were gift box and would have previously gone into the gifting segment. They were self consuming customers that are buying it to collect. If you don't have that insight, you can't do effective marketing, and that's where you kinda get wasted spends.

GARY: There's so much involved in affiliates today. Hearing that, it goes back to the point earlier about many brands being unprepared for this massive wave in affiliate maturity now, and what are all the different skill sets that's needed in an affiliate team. And we've just spoken about quite advanced sort of strategic data analysis and putting that into use.

They also need to be able to do campaign planning. They need to be a marketing person.

SAM: Yeah.

GARY: And that's normally where the skillset ends. So if you look at most affiliate agencies, even networks or in-house team members, they are affiliate managers, but they probably have a marketing degree. They've been in a marketing career. And so a lot of that stuff, they're gonna be really good at. But what they're not gonna be good at is all of the other bits that are now involved in affiliate management, which is, the biggest one that we see, that we feel is the sales mentality. Because if you are hunting for new partners from cold, they don't know you.

SAM: Yeah.

GARY: You have to find who [00:25:00] they are, reach out to them, probably kiss some frogs, handle rejection and go back again.

SAM: Yeah.

GARY: With a new idea, a new pivot. and be a persuader to whoever this long tail of partners that you gotta get through is. And that is not the sort of strength of an average marketing person, but you need to have all in one these days.

And I think that's what's got us to this point with The Bottle Club.

SAM: So what is next for The Bottle Club and RevWise partnership?

TIM: I think one thing for me is, brand to brand.

SAM: Yeah.

TIM: I was chatting with the business that is based in Scotland. They're a business called Little Lies. They do rocker fashion from like sixties, eighties rocker fashion.

But obviously everybody that's into that genre is into music. And we've got loads of like band related products. So we've got like Iron Maiden wine, Def Leppard whiskeys and sort stuff like that. Finding those niche partners to share audiences with.

SAM: Yeah.

TIM: You can share the same level of engagement, the same kind of tone of voice across different audiences that they just wouldn't have otherwise overlapped. So I find that really exciting.

SAM: It gives you access to your favorite thing too, which is more data.

TIM: Yes. Yeah. Exactly.

JAMIE: Yeah. It's focusing on that [00:26:00] post-purchase as well. that's where we see the most opportunity next, but also just more of the same hunting that we have been doing and just doubling down.

GARY: Yeah. We'll always have a job, thankfully, because it's just so time consuming to do this stuff. Everyone sits, they might sit in a ballroom and say, "Okay, we need X." A bit like this conversation, like what do we need more of? We need more either influencers or content partners or different brand partnerships.

And so all these great ideas come up, but then someone has to go and execute them and it's very fiddly and time consuming work. The actual reality is that most teams probably are, I know this from my background in sales, you get one win and you sit back and go, "I'm the king. Good job done there guys." And you just psychologically you take your foot off the gas a bit, it's gotta be a constant effort to keep feeding that funnel and it never ends. That's the reality of what we've gotta do day to day. And some of that's not that sexy because you're looking at pulling in data from SEMrush, from publisher scraping tools, from all sorts of sources, and having someone actually go through and make sense of that data, turn it into a hit list.

SAM: Yeah.

GARY: That meets Tim's and [00:27:00] our strategy. And then someone's gotta go out and actually do all that outreach and track it all and then turn those into sales.

But we're pretty good at it. And that's why I think we've got to where we have in such a short space of time and so we'll be doing a lot more of that basically moving forward.

JAMIE: And it can't happen without the really good communication that we have -

TIM: Yeah.

JAMIE: With you. Like we, we need it to be optimal and therefore the relationship has to be optimal. So constantly talking, strategizing, and I think it can't happen any other way really.

SAM: I do think that's something that too, that sets the affiliate industry apart from other like marketing industries or marketing channels, is obviously the business itself is so technically relationship focus, but it is such a human, in-person focused industry to a certain extent too. And it's the in-person moments and building those working relationships are then what leads to successful business partnerships.

TIM: For sure. I think with, the PPC agencies, there's a lot of one standard playbook per agency.

SAM: Yeah.

TIM: Rolled out for everyone. Whereas obviously with you guys, that's where your kind of manpower comes in.

GARY: Yeah and it's exhausting. It's exhausting, but it's, it's the only way to do it.

SAM: Yeah. The [00:28:00] phrase is what, like work smarter, not harder, but it's really doing both in the sense working smarter and harder.

TIM: Yeah. For sure.

GARY: And AI is obviously gonna help that.

SAM: Yeah.

GARY: And it is already helping that. And we have, like every agency probably have, tons of SOPs and processes and team leads, like rolling stuff out, the time and training. And we encourage our staff to use AI and we have a template for that so that stuff that they don't need to use their affiliate expertise or their relationships that they are building, they don't need to do hopefully they can push that down, which then means more profit for our clients and outcomes.

SAM: Yeah, but it's also like the Chat GPTs of the world and AI also then to your earlier point, make it harder because it's, that is now where customers are going to do their own research.

So it's making our own job easier, but at the same time, now how do we get us ranking in these like LLM systems too and like being in those results?

TIM: I think as well, like with the emerging technology, but also like changes in how the affiliate model is, you need a partner that's gonna go and be the one listening.

Like I'm the one that's listening to all the E-com changes and going, okay, what the developments do we need to do? What technology is now gonna change?

SAM: Yeah.

TIM: [00:29:00] Where vitals is now 60% of the search and like algorithm rather than 20, so we need to make those adaptions. But when the affiliate market industry's changing, there isn't necessarily gonna be a team in those businesses that is listing out to the changes is it got their finger on the pulse of it. And that's why you're a bit like an extension of the team because we leave you guys to tell us what we should be doing and then we can go and worry on this section.

You know what I mean?

SAM: Yeah.

GARY: I do feel sorry for like in-house affiliate managers at certain brands of a certain size. Often it's not even an affiliate manager, it might be an executive who's given that responsibility.

SAM: Yeah.

GARY: 'cause the channel's not taken seriously, but there's just, there's no way they can keep their finger on the pulse and do all that research.

JAMIE: And all the validations.

GARY: All the validations and deal attributions, slip for fraud, and go and outreach, find new publishers, bring them on. It's just, it's too many things and different disciplines for one single person to do well.

TIM: Yeah. I think one of the reasons we moved to Awin is we were having loads of fraud or like super high costs that we couldn't actually attribute bringing in proper deduplication, which for me was a real selling point of Awin and having you guys to go and manage like the [00:30:00] deduplication and the validation, and also challenge publishers because that's not yours.

Yeah's not, you weren't really involved in that sale. You couldn't do that with one person in the house.

GARY: Yeah, it, and it wouldn't have even been the publisher's fault in that case. It would've been the fact that it was, what do you call it? Armchair?

SAM: An armchair advertiser. But it's just like an evergreen kind of always on program.

GARY: Yeah. Keep it on. And then suddenly we start taking it seriously. We look in and we're horrified by what we see because it's been left to run. If you've got an affiliate program that you think is over simple. Not leveraging what you know is out there, not containing enough different publisher types and maybe even wasteful or mismanaged.

Then you should look at who is running that for you. And start asking questions.

SAM: Yeah.

GARY: 'cause you can get way more, from that channel.

SAM: Yeah. You guys have beat me to my last question here. For brands considering affiliate for the first time, maybe not in the channel, but thinking about doing it -what's the one thing you tell them? What's that one single best piece of advice you give them?

JAMIE: So they don't, have an,

SAM: They don't have an affiliate program. They're considering it for the first time.

JAMIE: Wow, okay.

SAM: No pressure.

JAMIE: Yeah, it's off the top of my head. I suppose it's diversity. You're opening yourself up to partnerships, diverse partnerships, [00:31:00] which, if you're not, if you don't have like a network program, it's very hard to piece it all together.

Once you get a network program, then you can start reaching out to different types of partners. You might have the original goal of we need more sales, we need more sales. But affiliates gives you so much more than just sales. And again, like we were focusing on, it's the awareness, it's the pre-purchase, purchase, post-purchase and it supports all the other channels as well.

SAM: Yeah.

TIM: I think more retailers and more brands need to know that affiliates isn't the dirty word that it was before, and there's actually so much more in it. I think that's the bit that people don't know.

SAM: Thanks for listening, and that's a wrap on season two of Awin-Win Marketing Podcast. I can't believe it. How do you feel, Rob? We're done.

ROB: Uh, yeah. I feel cooked right now, but yeah.

SAM: Yeah, it's the UK heatwave still.

ROB: But don't worry, we'll be back later this year with season three. In the meantime, you can keep an eye on our feed because there is gonna be a ton more bonus content coming your way very soon.

SAM: And make sure you subscribe so you don't miss out. You can find us on Apple, [00:32:00] Spotify, PocketCasts, or online at awin.com/podcast.

ROB: And while you're there, why not go ahead and leave us a rating and a review? Hopefully a very good one.

SAM: I certainly hope so. But either way, that's it from us today.

Thanks again for tuning in to Awin-Win Marketing Podcast, season two, where we show you how affiliate partnerships always offer a win-win.

ROB: It's goodbye from me and goodbye from Sam.

SAM: Bye.