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 last 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.
We’ve looked at setting up and managing partnerships in episodes one and two and this time we are focused on how best to grow them. Rainer Schmid is the Global Direct Marketing Manager from Bikes Online and he’s joining us today to share his experiences in the mature partnerships space. Rainer talks about the internal processes his team have implemented to optimise their partnerships, the attribution model he rates for handling payouts and his predictions on upcoming trends. He also provides a nifty catchphrase for what’s at the heart of growth. Be Nice!
“It’s that 80/20 rule. 80% of your content comes from 20% of your partners and if you ensure that 20% is well looked after, you don’t have to worry.”
Rainer Schmid
Be clear and transparent
“There are a couple of special terms that we need to always incorporate. One of those is a definition of what content it is. What is defined as content? Is it a five-second video? Is it an image in an Instagram feed? Is it a five-minute product review? You need to define that information. Otherwise, you’re probably not going to get what you’ve paid for.
You do get honest people who will just go to the ends of the earth and just do everything. But it just makes it easier for everyone. Less chance of conflict. You have a better working relationship. Everybody is very transparent in what they expect and what they are willing to produce. And that’s how you negotiate the agreement. Just be transparent. Say exactly what you want.”
Flexibility with commission structure
One of the really cool things about Impact is that you can set every affiliate on their own commission structure, and you can set specific payouts for particular products. There’s so much you can do there.
That’s why we have the standard commission structure, which is what everyone will start on. And then when we see that somebody’s a really good performer, they’re generating good revenue for us, good sales, we’ll reach out to them and say, you’re doing an amazing job. You’ve reached one of our internal milestones and we would like to increase your commission. And more than often they’re like, what? What do you mean? Pay me more? Yes, please.”
The 80/20 rule
“If you don’t keep speaking to people, they forget about you. When that sort of thing happens, you’re just gonna reach out to them, give them a quick call. That’s where it comes down to having a relationship with your ambassadors, especially the valuable ones. You never wanna lose the valuable ones. So you always need to maintain that relationship.
It’s that 80-20 rule. 80% of your content comes from 20% of your partners. And if you ensure that that 20% is well looked after, you won’t have to worry about losing them.
But when it does come to losing the other ones, it always helps to have a little boost of a campaign. So you say, we’re giving away bonus commissions for this month or for this product. Here’s some content for you. Please reach out if you’d like to do a review on the bike or if you’d like to do a review on the product. But yeah, it’s all about giving them a bit of an incentive.”
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