Stefan Dalling: There's nothing stronger than when a person that we trust give us their recommendation of what to buy and where to buy it. There's nothing stronger than that.
Peter Bray: The very mature customers using this technology, they see about 28% of their entire revenue come from this channel.
Stefan Dalling: I'm a little bit old school, a little bit crafty. I love the craft and I love the passion.
Peter Bray: What you're looking at is partnerships significantly impacting a different operating model and path to consumer. That before was just an old way of doing a wholesale relationship, but now it's becoming part of the partnership solution.
[Voiceover]: Welcome to Add to Cart, the podcast that Express delivers all you need to know in the fast moving world of E commerce. Every month, Nathan Bush from 12 High and an E commerce industry expert will share the news, research and insights that you need to know to keep you at the top of your game and of course, keep your customers adding to
Peter Bray: cartoon
[Voiceover]: hello and welcome to a very special explainer episode of Add to Cart. As always, my name is Nathan Bush, director at E Suite and host of Add to Cart. But what? Today's Wednesday? Oh no, not Monday, not Friday. It's Wednesday. Our friends over at Impact have partnered with us to bring you a bonus midweek explainer episode where we're going to dive into partnerships and how they can help e commerce businesses like Booktopia grow up to 200%. Joining me today is Impact Sales Director Peter Bray and Booktopia Chief Marketing Officer Stefan Dalling. In our conversation, we discuss how retailers can set up partnerships with other brands, content creators, affiliates, publishers and influencers to scale and grow effectively. Stefan shares how Booktopia approach partnerships to attract passionate communities at scale and how they do it profitably. Also, Pete shares how Impact is making it easier than ever for brands to find new partnership opportunities and automate the process. So without any further fluffing about, let's get straight into Wednesday's bonus explainer episode with Peter Bray from Impact and Stefan Dalling from Booktopia. Peter Bray, welcome to Add to Cart.
Peter Bray: Nathan, it's exciting to be here.
[Voiceover]: Look, I'm a bit nervous actually, because you are the ex radio host and I'm just a dodgy podcast presenter. What am I doing wrong?
Peter Bray: Okay, thank you. Thank you. I'm not surprised you brought that up. I'm just glad that you've left my past as a Contiki tour manager in the vault. But that's for a different podcast, I'm sure. But I think you're doing a great job and I obviously wasn't a very Good radio announcer, hence I'm an ex one. But someone like you and your skill set, you could easily make the jump to tv.
[Voiceover]: Mate, I don't know about tv, not with this face. That's why I do podcasts. So let's talk about partnerships. That's what we're here. It's a very special episode of Add to Cart. We're going to talk all about partnerships. Later on this episode, we're going to bring in Stefan from Booktopia as well to talk about partnerships. But to get us started, Pete, you work at Impact at the moment. For those who may not be familiar with Impact, tell us about Impact and some of the clients that you're working with.
Peter Bray: Yeah, of course. Well, I might start with just giving you a bit of a view of what it is that we do. And look, ultimately we help brands built partnerships as a whole new trusted acquisition channel. And this really helps brands overcome their reliance on other channels to find new customers like search and social. And so in its simplest form, the Impact partnership cloud, it's a technology that allows brands to create partnerships with any type of third party. So it means you could work with content creators, publishers, influencers, your traditional affiliates, and even creating Some sort of B2B connection as well. The technology and the people behind it help brands do that type of partnership channel development in an automated, systematic and scalable way.
[Voiceover]: So are we talking for the layman here, are we talking affiliate partnerships on steroids? Oh, is that the wrong way to put it?
Peter Bray: Look, it's an interesting one that you bring up there because we often do get bucketed in the affiliate channel, but we see affiliates, your typical coupon cash back comparison loyalty sites, they're just a type of partner. But ultimately the idea of affiliate, it's just a mechanism. It's a pay upon outcome engagement. Over time, this has ended up becoming a channel. It's a channel that not every marketer that I know loves affiliate marketing. It's kind of like a necessary evil. It's something that you do, but you've got a lot of questions around that. There's four key reasons that we see. There's this, there's this, I wouldn't say disdain, but there's this thing that's like, hey, we like the channel somewhat, but we could like it more. And some of those challenges are this. Number one, there's a real lack of control and visibility. Number two, there's a real lack of diversity in who you're working with. It is your typical traditional coupon cashback loyalty that sit in that channel number three, there's an inability to align the outcomes of the affiliate channel with business value. And then the fourth thing is it's really hard to identify or even measure the incremental value of the channel. And so when we come into the picture and what we look at as a partnership automation platform, we take those four challenges and we help brands overcome them. And so that means we help them build their own private curated and scalable partnership network. It doesn't have to be just those small group type ones. There could be any type of partner they could work with and that diversity drives growth. And then the whole idea is also around saying, well, how about you align this activity with real business value? For example, not all products have the same profit margin. So your commissioning, your incentives for your partners should be aligned with your profit margin margin. Provide more commission incentive for greater profit margin products, provide less for lower margin products, that type of thing. The last thing I'll touch on here is this idea of incrementality. We give brands the ability to be able to look at this channel, this partnership channel, and then identify the incremental value it delivers. And that is really something that's been missing for a long time. And that's one of the things that our customers love about what we do.
[Voiceover]: And for people who may not have even had partnerships at the front of mind as part of their marketing strategy, can you give us a little insight into what retailers typically see in terms of uplift in that initial stage of turning on great partnerships?
Peter Bray: Yeah, for sure. And look, you probably have a better insight or I'm sure Stefan can talk to the numbers as well. But you know, what we typically see is that in E commerce retail in Australia, that the affiliate channel sits at 5 to 8, sometimes 10% of revenue. Now what we see when our customers turn it on is significant increases in that 2 to 3x if not greater. But look, there's one thing about me kind of saying this stuff. There's an independent technology and research and advisory firm called Forrester. Now Forrester worked with a bunch of our customers to really identify what value is being delivered. What they found out is on average, depending on the maturity of their program, the very mature customers using this technology, they see about 28% of their entire revenue come from this channel.
[Voiceover]: That's huge. 28% of entire revenue coming from partnerships.
Peter Bray: Yeah, and look, I think the key reasoning behind that, some of it comes from the idea of going, well, how do you work with more partners in deeper and meaningful ways? So if you've got more of them. Well then obviously your entire revenue increases. But the other thing is, well, use technology to automate all the heavy lifting and then you're not just focused on the top line. You can use the technology to really work on things like, hey, how do we optimize the commissioning? So you're also increasing profitability. So now, yes, you're growing the top line revenue, but you're also increasing the bottom line. And that's a really compelling conversation that marketers can have with the executives and with the board.
[Voiceover]: Brilliant. Okay, well, let's bring in a marketer. Let's bring in Stefan.
Peter Bray: Great, welcome.
Stefan Dalling: Yeah, thanks.
[Voiceover]: Nathan, your microphone setup is actually putting mine to shame. I feel a bit, you know, a little bit inferior here.
Stefan Dalling: Well, like I said earlier on, I'm only the good is good enough for you and your listeners.
[Voiceover]: Thank you for joining us. Now, Stefan, can you give us a little bit of an overview of your role at Booktopia?
Stefan Dalling: Yeah, so I've been with Booktopia for around two and a half years now. My role is the chief marketing officer here at Booktopia. So my role in remittance responsibility is of course growth. It's revenue through acquisition and retention across everything we do in the business. Booktopia basically has two brands. We have Booktopia and Engine Robertson. So we have those two brands and platforms that we're selling books on. And we are a online pure play retailer of books for those who don't know Booktopia. So we're selling books through those two websites. And then we also have, I think it's seven or nine marketplaces that we're selling books on as well.
[Voiceover]: So you're not busy?
Stefan Dalling: Not at all. Not at all. We have a total team of around 20 marketers right now sitting in house in Booktopia. So we do everything in house. We don't particularly work with many agencies, but we built up basically an in house agency, so to speak.
[Voiceover]: Yeah. Great. And you were in the background hearing what Pete was saying about partnerships and impact that figure around forrester's research. Around 28% of revenue coming from partnerships. Is that the kind of results that you're seeing at Booktopia as well?
Stefan Dalling: So I can't disclose how big of a percentage of the revenue comes from partnerships. But what I can say is that after we revisited the strategy when I started in the business, we crafted a brand new strategy around partnerships and what people and what technologies need to put in place to achieve that strategy. And after we did that over the last one and a half, two years, we grew the channel with more than 200%.
[Voiceover]: Wow, that's incredible. Now, can you share a little bit about your partnership strategy? What does partnerships look like for you? Because it looks different for every business and obviously impact is a part of it. But I'm assuming that it's a much broader strategy and impact play a critical role within that strategy.
Stefan Dalling: Yeah, it does. At its core, for me, there's nothing stronger than when a person that we trust gives us their recommendation of what to buy and where to buy it. There's nothing stronger than that. That trust can be created in a lot of different things. It can be created through people that we admire, the people that we look to, people that we might follow on social media or other businesses that we admire. And we trust whatever comes out from them because we've had great experiences with them in the past or whatever they might be recommended recommending. We will trust on that trust build. That's already happened. So that's kind of the foundation of a good partnership, is trust and leaning into that trust. And for me, it was important that we build a program where it was across both private individuals, across businesses that we trust and we trust in their brand. And we feel that this brand affinity, they live the Booktopia ethos as well. And these are people that we would want to deal with and we would want to work with. And as such we can see great symbiosis in collaborating with them in multiple ways. There's a lot of companies out there that like event companies as an example, where they are creating events with high profile celebrities that have often also written a book. But the event company isn't into the business of selling books. They're into the business of selling conferences and tickets to events. And they might not want to do anything with books. And here we could be a brilliant partner for them. It's also brilliant for us to connect ourselves when we're talking about the likes of Simon Scenic and Jim Collins and other very, very high profile celebrities that everybody know and having our brand associated with those kind of profiles. So at its core, the strategy really is to figure out how can we lean on other brands and other people who have both great brand perception, brand affinity and reach and how can we work with that. There's also an element, of course, where the channel diversification, less reliance on paid search can give you an opportunity to work with above the line without actually having massive above the line budgets. So these things are part of it as well.
[Voiceover]: So those examples are really great around events and partnering with personalities rather than necessarily brands or publications. One question we didn't get to, that I've had in the back of my mind is around content. So one of the downfalls of traditional affiliate programs is that you actually usually had to supply those affiliates with a whole bunch of content around your brand and your products and all that stuff to make the content interesting. Is it still that case?
Stefan Dalling: Yes and no. I think some of the best work that we do, we actually do provide them with the content and work very, very closely with them. Again, I would like to think that the best results comes from close partnerships and it's really playing to each other's strengths. Our strength is books. We are the best in the country at selecting, buying, selling and shipping books and talking about books for that matter. So it would almost be silly to kind of palm that over to a partner to figure that out. So we try and do that as much as we possibly can. Some places we work very closely with the partner on crafting a narrative and a story and a book recommendation that matches what they need to do. We did something similar with Audi back a year or two or two ago and built a travel destination for them where if you're taking road trips here in Australia, there's a beautifully crafted Audi branded page where Audi owners would be getting a bonus after they bought a brand new Audi. Also a very creative partnership. Ultimately you'll get a coupon and a voucher in the mail as physical direct mail the LinkedIn to your landing page on Booktopia where you could browse the curated travel driving around Australia books that we could possibly find. And we did that together with Audi. So that was a creative one.
[Voiceover]: Such a great example.
Peter Bray: I want to add to that. You raise a great point and I think if we flip this for a second to publishers themselves and I mean like the big guys through to your micros and your bloggers. The bigger publishers have been living in a world where advertising was their main revenue stream and the rise of programmatic audience based buying. A marketer might spend a dollar to try and reach or get reach through these type of channels, but the publisher ends up with less than 30 cents in that dollar. Once that the agencies, the technologies, the systems take their cut. And so we've got this thing which is diminishing revenues of publishers. We've got the diminishing audience for a lot of them as well. Because let's be honest, a lot of the publishers lose their audience to channels like Google and Facebook as well. So publishers are looking for alternate revenue Streams, they're looking for different ways to make money. And so as part of what we're doing as a company impact globally is to try and build this partnership ecosystem in a really sustainable way. There's wins all around is that we recently acquired a company called Trackonomics and so that company is effectively working with publishers to make it easier for publishers to be able to have a content commerce strategy. So, you know the whole kind of advertorial paid editorial stuff with some links in there. Yeah, cool. Again, affiliate thinking. But it's actually building it in a much more unique way. And so to some of Stefan's points there as well, it's like, why doesn't a news.com Vogue, Buzzfeed, Business Insider, Mashable, why don't they work with brands in deeper, more meaningful CPA ways? Well, those publishers already are. And so in Australia that kind of the media houses are starting to flip into that model in a much more accelerated way.
[Voiceover]: Yeah. And it goes back to Stefan's original point, is that it's got to be a win win for both parties. It's got to add value to the core of what you both do.
Peter Bray: Exactly.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, that's a great point. Can we expand on the channel conversation for a little while and put yourself in the place of someone who's new to partnerships? And maybe the idea of partnerships is swapping links on websites, traditional kind of that partnership model. We know that partnerships now extend into influencers and apps and all sorts of places. Can you shed light on what kind of channels and formats are working really well for yourself at Booktopia?
Stefan Dalling: Yeah, sure. It's again, back to influencers and celebrity endorsements. You could argue I'm probably a little bit old school. I've been in the affiliate industry for north of 15 years now. So I'm from back in the old school days where we did digital products online, sold your six pack apps, programs and all that jazz. But there again, there's nothing stronger than a single person with a loyal following that talks about your company and your brand, still not. And while it's something where most companies would probably say, but it's incredibly hard to scale that if they only have a reach of maybe 500 to 1,000 loyal followers. But the loyalty of those followers, the trust of those followers, if you can find a way to better automate the process of onboarding that and do that at scale, the power of that is absolutely amazing. So back into what really works for me. It's of course figuring out, well, who are those people for Us. And that could be everything from book lovers that have a little YouTube channel that talks about unboxing books and what their favorite books are. Small individual book clubs, again, highly passionate people that absolutely love the products that you would want to get on your side. It could also, for that matter, be authors. We're also working a lot with authors themselves. Now. One of the biggest things for authors is that when you've written the book, it's not done. That's when you're starting your journey as an author. And the good authors that have had success were great marketers. They understood that to be able to be a celebrity author, you need to be a fantastic marketer and really get that book out there. And we've got some brilliant examples of first time authors like the Leibovich brothers right now with Gabby and his team that had a new book coming out. They never written a book before. That book was everywhere, or rather Gabby was everywhere, as he always is.
[Voiceover]: He even made his way onto here.
Stefan Dalling: Of course he did. Love him. So again, that's a good example of how you need to really, really work with the authors. And for those of you who've been seeing Gabby talking about his book, which you absolutely should read and you should of course buy it with Booktopia, you will also see that predominantly he's been talking about Booktopia in those relations and those are the kind of relationship that you want to foster. But they need to be genuine, they need to be honest and they need to be making sense for both parties.
[Voiceover]: So from a partnership perspective, is it fair to say that you look for those smaller, more engaged communities than the larger high reach publications?
Stefan Dalling: I think there's probably a question, an answer there, where one is where my heart is and the other one is where the business of course needs to scale. We need to have both. My heart is with people who love the product and are absolutely fanatical about the products and will scream our brand name over the hilltop every day of the week rather than perhaps big corporations that have different motivations and different focus as well. So for me there's just something more rewarding with working with the smaller independent lovers of the actual product that I think is really, really great. But at the same time there's also, same time, there's also something super rewarding around working with your large, large corporations with millions of customers like ours, the supers and financial institutes of the world and, and you know, some of the major event companies, as I mentioned before, that's where you can do something very, very creative from A market share perspective at scale that can reach and touch a lot of people. But again, again, I'm a little bit old school, a little bit crafty. I love the craft and I love the passion and the heart that goes into it from the smaller ones. So growing and scaling, that is a core part of what we're doing. So we have a huge program. We have more than. What is it now, Peter? Is it 2500 people on the program or something? Partners. And tilt him.
[Voiceover]: He's nodding now. Pete, I will bring you into this here because I'm keen to hear from you on your other retailers, which you mentioned earlier. Has there been any creative executions in terms of partnerships that has caught you by surprise or you thought, oh, that's out of the out of the box thinking?
Stefan Dalling: Yeah.
Peter Bray: And look, there's two ways to look at that. One is, you know, different types of partners, different thinking. Sure. But there's also different ways in which you work with your existing ones, more traditional ones, and I think that's where you get the instant wins. And Booktopia was one of the first to really start to kind of jump into that and say, hey, how do we optimize the relationship we have with our existing content creators, our existing publishers, our existing affiliates? And with that optimization comes significant benefit for the business. But I think the simple things in that, in that view, best and less. For example, they have their traditional affiliates like coupon and cashback, they have them on different commission rates compared to the niche content creators and publishers that they work with. They have budget in the bank to do incentives outside of those big kind of 10, 10, 11, 11 days. So they can't always compete with the bigger retailers. So they kind of use the channel more strategically to find little peaks in what are typically trough type areas and environments. I think there's some other ones like bws, they look at lifetime customer value that's coming from different partners and they have different commissions for new verse returning customers. And then if there are items on sale, they kind of lower their commissioning rates for that as well. There's some really simple and easy things. But one thing I do want to share and I'm really excited about this and I can't say exactly who it is yet, but this company we've been working with for about a year to get this moving and it's actually a supplement company so they sell everything from your pre workouts, post workouts, protein bars, apparel, that type of thing. But they've got an entire team in their business dedicated to a wholesale relationship with gyms. So they'll go to Jim's and they'll say, hey Jim, that's G Y M. Hey Jim, you should buy 1,000 bucks worth of our supplements at a wholesale rate and then you can retail it at anything above X, for example. And so the benefit that is typically perceived in this channel is that, you know, this supplement company, they've got a new channel to customers and the gym is out there making a margin that product. But there's some pains for that gym because they're small businesses, right, and they have to worry about cash flow. Means they have to buy all this product, they have to store the product, they have to have a point of sale, they might have to have a float, they have to have security. What if it's the wrong composition of product they order and they can't sell it? So what we've been looking to do is say, hey, what if you turn these gyms into like an affiliate model via partnership automation? And so now what's going to happen is that gyms anywhere around the country are now going to sign up to this supplement company like an affiliate, but it's a B2B relationship. And so when that gym is promoting a unique promo code, they're promoting via the adms, they're putting a QR code in the gym, they are pushing out in their socials and the members and followers go through to purchase on that supplement company's core marketing engine, their website. What that means is that the gym is now getting remunerated with far greater reach, with typically more benefit for the gym. Because when those customers are going to the site, supplement company is putting these customers through a great experience. And so the brand they're going to benefit with higher average order values. The brand are going to have that direct connection with the customer. So they've got the data and they've got them in their marketing funnels. And ultimately the brand's going to see greater profitability because the discount that they're providing and that commission they're providing is typically less than that kind of wholesale relationship that they had. So now what you're looking at is partnerships significantly impacting a different operating model and path to consumer. That before was just an old way of doing a wholesale relationship, but now it's becoming part of the partnership solution.
[Voiceover]: I love that example, especially around the passion economies. So if you think about health and fitness being a passion economy, there's a lot of players in that space who might not be retailers and never want to be retailers, but have a great retail Opportunity and at the same time, a lot of retailers who would do anything to access the passionate community within that those gyms own. So it's really great and you can see that playing out. And Stefan, you mentioned about, you know, people who are attached to authors and being able to be part of that community or a type of genre or a type of, you know, event community. It's really nice way to bring those two together while both get to stay in their own lane and do what they do really well. Stefan, I might just throw to you because Peter mentioned a couple of measurements there around customer lifetime value, about margin and about how retailers adjust their partnership agreements based on what they think that relationship is worth. Are you able to expand a little bit on how you set up your agreements with different partners and how you measure the effectiveness of those partnerships?
Stefan Dalling: Yes. Peter touched on here before and a lot of it really is what we're doing today. Some of the key things is, of course, this is a performance channel. You're paying based on performance. So of course the key metric here is of course, sales. How many sales are you getting? What are you getting out of that? But I think one of the most important things for me is also and for the team is figuring out the incrementality rate here and answering the question of how much are we cannibalizing existing trade? Because when you're working with partners, there's a massive overlap in terms of existing reach and existing customers that you're bringing back into the funnel. And a commercially astute contract would of course be rewarding new customers than existing customers to your partners so that they're earning more money from introducing your brand to brand new customers to your business. So that's of course something that's the table stakes, I would probably argue in terms of how we need to structure this with new and existing customers. And like Peter mentioned here earlier, really looking at it on a category level or on a profit margin level and making sure that your structure of commercial tiering is matching your business and your operation. Which brings it back into a previous topic where we loosely talked about, which is the strategy. The critical importance around great partnerships is to have somebody in the roles that have that are commercially astute. It's really a hybrid, hybrid role of creativity combined with commercial astuteness that's critically important to really have success with partnerships. So the capabilities and looking highly commercial on how these partnerships needs to be structured in groups and individual contracts. That's really where the, I guess the nuts and bolts of having success with this really Lies. So some of the other metrics of course, is looking at traffic. How much traffic are you getting in on your website from those partners? What kind of channels are they using to drive that particular traffic? Does it overlap and complement your existing strategy of reach? What's the partner brand profile? What's the brand impressions? How many impressions are you getting out there? Not everything in my view, is about just sales. Often it's about, well, how many times. Or is your partner getting your brand out there together with yours? And like we talked about earlier on, if that's, if that's an author that's going on TV or on radio talking about Booktopia all the time has value for me. Of course it does.
[Voiceover]: So do you only remunerate when you get a sale in or do you remove remunerate? I can talk today remunerate based on traffic coming in as well.
Stefan Dalling: Now we want to do it on actual sales right now, but the future definitely is tying it in with, with other channels. And I'm sure impact is hard at work on figuring out how we, how we accomplish that, all of us. That's definitely the key is when you can start figuring out how do we do some kind of social listening that can be attributed back into, you know, back into this without an actual click on an affiliate link, so to speak.
[Voiceover]: And touching back on what you said at the start of that, do you have different remuneration? And based on new verse, existing customers, you basically look at what comes in from those partners and you look at your database and you say, look, if this is a new customer never purchased with us before, you're at this rate. If you've got that customer on your database already, it's a lower rate or.
Stefan Dalling: No, no, we do, we definitely do that. And that's the only way of doing it. Otherwise you wouldn't be commercially astute. So look, that is definitely what we do as well. But not only that, it's also looking at what kind of customer did we get in the door? There's. Did they use a coupon, did they get a discount? Again, those things should of course detract from the payouts. I'll actually spin that one around and say it's not about detracting it from the payout. It really is about you want to work with people who are providing value to your business and you want to reward them for the value that they're providing for you. It really is as fair as that. It's a win, win relationship. It has to be. So you want to make sure that you have a tiering program in place that rewards your partners with the highest amount possible for providing your business with the best customers possible. And then of course, the vice versa
[Voiceover]: of that, it makes total sense. So if we take you back to the earlier stages of Booktopia's partnership program, and you said you've been passionate about partnerships for a long time, so you would have brought that into Booktopia, I'm assuming. Can you tell us how you got started and then how you scaled it to the point where you can start seeing 200% growth through your partnership model?
Stefan Dalling: Yeah. So definitely not my credit. Yeah. I've been working in the industry a very, very, very long time. The people that's paved the way before me here at this business have been doing a great, great, great job and really putting the business on the right Track. So the 200% growth was still on the back of that, but still it was a very mature program in terms of its capabilities. I inherited probably, there was probably around 2,000 existing partners when I inherited that, that program. And it had a lot of the right thinking, it had a lot of all the right ideas and where to take it and where to go with it. But there was probably a fundamental disconnect between a macro strategy down to how do we actually execute that and what tools do we then need to execute on that macro strategy. And I think what the team did with the great foundation that they had was really bringing it back into a larger strategy and then figuring out what skills do we need from people and headcount to execute on that and what technology do we need to have to have the flexibility and capability to do that at scale and still improve our margins and our cost of sales while doing so. And while it's not something that I usually talk about, so here's the first one, look. We managed to do that growth on the top line while significantly, we do reducing our cost of sale simultaneously. Simultaneously, both bottom line and top line improvements. While I'm not going to be talking about how much it's a lot beautiful. And that's good aberration and good strategy for me is when you can do both simultaneously. But it was critically important to have both the strategy, the people and then the technology in place to really facilitate that.
[Voiceover]: And is getting both of those working at the same time. Does that come down to a lot of the automation now that you have the machine running that you're obviously always looking for new opportunities and always looking to expand. But the fundamentals of your model is now running and it allows you then to just keep that moving and then grow on top of it.
Stefan Dalling: Yeah, I would definitely say so. But I'll also say we're not even utilizing, I don't know, even 70, 60% of what our technology can offer us right now. We're still a bit away from that. So there's much more opportunity in improving both commercial models plus contract negotiation models, plus the workflow that's available to us, which is the great opportunity was of course that we right sized operation chose partners. That's part of the growth journey and the agenda for us. So yeah, lots more for us to do within that.
[Voiceover]: And as someone who's been in partnerships for a long time, what have you got your eye on? What do you think are the next big things coming in the partnership space?
Stefan Dalling: Well, there's a lot of buzzwords right now, so I can't help but drop, drop a few. But in reality, we've seen everything before, right. In influencers. Today is really celebrity endorsement that's been around for the past 60, 70 years. It's nothing new there. It's a new label on the soup can really. There's a new channel to do it on, which is of course social media. And here we go now, let's call it influences. But at the core the psychology is exactly the same. The way that we're doing these things are exactly the same. Now of course we have mobile commerce, live commerce, another flashy word of saying TV shop. We had that for quite a few decades as well. But I still think that there's much more that we can do there to bring it into new channels where the mass media really is today, which is of course their social channels, your YouTubes, your Instagrams, your Facebooks. And that's something that we're really doubling down on, particularly after Covid where a lot of our authors were really relying on being able to go out to physical stores and Booktopia and our friends in the industry and go out and do signings of their books so that they could promote that on their social media to their fans and their followings. When Covid happened and all the bookstores had to close down, incredibly sad for all of our industry friends that they had to close down in those periods, but also for the authors and also for the publishers, which nobody's really been talking much about. So some of the things that we really doubled down on was providing the authors that platform to go out and actually do it online, do it together with them. And through that really growing, what we're doing in live commerce as well. So I think that's where one of the futures are around this as well. And partnerships and tracking and affiliate tracking, to use the dirty word here. But those kind of mechanics around how we remunerate partners lends itself really, really well to those particular channels where people are easily clicking on a link through a live session.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, some great examples there. Pete, from Impact's perspective, what have you got your eye on in terms of the future of partnerships?
Peter Bray: Yeah, look, Stefan addressed a bunch of them already and I'll second some of them. But I kind of look to the more macro challenges facing marketers and the pressure and a big part of this around the idea of, okay, you need to do more with less marketing budget. And so when we think about that, that means that the marketers are turning internally and going, well, what channels, what systems, what operations do we have that we need to either shake up or just get more out of? So I see the kind of next big things in this channel, specifically meaning that there will really start to be some scrutiny around the value that the current model is delivering for the business. And then the second thing of that is going, and this is seconding Stefan's point is going, well, maybe we should be look to rewarding our partners in a commensurate way to the value that they're delivering. And so that scrutiny and that flip of remunerating based on value, I think that is the next thing that needs to happen. And it's an exciting place to be in because that gives the marketers much more strength and capability and a more well rounded marketing mix.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, great points, great points. So if we have people listening to this and going, wow, I haven't even lifted the lid on partnerships. I haven't even started here. Pete, with Impact, how would you say they could get started?
Peter Bray: Give us a call. All right, there's a direct response if ever I've heard of one. Just give us a buzz in the show notes.
[Voiceover]: Back to your radio announcer days.
Peter Bray: Yeah, that's exactly it. Oh, look, I think it's really straightforward, isn't it? But I think what we're really lucky, we're very lucky in that we've got fantastic customers who we operate in a true partnership like Stefan. And there's so many more in this market. And you know, a big, big part of your audience base are marketers themselves. So I would really encourage those marketers to talk to our customers, reach out to them, and then you can get the real insight from, from their world. And I think that's that's a great way to start a conversation with us, either directly or speak to our customers.
[Voiceover]: And if they were to put a tactic in place to test partnerships, and I'll ask this of both of you, Stefan and Pete, where would you start in terms of channels? And I know it'll be different for every brand, but where do you think the quickest and easiest wins are?
Stefan Dalling: I'll take that one away. I would say that the easiest win is the cradle of partnerships and affiliate marketing. It really is to look at who's talking about your brand today and your products today. And typically you will be able to reverse engineer that by looking at your referral traffic in Google. And I'll go nerdy here. You look at your referral traffic in Google Analytics and see what other websites are linking to you and where traffic is coming from. And if you don't have a conversation with those websites or webmasters, a lot of them is probably going to be bloggers that's talking about you. If you don't have a relationship with them now, then contact them, use their contact form or figure out how you can get in dialogue with them and start the conversation there. The mechanics of affiliate and partnerships and the technologies that we're talking about there really just the vehicles of the partnership. It's just the easy way to facilitate it and an easy way to get away from all the technical problems. But at its heart it's the relationship. So you need to pick up the phone or write that email, contact those people with those blogs and broker that relationship and help them make money from talking about you anyway and then build up some programs that they can use as well.
[Voiceover]: That's a great practical tip. Thank you, that's perfect. I think everyone can go in and do that today, have a look at where their traffic's coming from and then amplify that. And now Pete, if that test was successful and everyone goes, oh, wow, there's a lot here, like we can go pretty hard at this now. And obviously then Impact helps automate and streamline a lot of that effort because it can get very hands on and very time intensive to do it manually. What kind of setup are you talking to start integrating Impact?
Peter Bray: Yeah, look, I actually want to, want to kind of balance the super practical and relevant perspective that Stefan just shared with a bit of more of the strategic view which is aligned with those next big things. I would say, okay, you can look at some data right now and say, hey, here's some opportunities for us. And then all of a sudden you got Some resource challenges to actually bring it to life and so apply the strategic thinking of okay, how can we do this channel better and speak with the team and look at some comparisons. Run an RFP if you kind of feel that there is is a real challenge that can be overcome by leveraging technology over the existing service model you might have, for example. But then look, I think part of your question there is also around, okay, how do you technically and financially get started? So what is the commitment to be able to start something like this? From our perspective, we make it really easy. On a technical side. We've got a solution for everyone, we've got a number of options. You can do a technical integration which is as simple as JavaScript tag that isn't based on third party cookies because we know that the death of cookie is ahead of us and luckily our solutions are ahead of that. You've got an API solution that we could work on, but then we also integrate with BigCommerce WooCommerce and you'll be happy to hear. Nathan, I know you're a big fan of Shopify.
[Voiceover]: They are friends of ours.
Peter Bray: They are friends of yours. Look, we have a toot our horn here and I think it's a true testament to where we're at as a business is that in the Shopify plus app store globally there's 45 apps that you can connect with. Only 45 compared to the thousands in the Shopify store. And Impact is one of those Shopify plus preferred app partners. It doesn't matter where you're at, what platforms you're on, we can plug in together. But then also our commercial model is vastly different than how brands operate in a traditional affiliate or affiliate network sense. A software as a service business. And our model, which starts from as low as $700 a month, is typically far more cost effective than what they're doing now. So not only do we come in with a far superior solution strategy people to support it, we've also got a commercially beneficial strategy there that helps marketers kind of say, hey, not only are we going to get more money, we can actually save some as well.
[Voiceover]: And from the reading I did on the website, the Impact website, there's a few differentiators which I thought were really interesting. Like the fraud protection ability to set different rates for different providers of different partners. Sorry. In different channels. And the ability to get automated reporting out of the Impact platform that will help you get that margin and justify the cost pretty quickly. Right?
Peter Bray: Oh, great pitch, mate. Thank you. That was good.
[Voiceover]: That was Good, Go for your job. It probably pays better than mine.
Peter Bray: Well, there we go. But look, yeah, look, the idea is this. Use technology to do the heavy lifting. If you want the data now, you want to work with anyone, you want to have really good contracting, commissioning structures, you can do that. The technology does all of that for you. And then what happens is that people in the business spend their time in identifying who do we work with, just creating that human connection with these partners so they can be real value being delivered both ways. And, you know, that's what this channel does. It delivers growth, it delivers value, and it helps shore up some of the over reliance that you have on these other acquisition channels.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, great.
Stefan Dalling: If you allow me to just piggyback on that one as well. And I think that's a prudent point that Peter comes with as well. And for the practical advice number two here, one great way to get started is of course to look at the knowns. But what a lot of these platforms and partners and affiliate partners provide as well is that marketplace in the ecosystem where you can go in and find the answer to all the unknowns. So you can look at industries that symbiotic with yours or heavily relying on yours, you can look at other industries exactly like your own and then find other people who have massive reach through that. So it's probably important to say that combined with what we just talked about, all the practical contract negotiation, pricing and all that, it also has an ecosystem of existing partners, like a marketplace where you can easily find them and look for them and then go out and start that conversation already in the platform. So that's of course the second part of how you go out and find practical partners to work with.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, great tip. Have you found interesting partners via the platform that you might not have found otherwise?
Stefan Dalling: Yeah, I think we have. I think we've found a few of those. Again, depends on the maturity of the company. And like I said, we've had like 2,000 partners when I started. So a huge piece of work has already been done there to build those relationships. But definitely new partners are coming out of it. But I think it's also about being realistic. There comes a, a tipping point where you kind of grab all the major, major ones that are out there. There's only x amount of HCFs and BUPUs of the world out there. There comes a point where you're kind of playing where you can play and then it's rather something new coming up.
[Voiceover]: Absolutely, gents, it's been a fascinating conversation. You've changed my view on what partnerships can look like and how they can operate within a retail business. So thank you for that. Some of those growth figures are phenomenal that you are seeing Stefan at Booktopia and Pete that you're seeing across the industry now if we have people looking to get in touch and Stefan, either contact yourself to learn more about what your experience is at Booktopia. How could they do that?
Stefan Dalling: Look me up on LinkedIn. Just use my search for my name. I'm sure it's gonna be in the show notes somewhere. So yeah, reach out on LinkedIn. I have many people that do that already and I'm happy to give advice on what you should do for your business if you're just reaching out.
[Voiceover]: Great stuff. And Pete, talk to yourself or the team at Impact.
Peter Bray: Same thing. Peter Bray on LinkedIn or my email is peter.bray@impact.com Gents, thank you very much. Thank you.
Stefan Dalling: Thanks Nathan. Thanks for having me.
[Voiceover]: Look, I know that was sponsored content, but you know, I thought it was pretty good and I hope it sparked a few thoughts around how you might be able to tap into the power of partnerships for your brand. A few moments in there that stood out to me. I loved Pete's example of the supplement company who was partnering with the gym chain to sell product without physical goods wholesaled, both parties doing exactly what they were good at and customers having a great experience. That's a brilliant example of how partnerships can work effectively. I thought Stefan's tip around looking at your referring traffic in Google Analytics and developing official partnerships as a starting point was really smart. And I loved how both Pete and Stefan explained how how partnerships have come such a long way since those link swapping affiliates that a lot of us have been burned on. There's a huge world of opportunity out there. If you want to learn more about how Impact can kickstart your partnership journey, visit impact.com growth. There you can learn more and view case studies from other retailers who are reaping the benefits. Thanks again to Impact for partnering to help give us a little nugget of gold on this Wednesday. To finish up, I have three resources for you. Firstly, if you're a first time listener of ADD to CART and you want to stay up to date with new episodes, head over to add to cart.com and you can sign up for our weekly newsletter. We'll let you know every time a new episode drops as well as giving you my three takeaways from each episode and a link to to the transcripts so you can know that this is an episode that you want to dive straight into. Secondly, if you want a weekly roundup of the best e commerce case studies, tools and research, sign up to the High Five Friday newsletter which is delivered to inboxes at 8am every Friday morning. I read all the e commerce news and send you the bits that I think you can take action from. Sign up at 2012 high 12h I g h.com au high 5 and the last thing if you are looking to explore your next e commerce opportunity, head over to esweettalent.com we are a dedicated e commerce talent agency connecting the best e commerce talent with the fastest growing brands. Check it out. Sign up to the email and get in touch with me if you want to discuss your next move. Until next time, thanks for listening and keep those customers adding to cart.
