Rob Schab, CMO and Cofounder of Levanta. Today, Rob will be sharing how to recruit affiliates tailored to your ecommerce brand.

> Here’s a glimpse of what you would learn….

In this episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough podcast, host Josh Hadley interviews Rob Schab, CMO and co-founder of Levanta, about utilizing affiliate marketing to boost sales and rankings for Amazon sellers. They explore Levanta’s success in aiding brands through affiliate marketing, the importance of selecting suitable influencers, and strategies for affiliate recruitment. Rob underscores the need for standout messaging and high commissions to attract influencers, and the significance of maintaining affiliate engagement. The episode also touches on the potential of TikTok for affiliate marketing and concludes with Rob recommending “Atomic Habits,” the productivity tool Linear, and industry experts to follow. He invites listeners to join Levanta’s affiliate network to enhance their marketing strategies.

Here are the 3 action items that Josh identified from this episode:

Action Item#1 Diversify Your Affiliate Marketing Toolkit: Take a cue from Levanta’s success by exploring various affiliate marketing platforms and strategies beyond the conventional ones. Experiment with different channels, including TikTok, to tap into new audiences and drive additional sales. Remember, diversification is key to staying ahead in the ever-evolving e-commerce landscape.

Action Item#2 Prioritize Influencer Selection and Engagement: When recruiting influencers, focus on authenticity and alignment with your brand values. Look for early wins with a few influencers, which can signal broader potential partnerships. Keep affiliates engaged through regular communication, updates on deals, and consider hosting webinars or sending newsletters to maintain their interest and support.

Action Item#3 Offer Competitive Commissions and Leverage Outreach Tactics: High commissions are a potent incentive for affiliates, so ensure your compensation structure is attractive. Stand out from the crowd by crafting personalized outreach campaigns using outbound email software and reaching out through multiple channels, including social media. Remember, capturing influencers’ attention is crucial in a competitive market, so tailor your outreach efforts accordingly.

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Episode Sponsor

This episode is brought to you by eComm Breakthrough Consulting where I help seven-figure e-commerce owners grow to eight figures.

I started my business in 2015 and grew it to an eight-figure brand in seven years.

I made mistakes along the way that made the path to eight figures longer. At times I doubted whether our business could even survive and become a real brand. I wish I would have had a guide to help me grow faster and avoid the stumbling blocks.

If you’ve hit a plateau and want to know the next steps to take your business to the next level, then email me at josh@ecommbreakthrough.com and in your subject line say “strategy audit” for the chance to win a $10,000 comprehensive business strategy audit at no cost!

Josh Hadley (00:00:00) – Welcome to the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast. I’m your host, Josh Hadley, where I interviewed the top business leaders in e-commerce. Past guests include Kevin King, Michael E Gerber, and Matt Clark from ASM. Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Rob Schab. He is the CMO and co-founder of Levanta. And today, Rob and I are going to be discussing the power of affiliate marketing and exploding your sales on Amazon, and even increasing your organic ranking through the power of affiliates. This episode is brought to you by Ecomm Breakthrough Consulting, where I help seven figure companies grow to eight figures and beyond. Listen, Rob, I started my business back in 2015 and grew it to an eight-figure brand in seven years, but I made a lot of mistakes along the way. That made the path of getting to eight figures take a lot longer than it needed to. There were times where I made bad hiring decisions, or I had to finance payroll from my own personal checking account because of cash flow constraints. And last but not least, I watched my business drop by 90% when Covid happened, and the stress and anxiety of knowing whether our brand would survive.

Josh Hadley (00:00:53) – So I remember wishing for somebody, a mentor who could guide me through the way of scaling up my business. Someone who had been there, done that. They could share all the secrets to help me overcome all of these obstacles. And so that’s why I’ve decided to offer that one-on-one coaching and consulting that I wish I would have had back then. And this is where I’m going to share my nitty gritty cash flow frameworks, the sales strategies, the operating systems that have helped me scale my own brand. And because I believe in giving each entrepreneur my undivided attention. I only work with three clients at a time. But first, before we get to that point, I want to make sure I provide value to you guys. So, I offer a completely free, no strings attached, comprehensive business strategy audit session just to show you how much value I could provide to your business. So, to our listeners, if this is something that sounds like you’d be up for and interested in, go ahead and email me at Josh@Ecommbreakthrough.com.

Josh Hadley (00:01:34) – That’s E-comm with two M’s. And in your subject line say I want to pick your brain. And then let’s chat about how we can take your brand to the next level. But today I am thrilled to introduce you all to Rob Schab, the CMO and co-founder of Levanta. He has a rich background in marketing. Rob also served as The Crow and co-founder of Grove. He’s an alumnus from the University of Washington. And a little brief bio about Levanta. It’s an affiliate network that’s customized for Amazon sellers, and it unveils the transformative power and advantages to really scale brands and sellers. So, with that introduction, welcome to the show, Rob.

Rob Schab (00:02:07) – Thanks so much for having me, Josh. Really excited to be here and talk affiliate marketing with you and your crew. I really love what you’re doing, for your entrepreneurs. I know that, you know, being a first-time entrepreneur specifically can be a really challenging thing. You know, there were a lot of things I did in my first journey that I wish I hadn’t, that, you know, those failures, failures and learnings that helped me in my second business.

Rob Schab (00:02:26) – So I know that, you know, a lot of entrepreneurs out there can use someone like you. and honestly, I can provide value to those same entrepreneurs through, through what we’re doing. So, I think we’re in for a great show here.

Josh Hadley (00:02:36) – Yeah, I love that. Now, Rob, with that being said, you’ve got a lot of experience. you were doing Grovia before. Now you’re doing Levanta. So, tell me about that transition. How did Levanta come about and kind of the story behind it?

Rob Schab (00:02:50) – Yeah. You bet. It’s been a really fun and interesting journey. So. Yeah, we started Groby about four years ago. It was an affiliate recruitment software and service specifically for B2C brands to shop stores or e-commerce websites. We grew that business over the course of about two years and eventually sold that business to Acceleration Partners, which is one of the bigger global affiliate marketing agencies. It was during that time that we started to look into, okay, you know, we’re obviously having a lot of success in growing affiliate programs for B2C brands, but it turns out that Amazon is 40% of US e-commerce.

Rob Schab (00:03:22) – Why aren’t we providing these same services and software for Amazon sellers? We started to look into the different options available for sellers and really couldn’t find anything. So, you know, we decided that that was the opportunity that we needed to pursue. We needed to unlock the, you know, what is a $6 billion industry in the B2C space? We need to unlock that in the Amazon world. And so that was the idea behind Levanta. We launched about a year and a half ago, and it’s been immensely successful, not only for us as a business, but for the sellers that are using our platform. You know, we’re driving, you know, upwards of $10 million a month for Amazon sellers. and we’re supporting hundreds of sellers today and thousands of creators. So, and again, you know, being an entrepreneur myself, we’re working with a lot of Amazon sellers that are just, you know, one-man, one-woman shops. And it’s really, you know, empowering. And it feels good to be able to help, you know, other entrepreneurs out there be successful with their businesses.

Rob Schab (00:04:11) – So that’s where we’re at today.

Josh Hadley (00:04:13) – I love that. Now, Rob, I’m a current user of Levanta and a big fan of the platform. And that’s kind of reaching out to your marketing team in general. And that’s how we kind of got in touch. But, you know, I’m a big proponent of your platform because it’s really hard to be able to kind of there’s a lot of strategies and hacks that people have shared about, hey, go find YouTube influencers and go tell them that you’re going to double their Amazon affiliate commissions. Go search for the short form Amazon Link. It’s like Amazon CEO, blah blah blah, right? go search for those, reach out to those people, manually tell them that they need to send over their affiliate, you know, commission report from Amazon, and then you’ll go ahead and double it. You’ll send them over via PayPal. Those were the hacks that have been talked about for years now. And what I love about Levanta is that what you’ve done is you’ve kind of removed that portion that says, hey, download your report, show me what you actually made sales for, and then I’ll go ahead and cut you a commission for that instead.

Josh Hadley (00:05:07) – Really, it’s a beautiful interface and dashboard that I can see everything in one place is that kind of and I guess on top of that, you actually get to capitalize on the brand referral bonus. So, it kind of automates all of this together to where you don’t have to create the brand referral link. Then go tell the affiliate, hey, I need you to make sure you use this link. You can still use your affiliate link in coordination with this kind of site. All in one. Is that a true synopsis of what it provides?

Rob Schab (00:05:31) – Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Summed it up perfectly. and I respect the heck out of the hack that you mentioned there. And I think people should still do that to some degree. What we’ve done is kind of automate three of the big processes that you mentioned there and much more. But the three big automations that we’ve built are recruitment pieces. So, you don’t necessarily have to go to YouTube and manually search those, you know, influencers and reach out to them and try to build a partnership that way.

Rob Schab (00:05:55) – We’ve got an inventory of 4000 affiliates already on our platform who are already familiar with this model. You’re not having to re-educate folks so much. And then there’s the next piece, which is automating tracking. you know, instead of having to, you know, have them use an Amazon link and then manually download their associates report and, and share that with you. And you have to validate it and trust that they’re telling the truth. you know, you just give them a tracking link so that they can get the commission directly from you through Amazon attribution. and they can, meanwhile, still get their Amazon Associates Commission. And then there’s the payment speeds, which is another big challenge to do at scale. If you’re working with hundreds or thousands of influencers and affiliates, it’s really challenging to do this manual audit of every single spreadsheet and decide how much you have to pay them, and then, you know, pay them each through different ways that they want to be paid. It’s an incredibly challenging thing to manage a small scale and almost impossible to manage at a large scale.

Rob Schab (00:06:42) – So all of those things we want to do for you through our software, you know, I mentioned the recruitment. We have the marketplace, I mentioned the tracking, we have the automation of link creation and then the payments where you can work with a thousand different affiliates, and you only have to pay one invoice at the end of each month. And we accelerate the payments for you. so, lots of time savings.

Josh Hadley (00:07:01) – You’ve definitely automated so much, so much. There. Now, this is one thing that’s been a debatable topic in a few Facebook groups that I’m a part of is people saying, well, can I truly like, can you actually merge a brand referral bonus link and have the associates or the affiliate then append their Amazon Associates link to that? So, you get to essentially double it. They get their commission. You also get your kickback for the brand referral bonus. Is that ToS compliant?

Rob Schab (00:07:29) – Completely. Yeah. I appreciate you asking that because I do want everyone to be aware it is both technically possible.

Rob Schab (00:07:33) – It’s very easy to append an associate’s tag to a Levanta to link or attribution link. and it is compliant there. There’s nothing against the Amazon Associates terms or the brand referral bonus terms that say, hey, you can’t use both of these systems if you’re an affiliate. Now, one thing that would be against the terms likely and I think the brand referral bonus or attribution terms do say this. If you’re a seller, you can also start your own associates account and get the brand referral bonus and the Associates Commission. that would be against the terms, but an affiliate using both ends, you know, double dipping. That’s completely allowed by Amazon today. I love that.

Josh Hadley (00:08:07) – Now. And I’ve got a kind of a secret hack that I’ll share here at the end. But before we get to that point, Rob, I would love for you to share a couple of the case studies that you’ve had of brands that have joined your platform and they have seen success. Again, I think that people have heard, you know, affiliate marketing is a thing, but for a lot of Amazon sellers, like that’s an extra task.

Josh Hadley (00:08:26) – It’s separate from, you know, launching a product. It’s separate from PPC management. And for a lot of DTC brands, they have a full-time role for many of those DTC brands, like having an affiliate manager or a partner recruitment manager. Right. For a lot of Amazon sellers, I would say that’s a role that’s missing. So why don’t you maybe, you know, talk to us about these case studies so that we can, I guess, help Amazon sellers know whether, hey, is this worth my time or not?

Rob Schab (00:08:50) – Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I’m happy to touch on some of the case studies we’ve published. But truthfully, we’ve got hundreds of the happy Amazon seller customers. to the point where I really think that any Amazon seller should be considering this channel. It’s not necessarily a fit for everyone. And we can talk about, you know, some of the things that make this better for some sellers than others, but it is something that every seller should at least assess or try.

Rob Schab (00:09:14) – and I’ll give you a couple examples of even very small businesses, startups that have had success with this channel. The first one I want to mention is Grace and Stella. So, Grace and Stella, you know, they were looking to understand, you know, the effects of the brand referral bonus and the impacts of external traffic on, on their organic rank or their BSR on Amazon. And so, they started to run some isolated tests and they found that, you know, first of all, with the brand referral bonus that you mentioned earlier, Josh, it is, you know, pretty simple to understand. You’re getting 10% back on any sales that you generate through Amazon attribution, which is every sale that is generated or tracked through Levanta. So that’s a huge win right off the get go, because fees are high on Amazon and there’s no denying that. So anyways, you can earn some of those fees back. This is really important. So, referral bonus is an immediate automatic no brainer win.

Rob Schab (00:09:57) – Then there’s this sort of additional benefit of this increase in organic link. So, what Grace and Stella did is they started to run some isolated tests to see, okay, if I run a bunch of affiliate traffic or external traffic in this particular case, and how does this affect my BSR? on the A6, what they found was that over the course of about two months, they saw an increase in BSR from around 300 to 150. so, that was an immediate win. Now the sales also jumped up significantly as a result of that. But we’re a little more difficult to measure. So, we ended up doing another case study and really, truly isolating the two channels. So that we could see the actual impact on sales. And we did this with a different client called Lock Star. It’s smart locks, you know, smart door knobs that you can punch in a digital code. and basically, what we found is throughout this test with Lock star, is that the sage a little bit? They were generating, all $0 at the time.

Rob Schab (00:10:45) – They were thinking about liquidating their stock. They were thinking about shutting down that particular part of their business. And we said, hey, let’s give this a try. Let’s launch an affiliate program. And maybe this helps you liquidate your stock as well. You can set a pretty high commission and you can start to generate sales this way. Let’s see if this helps the organic rate. Basically, within a couple of weeks after launching the program, it started to get on the pace of generating about an additional $40,000 a month in affiliate sales alone. What this led to was a massive spike in BSR and an immediate uptick in organic sales, a measurable update. What we found was they actually generated an additional $40,000 that month in organic sales. So not only were they generating $40,000 in affiliate sales, but an additional double that amount in organic sales. So now I’m not saying that’s necessarily the case for everyone. It depends on, you know, the environment, the competitive environment and your, you know, your products, you know, BSR.

Rob Schab (00:11:36) – But the fact of the matter is that for some businesses, this can have a massive effect on, on your organic sales. So, I definitely want more people to take that into account when they’re thinking about the affiliate channel. From a strategic standpoint, it’s not always just about the sales that you can generate through affiliate marketing directly. There are sort of these, you know, additional effects that you need to consider. and so, we can talk more about sort of, different hacks to get the most out of affiliate marketing when we get there.

Josh Hadley (00:11:59) – Yeah, I love that. So, you kind of get this, like, halo effect, right? Because you’re driving external traffic. Amazon loves external traffic. You theoretically get this boost in organic ranking. But again, even if you’re driving external traffic from Google Ads, you know, you’ve got AMP that has case studies that also say, yes, you drive significant volume off of Amazon. It will directly influence your organic rankings. Even if that conversion rate from off Amazon traffic is lower than your current conversion rate.

Josh Hadley (00:12:25) – Amazon still loves that and they know that. So. Rob, I’m interested because I want to dive deeper into that case study and really peel back. Like, why was it so successful? to know how they generated $40,000 in revenue in just a couple of weeks on the Levanta platform? Like, is that what everybody should expect when they join Levanta, or what was unique about them, and what were they doing differently than, you know, some brands? Because I’ve heard other brands that have gone on there, like I didn’t do anything for me. So, tell me what made the difference.

Rob Schab (00:12:53) – Yeah, absolutely. And like I said before, but there’s, you know, certain cases where this is going to generate $2 million a month for some sellers, and then in some cases where, you know, the product is just not a right fit for affiliates and creators, and it may not work out. So, affiliate marketing isn’t for everyone. I’ll give you a couple of examples of products and brands that will work well, and maybe some that won’t work as well.

Rob Schab (00:13:13) – but for Law Star specifically, what they had, was the advantage of having a high-ticket item, something that is relatively low consideration, like if somebody is in the market for a doorknob, you know, they don’t need to consider so much like, they don’t need to do a ton of research. They just need to go buy a doorknob so they can be easily convinced because they’re in the market for buying right now. So, what they did was they actually worked with media buyers, which is a big sort of portion of our affiliate base. Media buyers will essentially put together content. In this case, a content piece might be top ten smart locks or top ten electric door knobs or, you know, different articles like this. And then they’ll put your Amazon product number one on that listing, and they’ll go by Google ads bing ads, essentially social ads, and they’ll drive traffic to that content. And then from there, the user can select your product and go purchase, this can be an incredibly scalable channel, in many cases much more scalable than driving, you know, search ads and social lives directly to your Amazon listing because there’s some sort of like, trusted source within that user journey that’s actually recommending your product.

Rob Schab (00:14:10) – those media buyers can drive massive scale for these sorts of high-ticket items. Now, maybe you don’t have a high-ticket item. Maybe, you know, I mentioned Grace and Stella. You know, they’re beauty products. They’re fairly low consideration, as well. And they’re much cheaper. These might work better for, you know, influencers who are looking for, you know, novelty products, with good branding to promote to their audience. so having something unique, that, you know, your competitors may not have, it certainly helps, you know, having products that are, as I mentioned, low consideration, but, like, maybe like household necessities, you know, maybe you sell blenders. People need blenders, and they need to be influenced by somebody to find out what blender they may need. Now, there are also examples of products that may not work. You know, I always use the example of paper clips. You know, there’s a huge market for paper clips on Amazon and certain of that, but an influencer may not feel very compelled to, you know, promote paper clips on their social accounts.

Rob Schab (00:15:06) – You know, it may not be a novel, sexy product that an influencer wants to promote. It may not be something that a media buyer thinks they can properly arbitrage, so it may not work very well with media buyers. The point is, there’s not an exact science to what will and will not work. Usually, it takes a little bit of testing. You know, what we found is that if you can find a couple of influencers or creators or attributes that might work for you, that’s a really good sign, because the chances are that there’s a lot more of those out there, probably a lot more of them within our marketplace. So if you get some early success on Levanta, it’s a good sign that there’s a lot more future success. if you’re getting goose eggs month after month, there’s a chance that it’s just not a good fit for you.

Josh Hadley (00:15:42) – makes a lot of sense. So, Rob, I think the crucial aspect comes into play: how are you recruiting affiliates and how are you reaching out to them to actually promote your product? So, let’s dive into that.

Josh Hadley (00:15:53) – And why don’t you share with me some of your top strategies for how you go out and find affiliates? How do you get them to actually talk about your products? Because I know this. Everybody on TikTok, on Instagram get DM’d and message the crap out of with, hey, why don’t you talk about my product or my product or my product? So, among all the products you know and brands that are reaching out to them, how do you stand out? What are some recruitment tips?

Rob Schab (00:16:15) – Yeah, absolutely. I love that question. more specifically because affiliate recruitment is my game. You know, my previous company was an affiliate recruitment agency. That’s all we ever talked about in the services that we provided. And we brought a lot of those same practices over to Levanta. And that’s how we’ve been able to build out our network, so quickly, is because we’ve put a lot of these affiliate recruitment strategies into play here. But the question here is, how can a seller kind of stand out from the noise and get affiliates to start promoting their products? There’s a lot of things you can do here.

Rob Schab (00:16:43) – the first thing I think is talking about the different channels of affiliate recruitment. And there are two big ones. There’s in-network and then out-of-network in-network meaning like if you use a tool like Levanta or, you know, any of our competitors, there’s a good chance that there’s a, you know, good, inventory of publishers that are a good fit for you. I use publishers, affiliates, creators, influencers all sort of interchangeably. So, when you’re doing in-network recruitment, which is where you should start, first of all, you want to have a really compelling message. Our platform has in platform messaging where you can directly send messages to the creators on the platform. So, you want to stand out from the noise. The first thing you can do is again, have an interesting novel, unique products, or at least position your messaging to portray it that way. influencers want to promote cool products, so, you know, that’s a good place to start is adding products. Then there is the idea of offering high commissions.

Rob Schab (00:17:34) – This is something that a lot of people really get hung up on. It’s not the most important thing, but it is important if you’re coming in and offering a 2% commission, an influencer may not be excited about that. If you understand the benefits of the organic rank, potential upside and you understand that, hey, maybe if I get this customer in the door now, it may be a returning customer. I am really high. Let me drive you to offer way higher commissions. We’ve actually seen one of our client’s sports research offer up to an 80% commission on some of their products, because they understand those sorts of auxiliary benefits. An 80% commission is incredibly, incredibly exciting for influencers and affiliates. They get a lot of responses when they’re able to offer that kind of commission. additional things would be, you know, offering to send out free products right from the get-go. You know, don’t dance around that fact. Find influencers, pre-qualify influencers, and affiliates that you’re willing to send products to and offer that up right there in your first message.

Rob Schab (00:18:23) – A lot of people want to get hands on. Another piece here would be looking at deals and discounts. You know, there’s all sorts of different types of deals you can run on Amazon, and you can even stack them. So, a lot of folks will do it. You know, I’m running a lightning deal and a clickable coupon. I want to send you some products, and I want you to promote this deal on this day. That’s something that a lot of our influencers and Facebook groups and folks get really excited about because they want to share good deals with their audience. So, I think if you implement all of these things, your chances of success are much, much higher than if you just go out there and say, hey, I’m offering a 15% commission, here’s my product, you know, make it or leave it.

Josh Hadley (00:18:56) – Yeah. And if you’re so if I’m an Amazon brand owner right now and I don’t have an affiliate network or program going on now, do I just go to Levanta and is the in-house, you know, affiliates enough, or do I need to be actively doing something on my own, working through TikTok, Instagram to bring affiliates myself to your software?

Rob Schab (00:19:17) – Yeah.

Rob Schab (00:19:17) – Another great question. and I think there’s a couple ways to answer this. You know, I mentioned again the different channels that you might want to do recruitment out of. The first one is outbound through that marketplace. If you get on Levanta, there’s a lot of opportunity for you to actively recruit affiliates in our network. What is also true is that many brands will get a lot of inbound applications. So, some folks get lucky not just to get on Levanta and set auto approve applications on and generate a bunch of revenue, but don’t recommend, you know, that’s just relying on you kind of getting lucky. And somebody may be stumbling across your brand in our marketplace. Always recommend being proactive in our marketplace. So other than that, you may also want to do external affiliate recruitment. Our platform is technology. You know the more you put into it, the more you get out of it. and so, you know, utilize us as much as you possibly can, because we do give you a lot of really good tools to recruit affiliates.

Rob Schab (00:20:04) – But there may be a lot more out there for your brand or your products that we don’t yet have in our network. And if you know that, you’ll find those affiliates, maybe it’s YouTubers, maybe it’s TikTokers, Instagram, Facebook groups. it kind of depends again on your product, which of those are going to work well for you if you already know, that there are, you know, YouTubers out there that we don’t have on our platform, we make it really easy for you to grab a signup blade from the platform, share it with you, you know, potential affiliates, and they can sign up directly for your Levanta program. So, to my earlier point, you know, you mentioned that back on how to recruit YouTube influencers. I still recommend that everyone does that. It’s probably my favorite recruitment strategy back when my previous company, Grovia, would recruit the heck out of YouTube influencers, and it was incredibly successful. We’re still doing that today. And, you know, our army of sellers are out there, you know, recruiting a bunch of those as well and having a lot of success with them.

Josh Hadley (00:20:50) – I love that, and I love that you have a lot of experience with recruiting affiliates. And here’s what I would argue is that I think it’s better, like if you’re able to go develop your own, network of affiliates and not just rely on, hey, I’m going to go to Levanta or any of the other like affiliate portals and just rely on their existing marketplace of affiliates. It’s better if you can self-identify who would be the best fit for this and even bring them on board. So, Rob, one of the things I think is really important, if you really want to take affiliate marketing to the next level, is not just relying on whatever affiliates are there in the existing platform, whether it be Levanta or Archer affiliates or any of those other programs. It’s really being able to go find and identify your own affiliates that already resonate with your brand. You can see they post really good content. So with your experience at Grove, you are 100% centered on finding those types of affiliates for you, to just grow the number of affiliates that are out there.

Josh Hadley (00:21:43) – So how do you stand out? Stand out in the sea of constant spam messaging that these influencing creators are getting? How do you stand out and how do you actually win them over? And then we’ll talk about more advanced strategies after that.

Rob Schab (00:21:55) – Sure, sure. Yeah. I mean, some of those same points that I made earlier about any network recruitment, I think they apply to this outer network recruitment strategy, you know, make the offer incredibly compelling with deals and high commissions like unique products, willingness to send products. The other thing here is your method of communication. I mentioned one message earlier. You should never stop at one message. Yes, these folks are receiving tons and tons of emails and DMs and from all angles you need to make your message compelling, but you also need them to see it over and over again to where eventually they’re like, wait a second, I’m going to read this one through. And maybe it is interesting to me. So that means using something like a, like an email or an outbound email software, whether that’s, you know, I use HubSpot, you can use mix Max.

Rob Schab (00:22:34) – There’s all sorts of tools out there that allow you to essentially build drip campaigns and say, send an email on day one, send another email on day seven, another on day 14, so on and so forth. I also recommend trying to personalize those emails as much as possible while you know you can template ties a lot of things, maybe you personalize the subject line to that particular influencer or. I always called a personal hook for first line in the email is something that you can relate to about the influencer, or if you can point out that you actually saw some of their content and relate to it, or comment on it, that may help you stand out from the noise other than just looking like spam. And the other thing is again, hitting them.

Josh Hadley (00:23:06) – From multiple angles.

Rob Schab (00:23:07) – Yes, send them multiple emails. But a lot of influencers don’t check their email. Maybe. But once a week, maybe once a month maybe. Never message them directly on Instagram. You know, comment on their YouTube videos or whatever.

Rob Schab (00:23:18) – you know, methods you need to, like, actually get their eyes on your message. there’s a lot they can do once they’re in the funnel for you. You know, obviously they’re driving potentially recurring customers, but they themselves are recurring in nature and that once they become a fan of your brand, they’re not just going to post once, but they can continue to post them week after week, month after month, and continue to generate business for you. So, you know, influencers and affiliates are incredibly valuable. You know they need to be treated that way. One last tip on this point is that as a result of what I’m just mentioning, like the value of an influencer, you may look at different compensation.

Josh Hadley (00:23:50) – Models with.

Rob Schab (00:23:50) – Them, especially with these folks that you’re recruiting outbound that may not already be familiar with Levanta and may not love the commission only model. In many cases, you may want to look at offering some sort of hybrid model to these folks that’s like, hey, maybe it’s $500 upfront plus 20% commission.

Rob Schab (00:24:05) – maybe it’s $1,000 plus 15% commission or reduced commission. So try to give them these additional incentives upfront. Those are the types of things that get them excited and kind of get them in your pipeline.

Josh Hadley (00:24:14) – Yeah. No, I love that. Rob. I think that’s so important. Just to get like it’s not just one time that you reach out to them and hope and pray. They respond. I like the idea of having a dedicated follow up sequence and continuing to reach out. Sometimes it takes people seven times to tell they’ll pay attention to you, right? And it’s just finding the right time and day where the stars align there in their email inbox or their in their DMs, and your message comes across and they take action. And so I think that that’s one of the best. It’s kind of like a sales tactic. You just can’t give up. You just gotta keep knocking and keep calling. So Rob, let’s assume we’ve recruited a bunch of affiliates now. Now my question is, so how do we manage all of these affiliates? How do we encourage them to continue to post about our products so that again, theoretically, hopefully they’re making money from talking about our products.

Josh Hadley (00:24:59) – But how do we continue to ensure that they’ll continue talking about our products?

Rob Schab (00:25:05) – Yeah. Great. Great. you know, the same way you just mentioned that the recruitment, part of this is a lot like an outbound sales process. Ongoing management is a lot like a customer success process. You need to make sure that there is some continued engagement with these influencers so that they keep promoting your products. You know, there are a couple of things. The first piece is making sure to your point that they’re compensated properly. If they get into your program and they start promoting your products and they’re not seeing a return on it. So the first way is to lose them pretty quickly. So make sure you’re always monitoring, like all my products converting well for these folks, you know, do I need to give them additional incentives. Do I need to set private commissions for some influencers, you know, give them a higher commission for a certain period of time? That’s the third piece. The second is continued engagement.

Rob Schab (00:25:46) – whether that’s, you know, a phone call, you know, just a message, an email or campaign, that gives them information on, you know, upcoming deals, maybe on certain, you know, seasons, whether it’s Mother’s Day or, you know, Prime Day or the holidays, making sure they’re aware of when your products are going on sale so that they can share that with their audience. Another thing is new product launches. This is a way to keep things interesting and less repetitive. If you’re, you know, selling curling irons and you’re trying to push that curling iron on them, push that curling iron on them over and over and over again. We may get tired of hearing about it, but if they like your curling iron. But hey, we just launched a straightener as well and we launched a, you know, a new electric brush. You know, this is a way to offer them something new every single time you talk. And so always keep your affiliates and creators updated on new product launches.

Rob Schab (00:26:30) – And that can be a really good thing for you, especially if it is a new product launch. It’s a good way to get reviews and, you know, high ratings right from the get go. You can offer deals and, you know, get your influencer, an affiliate based, promote those things off the ground really quickly. and last thing I’ll mention is I’ve seen a lot of folks do sort of a webinar, monthly, where they’ll invite all of their creators to this so they can kind of, you know, announce all of these things and provide updates over one call, sort of in bulk. so you’re not having to have separate calls with every single creator.

Josh Hadley (00:27:00) – Interesting. I really like that idea. So let’s say and I’m even thinking, like, you could have some type of newsletter that you send out to your affiliates, right? I guess I really like the monthly webinar hack. Any other hacks that you have for us in terms of how to continue that engagement? Like, are you sending text messages to people? Is this like a full time job that you should have somebody on your team focused on? Tell me more?

Rob Schab (00:27:22) – Yeah.

Rob Schab (00:27:23) – so the webinar, I think that’s really going like above and beyond. I’ve seen very few companies do this. That newsletter is a lot easier to manage. To make things even easier, a tool like Levanta allows you to kind of take that same, you know, message that I just mentioned, where you’re, you know, announcing your upcoming deals, your new product launches, any news that you think your traders should be aware of? You can just send that as a bulk message within Levanta so that it hits all of your active creators at once. You can even link directly to those product listings within Levanta in that message. So I would say that I mean all those same principles, like you’re still going to get the same value out of it, but it’s just it takes a minute to do it in Levanta. So that’s the happiest way of doing it. beyond that, I think that, you know, again, it’s really like when you get the chance and you understand that the, the true value of acquiring these customers that it has on your organic rank and the LTV of those, those customers offering a really high commission is the biggest hack here of all, because influencers, they love to get their hands on on this kind of offer.

Rob Schab (00:28:18) – If they’re used to like a 2 or 3% commission on Amazon associates. So when they see 50% or something like that, it blows their minds. and so I try to do that whenever you get the chance.

Josh Hadley (00:28:27) – Yeah, I love that. Rob. Excellent. Rob. As we start to wrap things up, what else have we not talked about about affiliate marketing, affiliate recruitment or engaging our affiliates? to really help grow our brand on Amazon that you could share with our audience?

Rob Schab (00:28:41) – Yeah, I think this is adjacent. You know, I’ve talked a lot about Levanto. We’ve talked a lot about Amazon. And I think that, you know, focusing your affiliate efforts on Amazon is your best bet, because that’s where people want to shop. That’s where the majority of the US population are doing their shopping. But for folks that are, you know, having success in that, already or having success on Amazon in general, and you want to take a second to plug TikTok shots, I know there’s some uncertainty around TikTok right now, and so we’ll see where that lens is.

Rob Schab (00:29:07) – And I’ve heard from a lot of sellers that they’re having a ton of success on TikTok and specifically through the TikTok affiliate. I think similarly to what I mentioned with the Amazon affiliate, the TikTok affiliate may not be a fit for everyone. But again, I do recommend giving it a try because it’s free to get started. And like I’ve seen some folks get set up really quickly and launch really quickly. I’ve also seen some folks have a lot of trouble getting set up, so hopefully I’m not leading anybody on a wild goose chase here. But, that’s one thing I would generally recommend.

Josh Hadley (00:29:34) – And I’d be interested to. Robin. We’ve seen success with TikTok influencers as well, so I’m a big proponent of affiliate marketing in general, and that’s what TikTok is completely centered around. At what point do you think it makes sense for an e-commerce brand to go the DTC route with an influencer marketing campaign? Right. Because I know a lot of DTC brands, their entire business model is based on influencers, right? Correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s primarily what Grover was about.

Josh Hadley (00:30:01) – was like helping these DTC brands, like, find affiliates because that’s their bread and butter of their entire business. They don’t have affiliates. They don’t have a business similar to Amazon sellers. There’s no Amazon. There’s no business. So, Rob, tell me more about those intricacies, about DTC. And when do you consider that? Is it worth it? Is it that is it actually better for me to invest the time to if I’m going to go recruit affiliates, am I better served recruiting affiliates for my own DTC website? Then I am recruiting affiliates for Amazon.

Rob Schab (00:30:31) – Yeah. And that’s a really interesting question that I’ve actually not gotten before. and probably talk about this one for a while, but I think starting now, it’s looking at the two channels holistically. I would say that for anybody that’s selling sort of exclusively on Amazon, generally, it is a good idea to have a DTC presence as well for a number of reasons. This being you have a plan to exit, it’s ideal to be diversified across numerous channels.

Rob Schab (00:30:54) – So not all of your sales are concentrated on Amazon. You’ve got sales on Amazon, you’ve got sales DTC, maybe you’ve got some on TikTok and Walmart. Players like to see that diversification. Now as far as diversifying your affiliate programs, right. Some brands do sort of live and die by the affiliate channel in the DDC world. but I would say that’s not the case for most brands. And, I would actually argue and I’m biased because I’m a huge proponent of the Amazon affiliate space. In affiliate marketing in general, I do think that Amazon affiliate marketing as a channel is generating a lot more incremental revenue than the DTC world. And what I mean by incremental revenue is sort of the type of traffic and the type of revenue that it’s generating. For example, you know, content creators and content sites and content. That’s what’s generating a lot of the sales on Levanta and Amazon affiliates. That is, you know, the type of content that is educating users on your product and driving net new customers and net new sales.

Rob Schab (00:31:45) – Whereas in the B2C world, you have a lot of coupon sites and cashback sites and, you know, lower funnel types of affiliates. For less incremental revenue driving. And that’s what makes up a lot of those affiliate programs. Now, that’s not to say that a lot of affiliate programs out there don’t rely on those types of partners and truly do focus on those incremental revenue driving partners. But, you know, Groupon and Cash Back are a huge, huge part of the DTC affiliate space, and they’re just not in the Amazon world. I would say this last point here is that when it comes to recruiting, that incremental revenue driving affiliate, those folks want to drive traffic to the shopping cart that is going to convert the best, because that’s how they earn more money. They need a high conversion rate. And what a lot of those influencers and affiliates know is that people buy their products on Amazon. It is so much easier to swipe your finger on Amazon and get your product tomorrow than it is to go to a DSC website and fill out your information, and then add your credit card details and get your package in two weeks.

Rob Schab (00:32:38) – Influencers know that it’s not that, so they prefer to send traffic to Amazon. It makes it a lot easier to recruit those affiliates. That’s why Levant has been so successful, because we’ve been able to recruit those affiliates so quickly. They still get the benefits of that high conversion rate, and now they get this commission directly from the seller. That’s probably higher than what they’re going to get from B2C affiliate programs anyways. So I don’t think that, you know, I would recommend it if you’re going to invest in an Amazon affiliate and it’s working double down on that. Don’t try to diversify the DTC quite yet.

Josh Hadley (00:33:05) – Awesome I think that’s a great response. Rob. Any other hacks or tips that you can share with us that we haven’t discussed at this point?

Rob Schab (00:33:11) – Yeah, absolutely. I think there’s one more I think is worth mentioning in that specific pocket of influencers that I think Amazon sellers need to be looking at, and it’s one that may not be immediately obvious. And that’s Facebook groups. You’ve probably heard me say this a couple of times, sort of offhandedly, but it is a really easy way to engage with audiences of shoppers at scale.

Rob Schab (00:33:30) – Facebook groups, what I mean by this is like, if you look at Loved by Gen or where it for less or the mommy markdown, there’s these groups that are, you know, 400,000 followers, 500,000 followers, a million followers plus sometimes where, you know, it’s just a group of moms or shoppers that are out there looking for new product recommendations and new deals. If you can go to those Facebook groups, we’ve got a lot of them in Levanta, by the way. You can offer them, hey, you know, we’re running a 30% off coupon on this date and we’re willing to offer you a, you know, an increased commission for this period of time. You can generate a lot of sales in a very short amount of time. and there are a bunch of different groups to choose from. So you can keep once you kind of get one in the door, you can keep recycling that tactic over and over and over again. I think I’m honestly the happiest of hacks that I think that not enough Amazon sellers are taking advantage of right now.

Josh Hadley (00:34:15) – I love that, and is there a way to specifically identify whether they have a Facebook group there within Levanta?

Rob Schab (00:34:21) – Yeah, absolutely. I, you can actually use our marketplace, and we have filters in, in the marketplace to say specifically, I want to see affiliates with 500,000, Facebook followers or even I would start lower. I would start with 100,000, because a lot of those smaller ones still have scale and still can drive revenue, but are probably less popular in getting less messages from a bunch of other Amazon sellers or DTC sites. So yeah, it’s really easy to do that within LaWanda. In fact, it’s a lot easier than trying to go to Facebook, and do all this manually. You know, we’ve got a great curated list of them right there for you.

Josh Hadley (00:34:52) – Awesome. I love that, Rob. This has been very exciting. I’ve got lots of ideas. I’ve written down a lot of notes here, for our own brand.

Rob Schab (00:34:59) – So I appreciate you can use some of these.

Josh Hadley (00:35:02) – No, this has been great.

Josh Hadley (00:35:03) – Now, as we wrap up this episode, I love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from every episode. So, Rob, here are the three actionable takeaways that I noted. You let me know if I’m missing anything. Number one, if you are not looking at doing affiliate marketing whatsoever right now, now is the time to start looking into that. There are more tools out there than ever have been. so you’ve got Archer affiliates, you’ve got Levanta that we’re talking about right now. there’s actually one other one that I was looking at. You’ve also got Amazon creator connections. Okay. And I’m going to find that other one and I’ll make sure we link it in the show notes. But there are quite a few platforms and softwares that are there to help you get the brand referral bonus and then pair you up with affiliates, and then those affiliates can then send traffic to your Amazon listings. And Rob, like you talked about, you’ve seen organic growth with a lot of those other brands. So I love that aspect.

Josh Hadley (00:35:55) – So action item number two is going to be you need to create some type of recruitment program. It’s not hey, I’m going to just list my products on Levanta Archer affiliates. And Logie is another one. and just think that build it and they will come false like you need to go out and you need to go tell people, hey, we join Levanta, you need to reach out on the marketplace to go find those affiliates and simply invite them to your program. So you need to be aggressive in inviting people to become aware of your brand. It’s not sufficient just to list yourself on there. I promise you, it’s going to be a long shot in the dark for you if you do otherwise. Action item number three is then to have some type of follow up process with them. And I really appreciate the ideas you shared. Rob, I think the webinar I think is really interesting, but being able to say, hey guys, here are some contests that we’re running this month. Whoever brings in the most revenue we’re giving out, you know, maybe an iPhone or an iPad or something like that, just to incentivize these affiliates to send even more traffic to you.

Josh Hadley (00:36:53) – And again, you just are continually spinning this Amazon flywheel. So having a method to reach out to continue to engage these affiliates is super critical. Rob. Anything else that I’m missing here?

Rob Schab (00:37:05) – No. That’s great. Those are all perfect takeaways from this. you know, to your point, we actually are not the only affiliate network out there for Amazon sellers. I do want to add a plug that is obviously biased. I do think we’re the best. We’ve built our platform in a way that it fits really well into existing creator workflows, hence why we’ve been able to build the biggest creator marketplace in the highest revenue driving marketplace in this space. So, you know, there are other competitors out there. We’re probably the most expensive, if I had to guess. But classic, you know, you get what you pay for.

Josh Hadley (00:37:35) – Yeah. No, I agree, and you guys do have a great software tool. There are two other ones that I failed to mention that I just remembered. So, you’ve got another affiliate like network tool that you could look into that costs tens.

Josh Hadley (00:37:47) – Okay. So, you can go check them out again. They’ll pair your brand referral bonus with the group of affiliates. They have a lot of media buyers. And then the other one is going to be the Perch Plus program that has now since been moved over. It’s merged with the razor group. So, I don’t know what the heck the name is now, but those are some affiliate programs that you could look into. So, Rob, I appreciate you. opening that up. Now, Rob, my favorite time is to ask the following three questions to each guest. So, question number one, what’s been the most influential book that you’ve read and why?

Rob Schab (00:38:16) – Yeah, this one was easy for me. and I’ve read this book a couple of times just to remind myself. And you heard of it? It’s called Atomic Habits by James Clear. And this has helped me a lot, both in work and in life. And it really just kind of opens your mind to understanding human nature, how we operate throughout the day.

Rob Schab (00:38:32) – and it’s helped me just generally grow as a person and get better at, you know, whatever I want to get better at, you know, it helps you design your environment, it helps you design your life in a way to accomplish your goals. You know, if you want to get stronger and get in better shape, you know, set yourself up where you’re, you know, your clothes and your running shoes are right by your bedside every single day. You know, set the coffee to go off automatically in the morning so that you, you know, have the habit of getting to update your coffee and getting ready to go. It has been like some of this sounds kind of cheesy, I’ll admit it, but I recommend it to literally anybody just to get yourself thinking about, you know, how do you live your life and how can you improve that?

Josh Hadley (00:39:08) – Yeah, Atomic Habits is a great book. I highly recommend that as well. All right. Question number two. What’s your favorite productivity tool?

Josh Hadley (00:39:15) – Or maybe a new software tool that you’ve recently discovered that you think many people don’t know about or maybe is underutilized.

Rob Schab (00:39:21) – Yeah. I mean, there’s this new affiliate management tool called Levante. I can’t get enough of it. Oh, no, I’m just kidding. Of course. there’s, there’s one that I use every single day. and, you know, you’ve probably used a Trello or, asana type project management tool. We actually use one called linear. and it’s been absolutely game changing. I think it is the easiest to use, project management tool that just helps you manage all your projects, your tasks day to day and kind of, you know, work things through the pipeline really easily. We use it for every aspect of our business, from software development to marketplace management to sales, you name it. We’ve got a linear board for that. So, if you’re in the market for, you know, a tool like this, it is free. and I think it’s almost certainly the best of the free.

Josh Hadley (00:40:03) – I love it love I love free recommendations. All right, Rob, final question here. Who is somebody that you admire or respect the most in the e-commerce space that other people should be following and why?

Rob Schab (00:40:11) – Yeah. I mean, the first one that comes to mind is somebody you mentioned earlier and that’s Kevin King. The man is an absolute legend in the Amazon space. and I learned a ton from him. I’m not natively from the Amazon space. So, I get a lot of my information from Kevin. I don’t think you guys are competitors at all. but I always take a second to plug his newsletter because it has so much valuable information packed into every single newsletter and is a pretty fun read. There’s a lot of just fun things to learn from those newsletters, so, here’s my number one answer. But I also want to mention Rand Fishkin, who’s been, if you’re not familiar with him, he’s the former founder of Moz, the founder of Spark Toro. he’s been a huge mentor and somebody that both I look up to and my co-founder look up to.

Rob Schab (00:40:50) – he’s written a book called Lost and Founder. And so, if you’re an entrepreneur, I recommend Lawson Founder to everyone. It is such an interesting read on how to, you know, manage your business. And, you know, think about capital and think about your exit strategy and your lifestyle and things like that. Rand is a wizard, one of the smartest guys I’ve ever met. And, it has a lot of valuable tips for e-commerce businesses specifically as well to follow them on LinkedIn. So that’s for you.

Josh Hadley (00:41:15) – Rob. This is excellent. Rob. This has been an awesome conversation. Thanks so much for your time today. Rob. If people are interested in signing up for Levanta or reaching out to you, I don’t know if you have any offers for people, but how can people reach out to you?

Rob Schab (00:41:29) – Yeah, absolutely. The easiest way to get in touch is through Levanta.io. You can also find me on LinkedIn. Rob Schab. that’s a B like Schab without the W.

Rob Schab (00:41:40) – we do have an entry level plan on Levanta that anybody can use. It’s $150 a month. It’s completely self-serve, and you can cancel any time. So, if anybody just wants to give things to try and tap into that affiliate network that we’ve built for you, the easy way to do it is with our standard plan. So, yeah, feel free to give us a shout there. And if, and if you sign up, let us know that Josh sent you and we can give you a little extra love to make sure your program is successful.

Josh Hadley (00:42:02) – Awesome. Well, Rob, thanks so much for taking time out of your day to come on the show.

Rob Schab (00:42:05) – Thanks a lot, Josh. Really been a pleasure.