In this episode of Add To Cart, we are joined by Neguin Farhangmehr, Head of Affiliate and Partnerships at Growthops Digital.
Welcome to Add To Cart Upskill! We have partnered with one of our industry friends to teach you a new set of skills. At the end of the Upskill series, we want you to walk away feeling smarter and ready to take on a new area of eCommerce.
Today’s episode is the first in a series of three on Partnership Marketing and is brought to you by Impact.com, a technology company that’s transforming the way enterprises manage and optimise all types of partnerships. The Impact Partnership Cloud™ is an integrated end-to-end solution for managing an enterprise’s partnerships across the entire partnership life cycle to activate rapid growth. Impact power partnerships for some of the world’s largest and most loved brands: Uber, Airbnb, Nike, Canva, Westpac, HSBC, Woolworths and David Jones.
In the first episode, we are starting right at the beginning and looking at how to develop a partnership strategy as part of your marketing mix.
Neguin Farhangmehr never intended to pursue a career in partnerships, but after getting a taste of ‘the above and beyond channel’ as she calls it, she was hooked and has never looked back. Neguin leads high-performing teams with a strong focus in sales growth and customer acquisition, working with over 70 brands worldwide across many verticals.
In this chat, Neguin shares the best way to budget for partnerships, which partnership channels perform best and her key tips for brands commencing their partnership planning as well as a whole lot more, in fact, everything you need to know to get started!
Joining Neguin to teach you everything you need to know about setting up successful partnerships is Zhoe Low, Global General Manager at July and Peter Bray, Regional Vice President of Sales ANZ at impact.com.
If this series has inspired you to dive deeper into the world of partnerships for your brand, visit impact.com to get your hands on The Ultimate Guide To Partnerships or book a free demo today.
“I always see partnership marketing as the above and beyond channel.”
Neguin Farhangmehr
The future of marketing
“I remember thinking, oh my God, is this the future of marketing, what it looks like? You can be creative and design campaigns for brands that have that kind of relationships of trust, but everything is backed up with numbers and analytics, it blew my mind. The fact that you can cross-reference every suggestion, every recommendation that you have with data and technology, this maybe sounds very typical and usual nowadays, but fourteen years ago, it wasn’t.”
Partnership conversion rates
“If I’m working with traditional affiliates, the expectation is higher. You want them to bring a high conversion rate, and I’m going to say a number that in this industry, in ecommerce in general, is crazy. But you want to you want to talk about conversion rates that are higher than thirty or fifty per cent when you work with really big traditional affiliates. You want to talk about really fast conversions. But there are other verticals that we look for at least four percent, which is like a general bench mark in ecommerce, and also sometimes when you get a zero point five conversion rate from certain verticals, that’s something you celebrate with champagne as well.
You cannot really say, this is what good looks like, but you can say hey, considering what the campaign looked like, how much you invested, what kind of coverage you decided to go for, and what kind of publisher you wanted to invest in, I was expecting more or less conversion rate.”
A day in the life
“It’s going to be a very dynamic day today. The first thing is checking in on the reporting and seeing that traffic, and conversion is making sense. So the operational side of things has to be in the day-to-day, the admin, operations, reporting, analytics, comparing day today, comparing week to week. So that’s the part of it that is fundamental.
Then you go a step forward, and it’s going to be the planning. So what’s coming ahead? Is there any events coming up, marketing events, also your brand events? Is your brand celebrating something that is worth making a marketing campaign for it. So when you start planning, that’s where everything starts, you pick up the phone, send the emails, and you start dealing with all the stakeholders. Now don’t take this part of the job lightly. it accumulates. It’s a lot of follow up. It requires a lot of organization skills, but also it requires a lot of negotiation skills and clear communication.
Also, what do you need to put together for those campaigns? Do you have to liaise with other departments in your company? Like the creative it of things, do you need a new landing page? Do you have to talk to the other channels? In all the roles I had, I always had to run around the office and with different departments.”
If this series has inspired you to dive deeper into the world of partnerships for your brand, visit impact.com to get your hands on The Ultimate Guide To Partnerships or book a free demo today.
This episode was brought to you by…
