[EO Minnesota] Building Scalable, Strategic Affiliate Partnerships With Rick Gardiner

Rick Gardiner is the Founder and CEO of iAffiliate Management, a leading performance marketing agency that helps DTC e-commerce brands increase revenue through strategic affiliate and partnership marketing. Under Rick’s leadership, iAffiliate Management has worked with major brands, like Groupon, Hydro Flask, and Home Chef, helping clients fuel growth and build best-in-class affiliate programs over the agency’s 16-plus years in business.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[03:53] Why affiliate marketing has a bigger seat at the table now
[05:23] How Rick Gardiner’s entrepreneurial roots shaped his marketing journey
[09:05] What makes content and review sites powerful affiliate partners
[13:59] Top tech tools for tracking, compliance, and affiliate management
[16:48] The diverse types of valuable affiliate partnerships
[24:25] How card-linked offers unlock unique customer targeting power
[31:38] Structuring affiliate commissions around margins, ROI, and customer value
[33:32] What referral windows work best and why attribution impacts affiliate trust
[43:33] Why long-term relationships and personal connections drive sustainable partnerships

In this episode…

Affiliate marketing looks simple from the outside, but most brands discover the hard way that scale doesn’t come from affiliate links alone. Real growth happens when partnerships are intentional, aligned, and built for the long game. So what does it actually take to turn affiliates into part of a sustainable growth engine?

For Rick Gardiner, the key lies in treating affiliate marketing as a relationship-driven strategy, not a transactional tactic. Drawing from his experience as a long-time affiliate marketing strategist, he explains that the strongest programs are built around trust, alignment, and clear incentives, much like any high-performing partnership. When brands focus on quality over volume, affiliate alliances become a durable advantage instead of a short-term experiment.

In this episode of the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz is joined by Rick Gardiner, Founder and CEO of iAffiliate Management, to discuss building scalable, strategic affiliate partnerships. They explore how affiliate marketing has evolved, what separates high-impact partners from the rest, and how brands can avoid common pitfalls like cannibalization. Rick also shares advice on structuring partnerships that drive long-term growth while staying compliant and aligned.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Quotable Moments

“At the end of the day, it’s really about building valuable, trusted, strategic brand partnerships and helping brands grow and scale.”
“Learning how to sell and build relationships with people is really a foundational pillar of building a business.”
“There’s no bad partnerships or partners, there’s just bad partnerships.”
“Affiliate marketing is really a payment model and a payment method, so it’s all performance-based.”
“Having the right partners is almost a competitive differentiation or moat, if you will.”

Action Steps

Build affiliate partnerships intentionally: Treating affiliates as strategic partners creates stronger alignment, trust, and long-term revenue growth.
Focus on quality over quantity when recruiting affiliates: Prioritizing the right partners leads to more consistent performance and less channel noise.
Set clear rules and expectations upfront: Well-defined guidelines prevent conflicts, reduce cannibalization, and protect brand integrity.
Align incentives with business goals: Structuring commissions around outcomes like new customers ensures affiliates drive meaningful growth.
Invest in ongoing communication and optimization: Regular collaboration helps partnerships evolve, adapt to market changes, and scale effectively.

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Episode Transcript:

Intro: 00:02

Welcome to the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, where we feature top founders and entrepreneurs and their journey. Now let’s get started with the show.

Jeremy Weisz: 00:12

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, Founder of InspiredInsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. I’ve Rick Gardiner, you can check him out at iaffiliatemanagement.com. Rick, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out. Now.

Rick’s going to go deep into relationships, strategic relationships, and affiliates and how you can have someone else. In my opinion, Rick, it’s a shortcut for brands, right? Because someone has an inborn audience. Their audience already knows, likes and trusts them. So they’re promoting a brand.

Makes perfect sense. So I’m not sure why everyone doesn’t do it. Maybe you’ll explain why, but a couple of things. Because we met through EO. There’s some really interesting interviews with other EO members.

Anthony Standifer you. Check it out. He’s the Co-founder of MC Group. They’re a contract manufacturer specializing in health and beauty and personal care. Right.

And so I’m like, Rick and Anthony should know each other. I’m sure there’s ways to collaborate also. Noah Rosenfarb of Wealth Thrive. He talks about reducing taxes and building a predictable income and the inner workings of a high growth agency with Wes Matthews. And he grew a really large agency, sold it, and it was an interesting conversation.

Check out that and more on InspiredInsider.com. This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25, we help businesses connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. We do that by one or an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do the strategy, accountability, and the full execution and production.

And number two, we’re an easy button for our company’s gifting. So we make gifting staying top of mind for clients, partners, prospects, even Staff from a culture perspective. Simple, easy and affordable. You just give us the addresses. We do everything else and it’s not like a one off gift.

Rick. It’s like, think three gifts a year for 4 to 5 years. And so we kind of call ourselves the magic elves that run in the background and make it stress free for companies to build amazing relationships. You know, for me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. And I always look at ways on how I can give to those relationships.

And I found no better way over the past 17 years to profile the people I admire and share with the world what they’re working on on my podcast, and to send them sweet treats in the mail. So go to rise25.com or email support@rise25.com. I am really excited. Rick Gardiner is Founder and CEO of iAffiliate Management. They’re a leading affiliate marketing and partner marketing agency and they help direct to consumer ecommerce brands scale revenue.

They do that by cultivating best in class affiliate partnerships with some top content review sites, mass media publications, and other really high value affiliate partners. Rick was a former Division one swimmer. Much respect there. I mean, you have to have super amount of discipline. I remember, Rick, I did not want to do swimming growing up, which was a mistake because there was like people were waking up at like four in the morning to like, get in a cold pool.

That did not seem pleasurable at all to me. Now I swim six days a week, so I should have gotten into it sooner. But he’s been in the affiliate, you know, and partner marketing world for over 20 years, and he really helps marketing leaders and brands rethink how affiliate can fit into their marketing mix and add value. So Rick, thanks for joining me.

Rick Gardiner: 03:44

Thanks for having me, Jeremy.

Jeremy Weisz: 03:46

So let’s start off, I’m going to pull up your site here. Just talk about for a second I affiliate management and what you do.

Rick Gardiner: 03:53

Yeah. So our agency we’ve been around for 16 plus years. Kind of started out in working primarily with digital goods, software, software, SaaS and have expanded into some other categories from apparel to food and beverage. But, you know, our core focus has always been affiliate marketing. I say it with love that we’ve been doing affiliate marketing before.

Affiliate marketing is cool, but it’s definitely evolved and I think getting a bigger seat at the table, and I think the impact and outcomes that it can influence is also expanded. So, you know, primarily working with B2C e-commerce brands, we also help brands drive and scale more revenue through their marketplace, you know, Amazon, Walmart Marketplace stores, TikTok shop and yeah, but at the end of the day, it’s really about building valuable, trusted, strategic brand partnerships and helping brands grow and scale.

Jeremy Weisz: 04:57

We’ll talk about how companies can use these partnerships. But I do. It’s interesting to me how did you even get into this? Right? Because I know, obviously you were a swimmer. You studied speech communication.

I’m not sure if you were growing up. I want to be an agency owner when I grow up or something like that. But what? How’d you get into this line of work?

Rick Gardiner: 05:23

Yeah. So I came up, grew up in a very entrepreneurial family. So my dad started and exited a publicly traded company. And my mom also was.

Jeremy Weisz: 05:35

Was it what.

Rick Gardiner: 05:36

Did it do? It was you can think of it as like Amazon’s recommendation technology. So they, you know, started around the same time Amazon had the whole ecosystem. But they were kind of a plug in that would cross-sell make product recommendations to increase basket.

Jeremy Weisz: 05:53

If you got this, you’d also like this type of.

Rick Gardiner: 05:56

Other shoppers have also bought this. Exactly. So that was kind of their core technology smart. But yeah. So just kind of always knew I wanted to, you know, be an entrepreneur, own my own business, went through school, went to corporate America route, learned a ton and kind of.

Jeremy Weisz: 06:15

Did your dad give you any advice growing up? Like what? What was he telling you to do? Obviously he was an entrepreneur was he’s like, go get a job at corporate. Maybe you should start your own right off the bat.

What was what was his advice?

Rick Gardiner: 06:28

I think the advice has always been, you know, given my personality and and everything that goes with that, you know, something in the realm of sales and marketing would always be good. Didn’t really have kind of a path. But I think, you know, regardless, you know, learning how to sell and build relationships with people is really kind of a foundational pillar of of building a business regardless of, of, you know, what you’re doing. So that’s, you know, kind of growing up and also, as I was in my career in the corporate America side, it’s always been in the sales and marketing side. Where I got introduced to affiliate marketing was when I was working with digital River, which is an e-commerce platform or technology company that sadly just shuttered their doors last year.

But, you know, we I was brought on to help build out and grow their flagship affiliate network. So I got to kind of see behind the curtain, understand the publisher partnership side from the affiliates, working with them and understanding how their different business models worked, but also from the advertiser and merchant side and also from a network and technology side. How do we, you know, track, report, attribute and pay partners for the the sales that they’re driving. So it was really, really educational. It was probably a little bit intimidating.

I knew nothing about affiliate marketing. And my wife, I would tell her I, you know, I took that job 30 days at a time, like I knew nothing about it. But I still have a job for 30 days in four years later, you know, five years later was at the company and really just grew to love the industry and kind of what it meant and how it was having a positive impact for a lot of people, both, you know, from the big company and merchant side, but also at the time, a lot of just kind of bootstrapped entrepreneur affiliates that were, you know, doing content. They had, you know, email lists or other promotional methods that they were using to make a living. And I found that really inspirational.

And, you know, at at one point decided I wanted to venture out on my own and start an agency. And here we are today.

Jeremy Weisz: 08:49

And you? I’m sure you built a lot of relationships through that. I’m curious. At that time, you cut your teeth at digital River. What worked at that time that you you found and then what did not work at that time, maybe that surprised you.

Rick Gardiner: 09:05

What worked? I think content has always been a big piece, and it’s taken all shapes and forms. I think, you know, looking at the top ten review type sites out there and kind of getting products and brands included in those write ups and roundups has always been a, you know, what, what brands are a lot really interested in is always worked well, you know, organic, SEO driven traffic’s always been a big driver of of sales and, you know, revenue. And I think back in the early days, it was also very much the, the Wild West. We didn’t have as much visibility into attribution and clickstream and how different channels were interacting throughout that consumer journey.

So, you know, you’d have an affiliate that, you know, you would talk to maybe or maybe not. And all of a sudden they’re coming out of the gates driving ten, $20,000 a month. And, you know, you want to understand how they’re generating that traffic in those sales. But on the flip side of that, some people are also, you know, at least at the time, were a little bit afraid to look under the hood and really understand it because it could be, you know, not as good as they had thought. So it was a good learning experience.

I think, you know, when it comes to the compliance aspect of the industry, understanding, you know, how the traffic, how the sales are being originated, making sure that they’re, you know, truly incremental and not just kind of robbing Peter to pay Paul situation was really interesting. And I think, you know, one thing I did learn that. Definitely. Worked, but also was detrimental in some cases was paid search and that that you know, having affiliates that were running paid search for brands and you know one done well and and strategically it can really be a powerful partnership. But again early days wild West not having as much visibility.

There’s a lot of cannibalization and paid search affiliates that were basically kind of overriding the brand ads, which was creating conflicts and issues and almost a turf war in the marketing department of.

[Continue to Page 2]

Jeremy Weisz: 11:22

I mean, the brands, like they’re doing paid search themselves, and then the other people are showing above them, they’re basically competing against themselves and then paying out the commission.

Rick Gardiner: 11:32

Exactly. Which is not ideal. So again, how.

Jeremy Weisz: 11:36

Do you navigate that? You want to encourage people? I mean, they’re going to spend their hard earned money and drive traffic to it. How do you navigate that? If I’m sure some brands maybe don’t do as much paid search, so it doesn’t really matter.

But the ones that are, how do you navigate and encourage people to still run their own campaigns unpaid, or do you tell them not to?

Rick Gardiner: 11:57

Well, I think I have a mantra. There’s no bad partnerships or partners, there’s just bad partnerships. So it’s really how you structure and kind of architect the partnership and and making sure that you’re creating that alignment. And using the paid search example, there’s different kind of safeguards that you can put in place, such as bid caps where you won’t let you know the part, the affiliate won’t be able to bid over a certain, you know, price point per click. We’ve broken that down by geography.

So letting affiliates do specific markets, GEOs, locales or even by search engine so they can be in Google, but they can’t be on MSN or Bing or some of the other platform search engines. So there’s a lot of different ways to do it. And I think what we found to be most successful is to do a very orchestrated and coordinated strategy where, you know, you’re you’re plugging the gaps or letting the affiliates play in the spaces where maybe the brand is struggling and, you know, affiliates are only making money when they’re converting. And so they tend to be very innovative and creative. And so they tend to adapt and evolve to make it work.

And if not, you know, they’re not going to keep pouring money into it. So there’s definitely a balance. But I’ve seen some really successful partnerships come out of it. And you know, again, it’s there’s a lot more tools as well available today to just help manage and have better insight into where these affiliate partners are doing paid search to make sure there’s no overlap or cannibalization.

Jeremy Weisz: 13:36

I do want to talk about you mentioned because in my mind, I always wanted to ask you about compliance and regulation. So I do want to get into that. And what makes these creators happy as well. But you mentioned some software tools. What are some things that are out there that you think people should look at as far as the tech tech side goes?

Rick Gardiner: 13:59

You know, there’s there’s on the paid search side, there’s tools like Brand Verity, the Search Monitor that do a great job at, you know, just giving brands and marketers insights into who’s bidding on their terms. So those are great tools to use on that front. You know, there’s other FTC regulations that, you know, disclosures that need to have, you know, affiliates need to have in place that they’re promoting a brand either as a sponsored content piece or that they’re earning commission. You’ve probably seen those disclosures at the top of of articles and reviews saying that, hey, when you click through our our link, you know, we earn commission. Learn more.

So, you know, there’s there’s tools out there that help manage that. We’ve also leveraged or built some of our own proprietary tools that we use to manage that internally. But that’s been, you know, the technology and the tech side of the industry is, you know, come a long way. And there’s a lot more tools available for brands and agencies to, you know, truly justify and make sure that the partnerships and partners that they’re working with, you know, are aligned with the overall outcomes and goals that they’re looking to achieve together.

Jeremy Weisz: 15:15

Yeah. I’m curious on your side when you’re working with someone and maybe, maybe we’ll take Tommy John as an example. Maybe not. You’ll tell me. But like when you go in, obviously there has to be tracking in place.

There has to be payments in place. Are you installing all these things like for the brand or typically do they come to you and they already have these things in place with the tracking and the payment systems and things like that.

Rick Gardiner: 15:39

Yeah, sometimes they’re already working with an affiliate network or tracking platform. So that’s really us just coming in, making sure things are set up correctly and that we’re we have the tightest integration, best integration according to best practices and how we do things. In some cases, we are helping them kind of stand up a new program. So, you know, we’re fortunate enough to have really great relationships with a number of affiliate networks and platforms out there. Where we can streamline that process for the brand very easily and kind of pay the project manager role of just making sure things are moving forward.

And things are getting set up correctly. So it’s kind of two buckets.

Jeremy Weisz: 16:21

Yeah. Let’s talk about I wanted to get into I’ll get into some of those other questions like, you know, compliance regulation. But I know there’s different types of affiliate partnerships. I don’t know if you want to walk us through some of those because I know there’s a lot of misconceptions out there when they heard. People hear the term affiliate and what that is.

So what are some of the types. And we can maybe talk through some examples.

Rick Gardiner: 16:48

Yeah. Affiliate is a very broad term depending on the industry you’re you’re working in. But you know, as it relates to our universe, I think a lot of people are familiar with kind of the foundational affiliates, you know, deal sites, loyalty, cash back content, coupon. You know, where we really get excited and is really on some of these emerging and growth partnerships. That’s that’s what we call them.

And those tend to be some of the influencers, you know, technology partners, on site technology partners, strategic B2B partnerships. So really tapping working with another brand to tap into a shared audience or customer segment.

Jeremy Weisz: 17:32

What does that look like typically?

Rick Gardiner: 17:35

Well, an example would be we worked with a VPN brand very early on in agency anchorfree, and we did a cross promotion with Malwarebytes, where basically we did a email exchange where we did some cross promotion of email sends. So, you know, that’s one example. You know, we can do different brand bundles and things like that collaboratively. You know, at the end of the day, affiliate marketing is really a payment model and a payment method. So it’s all performance based and and easily trackable and attributable to revenue.

And so really it’s the sky’s the limit in terms of the types of B2B partnerships you can do. The the most important thing is that it’s relevant to your your tapping into the right customer segments. And and audiences.

Jeremy Weisz: 18:31

Are there certain segments that you’re focused in on. I remember like to your point, I think that’s like the smartest thing someone could do. Like because I don’t remember which product it was because I buy a lot of protein related products, but I don’t remember it was Magic Spoon, like the cereal or three wishes or something, but I definitely got some marketing material from another like protein chip company and I’m like, oh, I was interested in it because, you know, I was a customer of his other company. I wasn’t like, why are they sending this to me? I was actually interested in the, in the, those type of products.

So I think it’s it’s a smart move. And they probably spent a lot of money acquiring those customers, and they could probably make some money back up promoting a similar, you know, type of product. And I’m sure that that company is doing the same for them. So it seems like a smart move.

Rick Gardiner: 19:18

Yeah, we see this a lot in the the software space too. I mean health, the the health and wellness space is super competitive and everybody’s looking for that edge and way to kind of break out of the noise. So there’s a lot of collaboration, and especially if you have a two different brands that are really kind of helping support a specific goal or health initiative, you can create some some really good momentum. But, you know, for, for software, for on the digital side, free products, you know, using the free version of an app, you know, you may see ads for other brands or merchants. Sometimes those are, you know, affiliate links that are being used so they can generate revenue passively through the channel.

But, you know, it’s very low risk. You know, you only pay for the the actions and conversions you’re looking to drive. So it is it is surprising that more brands aren’t doing it. But we’ve definitely seen significant growth just with increasing ad spend costs. You know, paid costs going through the roof, having less ability to target through some of the different social media platforms, things of that nature.

So it’s definitely getting more attention and getting a bigger seat at the marketing table.

Jeremy Weisz: 20:36

Rick, talk about the evolution of your type of client from when you started. What were some of the milestone type clients you work with, and then what type of clients do you work with now?

Rick Gardiner: 20:46

Yeah, one of our first kind of lighthouse clients was Groupon, when they were just launching an affiliate program, and I was introduced to them through a sales person that I worked with at a startup right out of college, and they were just looking for help of, you know, how do we do this? How do we set it up? And so their.

Jeremy Weisz: 21:06

Whole model is that too, I mean, you know, being in Chicago, I saw when Groupon first was putting out their first few deals, I mean, even their partnerships are affiliate. I mean, they’re promoting their whole model is affiliates essentially.

Rick Gardiner: 21:19

So yeah, they they were kind of a trailblazer into the whole retail media segment, too, when they started promoting other brands, and it wasn’t necessarily a Groupon because it’s kind of separate channels within their business, or at least it was at the time. You know, where they have, you know, their their daily deals, local deals that are, you know, kind of brokered specifically through the platform. But then they were also offering other discounts and deals, you know, as basically an affiliate of these other merchants. So, yeah, they were one of the first and kind of led the way in that whole retail media space.

Jeremy Weisz: 22:00

What kind of things were you advising them?

Rick Gardiner: 22:04

We were advising them against it actually initially because of just the leakage of, you know, you have somebody coming to our site through maybe an affiliate link, and then they’re going to click through an affiliate link on Groupon and go to a different brand that cuts the affiliate out so it can make some waves and and not the good ones. So you know that that was kind of our our thought at the time, and we started testing it and started to see some decent traction. And it it definitely built momentum over time. It wasn’t an overnight hit, but I think a lot more, you know, what you see with like Best Buy and Walmart and some of these retailers doing on site promoting other merchants that, you know, they may not be selling in store, but they’re they get a ton of traffic to their site. They’re working on the publishers side as an affiliate.

And it’s, again, a nice supplemental revenue stream for the business.

Jeremy Weisz: 23:01

I mean, this is this is everywhere, right? And I’m not sure. Do you ever work with maybe you work with brands for like credit card companies, but like, I, you know, sign up for an American Express credit card. And there’s if you buy this from Dunkin Donuts, right, you get X amount free through, you know, through rewards or points or things like that. So there’s so many of these like type of partnerships.

Rick Gardiner: 23:27

Yeah. Card linked offers have definitely come come in heavy with within the industry. You know the nice thing with the card linked offer aspect too is you know, it kind of breaks away from just the e-commerce business to you can start getting into the retail and brick and mortar. And so yeah, we help brands get set up with Amex, Capital One, Chase, some of the big publishers in the card networks and the the beauty there is, they have a ton of shopping data where you can do some really targeted campaigns to, you know, people that have never bought from a brand, people that haven’t bought in six, 12, 18 months, whatever that may be. You can get really granular so you can do some really cool things with those card linked offer partnerships.

Jeremy Weisz: 24:16

It’s also, I think, high trust, right. It’s like, oh, it’s on Amex. Then it must be a decent brand, right? Even though I’ve never heard of it before.

Rick Gardiner: 24:25

Exactly. Yeah. No, there’s definitely that trust and kind of association of being on an Amex. You know, being a merchant on Amex that, you know, creates trust and and even for, you know, a consumer that’s never bought from a brand before, they’ll offer an incentive to kick the tires, try a product. So yeah, it can be a great new customer acquisition partnership.

Jeremy Weisz: 24:53

So Groupon was an early customer client. What were some of the other types of clients?

Rick Gardiner: 25:03

Some of them aren’t even around anymore. We had, you know, software clients that specialized in DVD conversion software. I don’t think anybody I don’t own a DVD player anymore. But, you know, we had a lot of different, you know, AV software, internet security. That space has evolved quite a bit.

And, you know, I think we started to expand into some more apparel brands, you know, home goods, outdoor subscription, you know, Home Chef and other great Chicago brand. They were a long time client and and great, great partner. So yeah we just.

Jeremy Weisz: 25:44

Started on your site. Oh they’re they’re huge. Yeah.

Rick Gardiner: 25:48

Yeah they’re great. Great clients love working with their team. And yeah, we just started working with a little bit more household name brands, which is more fun right? I mean, internet security and software is great. It serves its function.

But most people are shopping because, you know, they have an issue, their computer got hacked or their identity got stolen. Whereas, you know, OXO, Hydroflask, Ping Golf, all of these brands. This is something that brings people joy, pleasure. It’s a passion. And the types of partners that come along with that.

You know, they tend to be more enthusiasts. So that’s where creators, influencers start to come into play. And yeah, it’s just been really it’s been a fun evolution. And, you know, we’ve got a great portfolio of clients and a great team to help support them.

Jeremy Weisz: 26:38

So when people are thinking of the types of affiliate partnerships, maybe talk about Hydro Flask for a second and what you did with them.

Rick Gardiner: 26:45

Yeah, no. We’ve done a lot of different partnerships with Hydro Flask. I think one of the things that you know, they’ve they’ve struggled with is just, you know, it’s a very competitive market. It’s very saturated. There’s a lot of noise, there’s a lot of products that are similar.

And so what we did with them was more, you know, working with their PR team. So one one another thing that we’ve found, you know, with the evolution of the industry is just kind of either cross-agency collaboration or inter-departmental collaboration between internal marketing teams. Kind of early on, it was either you had an outsourced agency or you did it in-house. And with Hydroflask, we worked with their PR team to to build out a strategy and just help them gain more market share through some content placements on food and wine and some other publications that, you know, drive significant revenue and volume and also have an incredible return on ad spend. So yeah, it’s especially with those saturated markets or commodity type products, you know, having the right partners is, you know, almost a competitive differentiation or, or moat, if you will.

People can’t easily recreate those partnerships. And and for them, for Hydroflask, it worked really well.

Jeremy Weisz: 28:14

What type of you know, what you do kind of crosses over different departments in a company. What kind of what departments? I don’t know, maybe you start with one, you start working with others. But what departments are you typically working with when you go into a brand?

Rick Gardiner: 28:29

I would say it’s primarily the growth or customer acquisition, you know, e-commerce team. I would say the collaboration tends to happen most with the PR just because, you know, they’re working on, you know, they have relationships with some of the the mass media companies that we work with. I think the main difference between PR teams and and affiliate is PR tends to be more editorial driven, whereas affiliate, we tend to work more with the the commerce and partnership teams. Once brands have been vetted or products have been vetted by editorial, you know, we engage with them on a more regular cadence, just, you know, have more coverage organically. But I think PR, you know, sometimes we’ll work with the paid search team depending on what their paid search strategy is.

If there’s anything we can do to help, do to help support them. And yeah, as long as we don’t have to deal with their legal team outside of contract negotiations, it’s a it’s a good, good deal.

Jeremy Weisz: 29:34

What about Savory Spice? What did you do with them?

Rick Gardiner: 29:37

Yeah, Savory Spice was an interesting story. They’re a very niche spice company out of Colorado, and we helped get them featured on the Today show. And, you know, they have you know, again, there’s some really big players in this space. And when we started working with them, they hadn’t had the best luck working with affiliates historically. And and so it took.

I don’t know exactly. Oftentimes. Well, sometimes if brands just kind of auto approve affiliates that apply to the program. You don’t really know who’s working. You know who’s promoting the brand.

I don’t remember the specific use case there, but, you know, if the affiliate program wasn’t as, you know, as productive or effective as it could be. And so we kind of came in and shifted the focus more on quality partnerships versus just quantity and, you know, started getting them featured and building partnerships with some pretty high end mass media publications, content and food creators. You know, their seasonality is a little bit different, especially with the barbecue season in the summer. Typically that’s a slowdown for a lot of, you know.

Jeremy Weisz: 30:59

You gotta get off this site because it’s making me hungry here.

Rick Gardiner: 31:02

So they have some great recipes on there and their products are amazing. We got a couple good gift baskets from them.

Jeremy Weisz: 31:08

I’m sure I’m curious about is there a formula for percentage of what people should be paying because I imagine like some of the like the software companies have more margin than obviously, you know, a spice or a water bottle or something like that. Is there some kind of formula there? Like like, hey, Rick, I have no idea. What should I be paying my affiliates here? Like what percentage?

Rick Gardiner: 31:38

Yeah, it truly varies. You know, our approach is we do some competitive benchmarking, seeing what their competitors are paying. And then, you know, we’re a very numbers driven, metrics driven organization. So at the end of the day, it comes down to making sure we’re hitting their ROI and margin goals. And so we can do some, you know, reverse engineering of some math to make sure that the the commissions are aligned with their, their customer acquisition cost goals.

And Even with that, you know, that may vary by SKU, by product, by vertical category, product category. We can do specific commissions by SKU or product. So it may not be a blended, you know, 10% or 5% across the board. It may be at a skew level and also pay out differently for a net new or new to file customer versus a returning or existing customer, because, you know, those new customers are definitely more valuable. But also retaining customers is incredibly valuable, so it’s important to maintain those relationships and compensate partners accordingly.

Jeremy Weisz: 32:50

I’m wondering best practices. I’m sure it depends. But you know, you mentioned net new okay, they drive someone and if they’re someone stumbles across who’s already a current client, maybe they’ll get paid a certain percentage. Is there best practices on how long. So this person comes back, they buy something and they come back in like two weeks and they buy, you know, $500 worth of spices or something.

Does the does the partner typically get credit for that or. Just one of the best practices of time time frame. Or maybe they only get it on initial sale to click through. How do you think about those things?

Rick Gardiner: 33:32

Yeah, that’s a great question. You know it. We’ve done a lot of research into click to conversion timelines. And frankly, most transactions do take place within 24 or 48 hours. But you know, it’s a nice it makes affiliates feel good when they know that, hey, even if they don’t buy something.

Day one, you know, two weeks, 30 days after, they’ll still get credit for that transaction. So I think, you know, it’s pretty common to see referral windows between seven days, 30 days. Once you start getting much beyond that, it gets a little mucky because it starts to, you know, other channels may be involved for retargeting and things of that nature, but I would say most of the programs we manage range from a seven day window to maybe a 30-45 day.

Jeremy Weisz: 34:29

So back to types of affiliate partnerships. Which ones should we talk about that we haven’t hit on? That would be interesting for people to think about.

Rick Gardiner: 34:39

I think we’ve talked about quite a few. I think, you know, the ones that that we’re really focused on is this year anyway, is some of those on site technology partners. A lot of brands have on site technology that help with retention, you know, increasing AOV or basket size. And so we look at it as, you know, a company or client will have their own tech stack and a great way to test and, you know, test or plug a gap would be to bring in a technology affiliate to to fill that gap. There’s a number of of partners out there like upsell it increasingly that do really good job.

You know either recovering, you know, somebody who abandoned cart or just keeping the consumer engaged on site. But what we found to be most successful or work be most effective is when there’s a goal or outcome in, in, in mind or focusing the partnership based on a specific goal. So for example, if we want to, you know, target new to file customers, people that have never purchased from the brand before, you know, having those on site technology partners engage with those consumers only to help just kind of ramp and lean into to converting those customers. I think sometimes people get a little bit hesitant with on site technology partnerships because one, they may already have something that’s working okay or fairly well already, or, you know, they don’t want to deal with the the integration or, you know, there’s just a lot of uncertainty around how it could impact conversion or potentially have a downside. And so we like to kind of walk before we run, you know, do some split testing or multi-variant testing to just kind of see which which if there’s affiliate partner that’s going to outperform what their existing tech stack is.

Let’s lean into that. Or in some cases, maybe they aren’t. You know, they’re already doing it better than the partner. So then let’s just kind of leave what what’s in place alone. But I think the technology space is always evolving.

You know, AI tools, things of that nature to, to help with the consumer engagement. We use it, you know, from a partnership perspective, being able to identify partners that will help brands show up in the different language learning models. But technology is definitely always in the forefront. But I think the content creator space is just booming. And so that’s really where a lot of our clients are looking for help of just leveraging those relationships that we’ve built over the years with, you know, top influencers, top creators and mass media publications.

Jeremy Weisz: 37:37

I mean, I can imagine, Rick, if I’m a, you know, someone that I’m going to promote a brand and they have a pop up that has get a percentage off, enter your email, get a percentage off, enter your text. To me that’s attractive because it’s like it’s capturing their information. So it will, you know, offer them and market to them.

Rick Gardiner: 37:58

Well, you’ve probably also had a bad experience with that where it’s very obnoxious and in your face. And so yeah. Yeah there when done well like.

Jeremy Weisz: 38:07

I mean I guess for me I just if I don’t want it I just like exit out. It’s, I mean maybe I’m just not I don’t get mad at those things. But you know, it’s just my personality. But that that stuff doesn’t bother me personally. You know, if it’s something I want to get again, I almost want them to retarget me because I’m like, oh, I don’t have time to buy it now.

I hope they retarget me. So I think they follow me around.

Rick Gardiner: 38:30

And I mean, you’re gonna it’s it’s about a client education too, right? Or customer education, something you bought. Maybe they have some something new coming out or just learn how to use their product better, more effectively. There’s a lot of value there. I think, you know, what brands are afraid of is it’s going to create kind of a negative experience for the consumer.

And obviously we work with reputable partners and, you know, we have full control over, you know, how we integrate and make sure that they’re adding value and not kind of rubbing people the wrong way. But.

Jeremy Weisz: 39:05

You know, on the types of, you know, affiliates. I know before we hit record, we were talking I don’t know how it works as far as like retailer you mentioned like Ulta and Sephora, how do those type of partnerships work?

Rick Gardiner: 39:19

Yeah. So, you know, traditionally affiliate has always been very much focused on, you know, companies that have a B2C e-commerce presence. You know, Amazon and Walmart are now opening up their marketplaces, allowing tracking platforms like Levanta to come in and have more, you know, more visibility and control of how they’re working with affiliates that are driving traffic to their marketplace stores, Sephora and Ulta and, you know, Best Buy and some of these other retailers, you know, the retail media side of things. So is also kind of along that same vein of Amazon marketplaces where, you know, essentially, you know, you can drive traffic to their, their site or in some cases, these brands are now opening up their affiliate programs, their partnerships for brands that they may sell in store or that they may be testing as a potential in-store product to kind of invest in and work with the brand to help, you know, increase sales and sell more products. But leveraging the brands affiliate program without having to go and build the brand, having to go and build their own.

So it’s it’s pretty unique. It’s definitely kind of on the the tip of the spear of the industry of, you know, the retail media side of it. But it’s pretty exciting. I mean, you think about, you know, Sephora, Alta, these brands are they’ve been around forever. They have very robust affiliate partnerships.

and to be for a product brand to come in and be able to tap into that is a pretty powerful partnership.

Jeremy Weisz: 41:08

And what size does a company have to be to work with someone like you? There’s a certain revenue they have to be at or how does it work?

Rick Gardiner: 41:18

Yeah, typically our clients are generating somewhere between 10 and 20 million in B2C e-commerce revenue. You know, we’ve worked with emerging or high growth brands that are, you know, may have some VC funding or whatnot behind them that are on a good growth trajectory, but that tends to be or has been kind of our our guide on that. There’s some other metrics in terms of site traffic, you know, are they generating 100,000 uniques a month? Things of that nature that can be helpful. But when you start looking at programs that are on Amazon and some of these marketplaces.

Some of those metrics aren’t available. Or, you know, it’s it’s not as easy to decipher. And so we try to to really understand what the goals and outcomes are of the brand and look at it of can we help them or not. And, you know, we can build we have the playbooks. We can we can focus on outcomes and goals.

And, you know, we tend to be realistic when it comes to building out forecasts and revenue projections of what this affiliate channel or affiliate program can do, because it is an investment and it does take time to build those partnerships, get them onboarded and get them driving traffic and sales for brands. But, you know, it’s a mix of short term kind of lift and also long term just strategic growth for the business and kind of fitting into the full suite. You know, the full marketing mix. And, you know, again, it’s it’s it’s been a evolution. And, you know, with the the click costs and ad spend being what it is, it’s definitely getting more attention as and becoming more attractive for brands.

Jeremy Weisz: 43:14

You know, I know with what you do relationships are kind of the foundational piece. So I’m wondering what you’ve learned in forming amazing and sustainable relationships with to, you know, companies or company and individual.

Rick Gardiner: 43:33

Yeah, a couple things come to mind. I think, you know, personal connection is always been, you know, important to me. And just getting to know the whoever, you know, our point of contact is or the team that we’re working with, you know, business is great, but I think, you know, the the where I find most value or I get most fulfilling for me is, you know, former clients that we may not even be working with, but, you know, we’re still staying in touch. We’re, you know, asking how our kids and families are doing what they’re doing for the holidays, things of that nature. That’s always been really important and again, fulfilling from my end.

And kind of to your point, too, I think, you know, there’s a lot of agencies out there. And, you know, sometimes it’s hard to differentiate. So having that personal connection or that relationship can really be a big point of differentiation in building trust. And so, you know, there’s creative ways I always, you know, like to find creative gifts and things to, to share with new clients and just create a positive experience for them, you know, working with us and, you know, even after the fact, continuing to stay in touch is is always been great.

Jeremy Weisz: 44:52

Is there an interesting, most interesting gift you sent to someone over the years that that sticks out or that you’ve received.

Rick Gardiner: 44:59

We we used to send money trees to all of our new clients. So they’re like a little bonsai tree. And we stopped after. I could not keep one alive for more than like 3 or 6 months. I’m like, and I’m not.

Jeremy Weisz: 45:13

You want to kill the money tree?

Rick Gardiner: 45:14

Yeah. It’s just like a bad omen or something, I don’t know.

Jeremy Weisz: 45:18

Just get a have someone make a plastic one or something. You can’t kill it.

Rick Gardiner: 45:23

But now what we’ve been doing, and this is a new initiative. We’ve been partnering with another brand, Woodchuck USA, in town. And with their Buy One Plant One initiative. So we’ve been starting to use this where we’ll be planting trees here in Minnesota.

Jeremy Weisz: 45:41

And the ones you killed, you’re planting new ones.

Rick Gardiner: 45:44

Yeah, we’re trying to make good here. But you know, I think it’s a little bit unique. It’s a little bit different. It’s, you know, making the world a better place and, you know, outside of just the trees to just the habitats. So for the animals and all that good stuff.

But yeah, we’re we we always try to find unique ways to connect. And you know, this is another example.

Jeremy Weisz: 46:09

I love it. Rick. First of all, thank you. I mean, I love hearing your thoughts, your journey, your evolution and all about. I mean, really the foundational thing is helping to individuals or companies help build better relationships and more customers. So thank you.

Everyone can check out iaffiliatemanagement.com to learn more. And we’ll see everyone next time. Rick. Thanks so much.

Rick Gardiner: 46:35

Thanks, Jeremy.

Outro: 46:36

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