Before the weekend starts, I have some solid information from a marketing director from an affiliate network, Everad. They are essentially a product owner, a network, a call center, and affiliate managers that love to give a way rewards.
Being they are a direct advertiser and worldwide affiliate network in nutra cash-on-delivery vertical, Everad is a well-known industry player. The company has 3 offices, 1500+ team members, 40+ covered geos and 150+ in-house offers, and this is only the beginning!
They have decided to focus only in the Nutra vertical, even calling themselves the biggest in this niche. Let's find out more.
I am pleased to do a blog interview with Stanislav Makeev, Marketing Director of Everad to further discuss Everad history and their future outlook in the space.
Why you have decided to focus on Nutra and why COD?
Our path has started in 2012. Rewind back to those times we have tried to succeed in various ecom niches. Chinese goods, Goji berries, Green Coffee, you know. All this was good and brought grand amounts of revenue.
But, at the same time, we’ve faced some problems. Main of them were - products’ quality and lack of trust for outsourcing teams (logistics and call-centers).
So, we’ve made a decision to move 100% in-house and concentrate on health & beauty vertical. Why? Because we had already gained solid expertise in producing some high-caliber nutra offers.
We were confident that nutra vertical can bring ultimate profit to both - affiliate and network. And, we wanted to go further and make tons of in-house offers to stand ahead of the competition.
In 2018 we are 100% sure that we’ve made the right decision. Nutra tops all the "what’s hot in affiliate marketing" lists.
Why our main idea is COD? It’s easy to explain. There are 3 main sale models for nutra: straight sale, trials and cash-on-delivery. When running trial offers you have to worry about amount of rebills, while SS demands a credit card for making an order.
It’s crystal clear that COD outsells all other models on tier 2/tier 3 geos. Credit card penetration is very low there and people are very eager to order products that will make them faster, better and stronger.
You have only exclusive offers and no direct advertisers, right?
Correct. Delivering in-house offers allows us to grant great benefits to our affiliates. And these benefits are not ephemeral. Affiliate marketing is all about the money. So, there are couple of key reasons to work only with the network, who has its own offers portfolio.
First, it’s the excellence of the offer itself.
Our production department unites skillful and talented marketers, product managers, developers and designers to conduct 5 + new exclusive offers per month. No matter which geo we are talking about, all these people are in charge of creating offers with insane market fit.
So, when the offer is ready and tested multiple times on internal traffic, we make it public and provide affiliates with highest payouts possible. At this stage it is no wonder offer will show groundbreaking results and we can pay extremely high commission to affiliates. That’s a classic win-win scenario.
The second main asset of in-house offers - no middleman. We don’t work with external advertisers, so there is no need to wait for the payments. Since we are direct advert and control all the traffic amounts, we can make daily payments to our affiliates. Instant cash flow, that’s the real difference!
What do affiliates need to know about driving traffic to health & beauty offers?
Nutra is one of the most diversified verticals in affiliate marketing. There are over 40 various sub-niches to work with. Starting from well-known weight-loss & skin care products and finishing with disrupting wow form-factors. You can choose the niche you like the most and where you understand customer’s psychology best of all.
So, understanding psychology in terms of creating ad is not that easy. Use some services, such as Adplexity, just to get an idea how to make an ideal ad copy. On the other hand, customer persona in Nutra is pretty simple.
On some geos it’s almost every second internet user. Which leads to the fact - you can target your ads to utterly broad audience and still get stellar ROI. No need to invest much money for the test in order to get successful campaign!
To sum everything up, affiliates are able to buy super cheap traffic, convert it and get unbelievable profit, due to the tremendous difference between ad spend and commission amount.
And don’t forget about angles, of course. Some products for 18+ could be successfully sold to 35+ aged audience and weight-loss products can be easily targeted to men.
Same could be applied to traffic sources. None of them could guarantee you decent approval rate if you decide to use misleading ads. But, if you play fair, Facebook, Adwords, Native and adult sources should be your favorites then.
Are there any benefits or loyalty programs for your top affiliates/partners?
Yes, they are and not only for top partners, but for everyone.
Let’s start with the unique Boost option. It’s like standard payout bump, but (due to our in-house platform) it’s semi-automatic and is open for any registered user by default.
Option allows you to get + 30% to payout for the first 7 days or first 500 approved leads. And it works for almost any offer. It guarantees that campaigns won’t turn red, even if affiliate doesn’t have enough experience in traffic arbitrage.
For serving the highest CR possible, we usually provide affiliates with native translations of promo-materials, custom-made landers and pre-landers. Everything is for free and by first request. I’ll admit that such features ultimately maximize EPC.
But let’s not stick to automation or metrics only. Most of the business people would agree that the best way to reach mutual goals is through constant networking and human relations.
Our master plan is to hire only like-minded & dedicated people. That’s why our affiliate managers are always willing to share insights and success cases even to complete newbies. They are 24/7 attached to scaling partner’s campaigns. Our goal and defining principle is to make every customer a friend of ours and make him feel like a trusted partner.
What are your plans for the upcoming years?
Constant growth, as always. Now it is the time for massive scaling and expanding into developing regions, where COD is the real sweet spot. For each new geo we’ll roll-out our up-to-par standards of affiliate program.
At the moment, we are one step from opening local offices, warehouses and call-centers in new Asian regions (Thailand, Vietnam and Singapore were launched recently) & LATAM. It will be definitely a game changer, so as our approval rates and logistics will give us strategic advantage.
We will also continue to invest capital into our in-house platform. Just to provide maximum comfort and effectiveness for our users.
What are the main benefits of local call-centers and in-house platform?
They are really diverse.
Let’s start from the approval ratio which can affect your final ROI numbers. The more local your call-center is, the higher approve it can provide. And, as you know, order confirmation is an inevitable step in COD conversion flow.
Take our Thailand call-center as an example. It is considered that 35-50% approval rate for Asian countries is quite normal. Maybe for someone it is so. But how do you like the approval rate that constantly over 65%?
60% + is the average approval rate on our Thailand geo. The clearer your source is, the higher amount of approved leads you will get.
In addition, I can state that mentioned call-center is really huge, so, all the campaigns are truly uncapped. Our local monsters of sales can handle any volumes of traffic.
As to in-house platform, there are ever-present and obvious reasons to build and adjust it. It carries more power, speed and user-experience than 3d party solutions. Own platform equips marketers with wide range of perks:
- custom tracking allows to minimize click loss
- wide analytics helps to optimize ad campaigns better
- statistics is displayed in real-time
- instant funds withdrawal on any payment system
That’s not even the full list of our platform gains. Different affiliates demand different options for their comfortable work. And we are always willing to evolve and help them.
Tell us more about the event and where we can meet you.
This summer we hosted Networking Gala sponsor at AWE Europe. It was decent, as always. And we want to thank all our partners, current and future ones, for making great deals and having a lot of fun time.
In general, we try not to miss any serious event. Recently we have participated in MAC Kiev as a diamond sponsor + co-organized decent pre-party with ABC team. As for upcoming conferences - AWA in Bangkok, of course.
Plus, again several EU meetups, including ASE in Amsterdam. Hope to see you all there, guys.
We are also keen on making our own meetup sessions more often. And experiment with formats. We’ve already organized several crazy parties with huge prizes - Apple gadgets, exclusive cars such as Porsche Panamera in 2016 and 5 limited edition cars in 2017.
A new contest for our affiliates takes place once or twice per year. We care about out affiliates and they know that.
So, stay tuned and join us! We’ll be glad to build more long-term partnerships!
