Affiliate Marketing vs Influencer Marketing

Speaker 1 0:00

It doesn't matter what kind of e-commerce brand you're building. You still need a rock solid way to grow and scale your company like clockwork. Welcome to 7 Figures and Beyond an e-commerce marketing podcast for D2C brand owners and marketers, looking for best practices that include proven strategies and tactics to grow an e-commerce brand to 7 figures and beyond. Bringing 18 plus years of marketing experience as an e-commerce brand owner and e-commerce agency owner, please welcome your host, greg.

Speaker 2 0:26

Shuey. Hey everyone, welcome to episode 27 of the Seven Figures and Beyond podcast. I hope everyone is having an amazing day. Today here in Utah it's pretty gloomy. We're getting some rain. It's actually, what is it About? 46 degrees out right now. We're almost to the end of May. I'm all bundled up. It's completely. What is it about? 46 degrees out right now. We're almost to the end of May. I'm all bundled up. It's completely ridiculous. It's sunny somewhere. Is it sunny where you're at Noah?

Speaker 3 0:53

It actually is, which is crazy, because the past five days have just been gloom on, gloom on gloom. I guess today's the lucky day. I actually sat outside and had breakfast in the sun with my shirt off, which felt really good because I've been sun deprived, that's awesome Getting the.

Speaker 2 1:07

what is that Vitamin D? Is that what that is?

Speaker 3 1:09

The sun, yeah, cool.

Speaker 2 1:10

Cool. Well, today's guest is Noah Tucker. He is the founder and CEO of Social Snowball. These guys are the number one platform to help with affiliate and referral programs for e-commerce brands, and today's topic that we're going to be diving into is guess what Affiliate marketing. So this isn't a topic that we've spent a whole lot of time about or time on, yet I'm really excited to unpack this and talk about some basics and advanced tactics that you can start to leverage today to grow your brand.

Speaker 2 1:50

I'm also really excited about it is because affiliate marketing is where I got my start about 20 years ago, like a really long, long time ago. It's changed so much since then, but I'm excited to kind of learn and hear what's new in affiliate marketing and I'm excited to hear how learn and hear what's new in affiliate marketing and I'm excited to hear how that can be applied to e-commerce brands, because when I got my start, it was B2B lead gen, so that's what I used affiliate marketing for. So this is going to be a little bit different and I'm excited to dive in and learn. So, noah, thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to chat with us today.

Speaker 3 2:24

Happy to. Yeah, it has changed a lot, a lot, I mean even in the past five, 10 years, let alone 20 years. So I'm sure there's a lot you could teach me about what it used to be like when I was five years old.

Speaker 2 2:35

I was going to ask. You must have been super young. So five, five years, there you go, cool, cool. So before we dive in, would you just take a few minutes, introduce yourself to our listeners and share a little bit about your personal story and how you've gotten to where you?

Speaker 3 2:52

are today. I worked on the brand side of the e-commerce world, so I was an operator building some of my own stores. I did a lot of consulting work for brands, like a lot of paid ads, honestly, a lot of building ambassador and affiliate programs. So that's kind of how it all started and basically you know, with these stores that I was working with building these affiliate and ambassador programs, I was just using whatever existing tools there were in the Shopify ecosystem to power them at the time.

Speaker 3 3:23

So there was plenty back then and all of them just kind of felt and I wasn't really thinking too deep into this at the time but they all felt very clunky. Everything was very manual. It just was like an outdated UI. Things that are simple, like onboarding affiliates and sending payouts and anything like that was just like a huge hassle and so I kind of just I mean dealt with it for a while and then, after you know, being in that world for five years, I was already kind of looking for what my next career move would be and I had the idea to like really take all of the pain points that I hated from these more legacy affiliate platforms and solve them and build an affiliate platform meant for the more you, the more modern day e-commerce brand and that's kind of how that was, like the light bulb moment to start Social Snowball, and that's really what brought us to where we are today.

Speaker 2 4:12

That's awesome. I love brands that are built out of problems and necessities. So, in short, I mean, it was basically everything out here is trash. I'm going to go build something. That's amazing. Would that sum it up pretty well.

Speaker 3 4:26

Yeah, I mean at the time I thought they were trash. In hindsight I know that they weren't necessarily trash, they were just built for when affiliate was a different, you know, meant something a little different than what it means today, like I think you know, I mean less. So, even in the past 20 years, the past five, 10 years, the word affiliate has kind of changed in meaning. It used to be more just like publishers and listicles, review sites, bloggers, and it still is that today. But there's also like a new type of affiliate that brands are partnering with and I like to call these like modern affiliates, which are like influencers, creators, ambassadors even a brand's own customers can be affiliates.

Speaker 3 4:59

And so what I realized, you know, looking back, is that those platforms that I was using no-transcript and I was trying to partner with influencers, creators and ambassadors as affiliates and it wasn't built for that and the tools and user experience that you need to partner with a publisher is super different than that you need to partner with an influencer. So at the time I thought they sucked partner with an influencer. So at the time I thought they suck. Now I realized they were just built for a whole different world of affiliate, that I wasn't trying to work with at the time. Yeah.

Speaker 2 5:29

Okay, cool and out of curiosity, did you bootstrap this whole thing? Okay, how did you get started?

Speaker 3 5:35

We are bootstrapped. So I did have a little bit of money saved up from my e-commerce endeavors beforehand, so nothing crazy, but enough to just get like a super basic MVP off the ground. I'm not technical myself, so I had to you know work I mean that was a whole disaster in itself, but I worked with like an agency and a bunch of freelancers eventually got like a really, really basic MVP off the ground and then, once I started making money, I just aggressively reinvested every penny into growth and it wasn't like until we were a year and a half in that I had to start taking a salary for myself, because literally my savings and crypto and stocks were all at zero and I was like I literally can't buy food right now if I don't take a salary. So I waited as long as possible.

Speaker 2 6:15

That's cool. Good on you, man. That's great. All right, you ready to dive in? Let's do it Cool. So let's start off by talking about the difference between influencer marketing and affiliate marketing. Yeah, it almost sounds like you've kind of blended the two. So, yeah, I think a lot of people when they hear those two words, they're like they think two very, very different things, yeah, and a lot of people might get them confused. So could you spend some time there?

Speaker 3 6:43

absolutely so. Back when I was using those legacy affiliate platforms, I think influencer marketing also was very different than what it is today. And if you look at the influencer marketing platforms that came around that era, they all are reflecting this and, like they, you know, the influencer partnerships at the time were focused around generating content, getting impressions, emv, like just really brand awareness, and not really measuring new customer revenue from influencers Like that was the focus at the time. And the reason I think that it was the focus is because at the time, meta was a really cheap and scalable and reliable and consistent acquisition channel. Not to say that it's not a scalable acquisition channel today, but it's just changed a lot and it's more expensive and it's less reliable and there's more external factors and things can change and it could totally ruin your business if you're too dependent on it.

Speaker 3 7:35

So the shift that's happened with influencer marketing is that it's become more customer acquisition focused. When a brand partner is an influencer, they care less about how many impressions you got and they care more about how much new incremental revenue was generated from the partnership. And so, with the shift that affiliate marketing has had, influencer marketing has made a similar shift, where they kind of have merged together to an extent, because now with influencer partnerships, the brand's main focus is new customer acquisition and attributable revenue. They need an attribution system for that, which is affiliate marketing. So that's kind of the intersection of where they've met and Social Snowball is kind of like the platform in that intersection I love that?

Speaker 2 8:19

Yeah, I think that a lot of brands for lack of a better word have gotten fed up with influencers, right, who have all these? They, they tout all of these big numbers and impressions.

Speaker 2 8:31

And it's like what are you doing for me, Like, what are you actually adding to my business? So, um, you know, I I'm I'm happy to see something happening there to help with the attribution side of that, and it's holding these influencers more accountable for the work that they're doing. Right, and I think there's a lot of upside there too. Like, the good ones can make a lot more than you know. Give me a thousand dollars to do a post and a reel and to give you a shout out on my Instagram. I think there's a lot more upside there as well, so that's awesome.

Speaker 3 9:05

Yeah, no, totally agree, and I mean it's more than just you know. My wild idea and this platform that we built, like this is what brands care about. Now they're searching for new acquisition channels and even if it's just like 10% or you know, 15, 20% of your new customer acquisition is coming from a channel that's not meta, whether that's influencer or something else. Like that's really powerful on a day where metas, cpms go crazy and you don't know why, at least you can kind of hedge that with like 20% of new customers coming from a channel that's unrelated. So I think that's like the shift happening across the entire e-commerce landscape and influencer is affected very heavily For sure.

Speaker 2 9:42

Cool, awesome. So, for those who are new to all of this, what would you say? The key benefits are to building and running an affiliate marketing program.

Speaker 3 9:53

So one is what we just touched on that you can diversify your customer acquisition and it's just a safe thing to do, Just like you would diversify your portfolio of investments, so that if one thing goes to shit, it doesn't ruin your entire net worth. This is similar, and with Influencer and Affiliate. What's cool about it is it's an owned acquisition channel. So, unlike Meta and Google and really any other paid ads channel where there's, it's an external third party acquisition channel. You own your influencer relationships. You own your list of affiliates. You own that relationship. Nobody could take that away from you. No platform can take that away from you. Maybe Instagram could change something or TikTok could change something, but you still own that relationship with that influencer or you know any type of affiliate, and that's just really. I mean, it's the same thing.

Speaker 3 10:37

We always talk with retention channels, right, Like oh, your email and SMS list is an owned retention, like it's an owned channel. You could have an owned acquisition channel too. It's not just a retention thing. An influencer, affiliate, ambassador, partnerships are a channel that you own, which is incredibly powerful. So it's just nice.

Speaker 3 10:58

It's comforting as a business owner to know that some of your new customer acquisition can come from something that's less affected by external factors that you have no control over. So that's one, and then two. It's just like overall decreasing acquisition costs, Like what you spend to acquire a customer through an influencer affiliate. It's like you could choose what. That is right. Either you're going to get sales or you don't, but you choose the CPA. It's like manual bidding you set a commission for, let's say, $10 per referred order from an ambassador or affiliate, and either people are going to be motivated to acquire you customers at that price or they're not, but you have control over that. So it's not like one day you open up Facebook and you're like, what, how did our CPAs double? That's not going to happen with affiliates, so it's it's. I would say those are like the two, the two biggest benefits, honestly, that's awesome.

Speaker 2 11:41

I have never thought about this as an channel. I love that you bring that up right. I mean, even if Tik TOK goes away at the end of the year, right? If? If the U? S shuts them down, these influencers have an audience and they're probably going to follow them to the next thing, right? And so that's a fascinating angle and thought I love that. That is perfect. So let's talk now about kind of the setup. So, when a brand decides I'm going to do this and I need to set this up, what are the essential steps or things that they need to be thinking about to make sure that this goes smooth and that they have the best chance of success?

Customer Acquisition Strategies Through Affiliates

Speaker 3 12:24

Yeah, well, I think there's. You know, within the umbrella of like a modern affiliate we're talking, there's multiple programs you could set up and some of them are easier than others, right? So like the lowest hanging fruit, to start with, would be turning customers into affiliates and this is something that we help a lot of brands do where, essentially, instead of just giving your customers like a referral program where it's like you could get a coupon if you enter your friend's email address like it's super outdated, nobody really uses, that, it never generates more than like one percent of a brand's gmv you could actually treat your customers as affiliates and let them become an actual acquisition channel for you. And what I mean by that is actually giving them links and codes that they could share, being able to reward them in cash instead of just a coupon, so that if they're not planning their next purchase, they still have an incentive to refer a friend and if they've referred three friends, they still have an incentive to refer a fourth, because it's not like they just have a bunch of coupons saving it, saving an account that like lose value the more referrals they make. So if you treat them as affiliates and give them an incentive structure that's aligned with the goal of customer acquisition. You can actually get a lot of referrals out of your customers and people don't realize this like beyond just paying them in cash, you could also have like tiers and bonuses. Like after they refer five friends, you send them a gift. When they 20 friends, you give them a higher commission. When they refer 50 friends, you give them a super high value gift.

Speaker 3 13:38

Things like this keep them motivated and you could actually, instead of just having your customers enter one email address for their friend that they're never going to see because who even checks their email these days you could actually have your customers refer friends at scale and make that a really meaningful channel. And the cool thing about that is it's very low hanging fruit in the sense that it's very set in for Get it. So there's like some steps you need to take to set it up, which would be, like you know, putting a widget on the thank you page that says, like you know, here's your link to share with friends, integrating with you know, klaviyo or whatever email tool you're using, so that you could like send the links and codes post-purchase. There's light setup like that, but once it's done, it just runs on its own. It's not as high maintenance as some of the other programs.

Speaker 3 14:20

If brands just want to dip their toes, I would recommend that the second thing would be more of a proper influencer seeding program where you're sending out gifts to influencers at scale and then enrolling them in your affiliate program so that they're incentivized to not only post but actually generate sales. Along with the post, that one is a little bit more work because you have to find the influencers and reach out to them and there's a little bit of more management that goes into it. But it could be extremely powerful as well. Got it Cool.

Speaker 3 15:09

Let's talk about brand like our affiliate programs good for companies that are just starting out that don't have a customer list or are hands of influencers. Get them posting, build some hype, also be driving sales at the same time, which is you know what's really powerful. Of course, that's valuable when you're a new brand starting out and it'll just help your other efforts, like, even if you're still relying really heavily on paid in the beginning, just having your product in the hands of influencers and people start seeing it everywhere. It's only going to boost everything. So that's why I recommend that, for if you're starting out or if you've been around forever, you should be seeding always, then turning customers into affiliates. You should probably wait until you have enough customers where that's going to be meaningful, so I don't know what the magic number is. Maybe once you're getting like 100 customers a month or something like that, at that point you should probably be creating them affiliate links.

Speaker 2 15:56

Got it Cool. Do you open that up to all of your customers or do you have a way to be able to identify which customers have the most social following and the best opportunity?

Speaker 3 16:06

We open it up to everyone. I mean, theoretically, the worst it could do is not generate a lot of new customers. But even if it's just running and it generates you five new customers a month or something, obviously that's not great. Again, you're only paying out commission if someone refers a friend successfully, so it's kind of like a risk-free channel in that sense. So there's no reason not to do it, even when you're a super small brand. The only reason I say that is because it's better to wait a little bit is because, if you're a super small brand, the only reason I say that is because, like, it's better to wait a little bit is because if you're a super small brand, there's probably things you could spend the time on that you would spend to launch that post-purchase program that would have a higher ROI in a shorter period of time. Got it Cool?

Optimizing Affiliate Programs for Best Results

Speaker 2 16:47

I love that you bring up time right, cause you're spending time or you're spending money for someone to manage this, and so you've got to figure out how to deploy that to where you're going to get the best return Perfect, cool. So once we're up and going, we've got an affiliate program going, we've got it launched, can you share some tips and some tricks on how to optimize an affiliate program for the best results?

Speaker 3 17:12

Yeah, definitely. So there's a few. There's a few things you can do that go a long way. So one you want to integrate with your ESP, like Klaviyo or whatever you're using to send emails, so that you can have frequent points of contact with the influencers or any type of affiliate on autopilot. You don't have to go in every week, it takes too much time. So you could set up flows that trigger when someone joins a program or when they refer X amount of sales, those kinds of things. And then it could be a welcome package explaining how the program works and showing types of content that have worked in the past. It could be inspirational content showcasing an affiliate that made a lot of money last month and it'll just kind of send to everyone to inspire them to post more. It could explain how the tiers work so that when they know when they hit 10 referrals, they unlock this work, so that when they know when they were hit 10 referrals, they unlock this. When they hit 50 referrals, they unlock this. Just things to kind of keep them motivated. You definitely want to enroll them in some sort of sequence with emails that is just going to educate, inspire and remind them about the program. That'd be one.

Speaker 3 18:05

Another thing is giveaways. So you could have like just another thing to keep affiliates engaged, because it's one thing if an influencer posts once or a customer posts once and then forgets, you want them to continue posting and, like, continue driving sales month over month. So something that brands do is like they'll enter everyone who refers over x amount of sales per month in a giveaway. So every month it'll reset and then you have to hit, let's say, three referrals or five referrals or whatever, and then if you hit that everyone who hits that within that month gets entered in a giveaway to win like a super high value product or whatever you know is going to your customers are going to care, or your affiliates, in this case, are going to care about Other things.

Speaker 3 18:41

Like I mean with your customer affiliates in particular, you have to leverage every touch point you have with that customer to remind them about the referral program if you want to maximize engagement. So something I've seen brands do really well is implement a macro with their customer service team to basically remind customers about the referral program after the end of every positive customer interaction. So if a customer writes in and they're like where's my order and the customer service is like you know here it is. Whatever it gets all resolved Before they close that conversation, they can be like hey, by the way, here's the affiliate code we already created for you, greg123. Just a reminder every time you share this and a friend buys, we'll send you $10. And if you have 300 customer service tickets a day, that's 300 additional touch points where a customer is happy interacting with your brand, and you could plug the referral program, and little things like that definitely make a difference.

Speaker 2 19:27

Interesting. Okay, do you see a lot of brands work out of that call to action into their new customer workflows or are they kind of standalone campaigns that are going out and educating and trying to get them to join?

Speaker 3 19:43

it's often within their like new customer workflows, like so for their post-purchase email. So you can, for example, you can add, like a universal content block in klaviyo that they could add to the footer of every email. That's like, by the way way, here's your referral code already or your link, whatever already generated. Every time you share it we'll send you $10. And that could just be in every post-purchase email. There's no additional steps for them to need to like fill out a form or anything. Their link is already created. They could copy it, paste it, share it across socials, whatever they want, right away. And then you know, usually there's dedicated emails as well. So you know, maybe one or two post-purchase and then definitely a bunch more after they receive the product and have been using the product or consuming the product. You definitely want to push for referrals pretty hard at that point. So you'll probably do some dedicated emails that are just like again these inspirational content showing how much another affiliate has earned or just explaining more how the program works and that kind of stuff. That's very cool.

Speaker 2 20:32

Awesome. Do you have any like really cool case studies or examples that you could share with us?

Speaker 3 20:40

Sure One that comes to mind that's done a few of these strategies we talked about is a company called the Pod Company. It's like a cold plunge company and I think they sell like saunas and other like wellness products. All the rage, the cold plungers Yep, yes, exactly. So, as you can imagine, a very active community built around that brand who loves talking about cold plunging and sharing. So their customer and influencer affiliate programs do incredibly well. They have their customer service team plugging the program at the end of every customer conversation. I think they created a macro in Gorgias and all their CS reps are trained on how to use it and when to use it and that does really well. And they're doing a giveaway. So for them it's a really high ticket product. So every time someone gets one referral within a one month period, they get entered into the giveaway to win, I think, a free sauna or something.

Speaker 3 21:31

So it's just you know, it's just like if they could get 50 people. I mean they definitely get way more than that, but if they get 50 people to refer one friend each month and then again the next month, and then again the next month because they know they get entered in that giveaway, I mean just the referrals per customer or per whatever affiliate maybe this is for influencers too can just skyrocket it from from one to potentially, you know, 10 plus, like it just makes a huge difference. It snowballs.

Speaker 2 21:57

There you go it snowballs Does that is that word familiar to you? Exactly, that's funny, Um cool. That's a great example. Do you have any others?

Speaker 3 22:10

Yeah, I mean there's some brands who have implemented some really interesting strategies. Um, another one that's pretty cool is Tabs Chocolate. It's like this aphrodisiac chocolate, literally like sex chocolate. Super interesting product. But I think they have trouble advertising on a lot of social platforms because of their category and so they set up a really interesting program where they would have creators instead of sharing content for the brand on their own social channels, they would make new social pages that are all branded as tabs chocolate. So one would be like tabs underscore chocolate, one would be like tabs chocolate underscore. If you go on tiktok and search tabs chocolate and go to the users tab, you'll see thousands, literally thousands.

Speaker 2 22:49

I've seen brands do that where they have so many, and I've never, I've never known why that makes sense.

Speaker 3 22:55

Yeah, so all of those are individual creators as affiliates, so they'll all have like an affiliate link in their bio and they'll create a ton of content for the brand branded like as the brand essentially, and they'll post it across short form platforms, not just tiktok, but also instagram uh for uh reels and youtube for shorts. And if they, you and if you have 50 creators that create a page on Instagram, youtube and TikTok, that's 450. And they each post three times per day.

Speaker 2 23:25

That's 450 posts a day If you repurpose it, it is a blitz, it's just a big blitz.

Speaker 3 23:30

It's a blitz, yeah, it's just takeover and if you have 450 pieces of content per day going out into short form platforms, some is going to go viral, just it will. So, yeah, that's a really interesting one. I've seen Fascinating.

Speaker 2 23:42

How does your technology work with, like TikTok shops, because I know that's starting to blow up right and people are working with collaborators and compensating them as like an affiliate through TikTok shops. Does your platform integrate with TikTok?

Speaker 3 23:56

It doesn't. As of now, I would say TikTok shop is kind of more like cause. Tiktok shop is almost like Amazon in the sense that it's it's. It's like a third party channel where you don't get any of the customer data. So, although TikTok shop works really well for a lot of, for a lot of brands at least, um, it's it's you don't want to again, it's like kind of you don't want to put too many eggs in that basket because if anything happens to TikTok or you know, even if it doesn't like you're not getting the customer data. It's not really true. Dtc, it's like a separate sales channel. The same way Amazon. Don't take away affiliate and influencer from your D2C, because that's still like you still need to optimize your D2C channel as well. At the same time, like you should be running both realistically. Got it Cool.

Affiliate Marketing Trends and Solutions

Speaker 2 24:43

All right, kind of. As we're wrapping up here, the last two questions that I like to ask all of our guests is so the first one is we're about halfway through the year. Is we're about halfway through the year? So what predictions do you have, as we kind of end the year and then go into 2025, when it comes to affiliate marketing? Good question.

Speaker 3 25:03

Really good question. Well, I see the trend that started to happen continuing and that trend is like whoever can be an affiliate is becoming more and more democratized to the point where anyone can be an affiliate. So it started as just like professional affiliates that are like publishers and bloggers and websites. Then it became like really big influencers, then it's like micro influencers, then it's like ambassadors, it's like now, customers Realistically anyone can be an affiliate and it's not just you know me and Social Snowball that support that theory.

Speaker 3 25:32

Like even with TikTok shop, like you were talking about, like we only need to have now a thousand followers to be able to be an affiliate for TikTok shop, for any brand on there. So that's like it's only moving more and more in that direction. And whether it's TikTok shop or a D2C affiliate program or whatever affiliate program you're running, anyone can be an affiliate as long as they could drive sales. And I think the gatekeeping of affiliate programs is going to be less and less and less and I think you know with that there's going to be maybe new types of fraud that come up and then there's going to be new technology that can prevent it because you know so many people are going to be, have access to become affiliates, which is, like you know, kind of already happening now. So I see that trend definitely continuing throughout the year.

Speaker 2 26:10

Fascinating. I know that when I was doing B2B lead gen affiliate stuff, affiliate fraud was humongous. Are you seeing a lot of fraud in the D2C space right now?

Speaker 3 26:20

I'd say the biggest type of fraud that happens which is actually something that we have a really cool solution for but the biggest type of fraud across the industry that happens is coupon abuse like codes getting on coupon sites or like honey getting leaked, and then not only are you giving out discounts that weren't meant for those customers, but then you're paying a commission to the affiliate when it's like they didn't even drive the sale, so that like can destroy your margins. And so what we've built for that is basically a tool called Safe Links, which is like a coupon code replacement, so affiliates would share this link instead of a code, and it looks just like a normal affiliate link. You could like customize it and shorten it like any affiliate link, but how it works is every time a shopper clicks on that link and it gets taken to your storefront in real time, a unique, single use discount code will be generated from Shopify and given to the customer to use during their shopping session. So if an influencer posts like use my link for a discount or click here to get a discount, and 10 people click on the link, everyone will get the same discount, but they'll all be unique codes and they'll all be single use code.

Speaker 3 27:18

So if any of those codes were to get scraped by honey or leaked to a coupon site, it doesn't matter, because they're all single use codes and the influencer or affiliate can still share a discount with their audience at scale without having to worry about any attribution discrepancies from leak um. So that's I mean. I mean obviously safe links is great for the brands using social snowball. For other brands, like I have seen code leaks be a reason where they're just like I'm not even going to bother running an affiliate program, especially brands that are like high eight, low, nine figures, like it's when you, when a code leaks and it's an affiliate code and you don't catch it and you're paying commissions like you can lose six figures, like it could be a serious loss. So it matters Wow.

Speaker 2 27:55

Well, that's awesome that you provided that solution that, in and of itself, should pay dividends for a long, long, long time. So that's awesome. What do you, in terms of kind of wrapping up, what other final words of wisdom do you have for anyone who's thinking about doing affiliate or is actively, you know, engaged in affiliate marketing?

Speaker 3 28:16

Yeah, I mean I would just say there's a lot of little incremental things you could do that can make a big difference. So if you're not doing anything, something as simple as turning customers into affiliates could add 10% of GMV. I've seen that happen over and over again with brands, especially the ones that have a passionate customer base, or a cold plunge or something like that. If you are running an affiliate program already little things that we talked about, like the email sequences, the giveaways, training your CS team, like those can change. If you're, let's say, you're already generating 10% of GMV from affiliates, that could change it to maybe 15. And like that makes a huge difference. And eventually, when you have 15, 20, 30% of GMV coming from an acquisition channel, that's something you own, that's not meta. Your business is just in a much safer place than it's ever been before. So those little tweaks can really go a long way.

Speaker 2 29:03

That's awesome. So, in short, I'm well. I'm not even going to summarize, I'm just going to say just do it right, there's nothing to lose. Just do it, Would you agree?

Speaker 2 29:13

100, 100 awesome, cool man. Well, thank you. Thank you for taking time out of your day. I know you're traveling. Um, that was a really, really awesome discussion. Yeah, thank you for having me. You're so welcome. Um, in our next episode, I'm going to be chatting with madeline banat, director of marketing for GoBeKids. We are going to be talking about how she helped GoBeKids go from zero to 40 million views on their social channels by working with influencers. There we go, go figure. It's going to be a really awesome discussion. I'm excited to hear how they did that. So that's it for today. I mean, hopefully you've taken like, you've learned something amazing today you can take that, make a plan and execute against it and take massive action this year. That's my hope for all of our discussions. So thank you all for joining and we will catch you next time. Thank you.