“We are a performance marketing company that develops customer acquisition programs by aligning our clients’ business goals. With that, we run campaigns using the most relevant effective channels in various publisher verticals. We create programs that focus on customers, sales, and sustainable growth – and implement models that reward publishers who refer successful transactions with a share of that sale.”-Gerald Young, CMO, Involve Asia.
Involve Asia is a performance marketing company that focuses on clearly defined and measurable business objectives. The company works with over 400 e-commerce companies to market their campaigns by offering incentives which are tied to their business objectives such as commissions for sales, bounties for leads and so on. They are currently in 6 countries – Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, and Vietnam.
In an exclusive interview with Startup Terminal; Gerald Young, CMO, Involve Asia provides more insight about the company and future goals:
Excerpts:
ST: Tell us more about Involve Asia.
Involve Asia is a performance marketing company that focuses on clearly defined and measurable business objectives. We work with over 400 e-commerce companies (the list is growing at a rapid rate!) to market their campaigns by offering incentives which are tied to their business objectives such as commissions for sales, bounties for leads and so on. We’re currently in 6 countries – Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, and Vietnam.
Involve Asia’s founder Jimmy How (left), and CMO Gerald Young
The adoption of affiliate marketing is driven by mainstream publishers adopting the model, as well as an increase in earned media value in social networks. For many businesses, affiliate ad spending has an increasingly large impact on e-commerce orders – ranking high up within the top 5 paid channels for advertisers.ST: How do you create a win-win situation for web, mobile and social media publishers and for leading businesses as well?
Involve Asia facilitates the relationship between publishers and businesses through our proprietary tech stack and know-how in the affiliate space. We consult and execute network-wide strategies for businesses resulting in incredible return-on-advertising-spend as well as identify relevant and targeted opportunities within a publisher’s medium. We offer the tools and analytics necessary for publishers and advertisers alike to track which programs do well based on their niche, vertical, and focus, and action-plans to optimise the channel for customer acquisition.
Both sides of the coin benefit from our deep industry knowledge as well as technology, and they go on to develop high-generating revenue streams for all parties via the affiliate channel. Us, included!
ST: Can you explain your business model? How do you generate revenue streams?
We are a performance marketing company that develops customer acquisition programs by aligning our clients’ business goals. With that, we run campaigns using the most relevant effective channels in various publisher verticals.
We create programs that focuses on customers, sales, and sustainable growth – and implement models that reward publishers who refer successful transactions with a share of that sale.
We provide publishers a unique advantage to hedge against the volatility of ad-pricing models by choosing and recommending which affiliate programs that will actually help them generate revenue based on their site.
Our framework allows publishers to generate revenue based on their specialty, and clients to achieve theirs by tapping into similar-to-core audiences from all the channels that run their program(s).
ST: How has your entrepreneurship journey been so far?
Firstly, all credit goes to the team at Involve Asia for getting us this far. Without them, we wouldn’t be where we are today! Secondly, all hats off to Jimmy’s vision and direction for steering the company into high gears from the get-go. The journey for all of us has been rewarding – mainly to see all our efforts paying off. We came in at the right time and moment when businesses are starting to adopt a performance model that correlates to their actual bottomline performance. To steal a line from Uber’s CEO Travis Kalanick, “blood, sweat, and ramen” should describe how much of effort and focus we have put into this baby! We’ve still got a lot more to achieve, and you’ll be hearing about us a lot more in the future!
ST: Do you really think Affiliate marketing has a bright future in terms of driving business growth and benefiting publishers, bloggers and target customers?
Research in other developed markets will show and tell you that a huge chunk of online spending is largely driven by content found online. The same can be said about how affiliate marketing itself is driving a significant amount of e-commerce spend. With today’s advertising model shifting and changing so rapidly, businesses are looking for models that are designed to scale. That being said, the affiliate model offers that blueprint and it helps businesses develop more effective performance partnerships.
As the channel itself grows, publishers of all kinds are now looking into capitalizing that spending by opting into programs that reward them for pushing a sale. We’ll be seeing more sales-driven performance campaigns actually being rolled out by marketers as they recognise the model as a profit-center and publishers are now primed to make more off their audience-base rather than just relying on a volatile ad-pricing model.
Lastly, affiliate marketing isn’t just an e-commerce company’s strategy. It’s also slowly but surely becoming a brand’s marketing objective, and we’re beginning to see more attention being paid in this space – opening up more lucrative revenue streams for publishers who previously did not have the chance to run these kinds of campaigns in the first place.
ST: Would you like to give some tips to young aspiring Internet marketers, affiliate marketers, blogging and startup enthusiasts?
Experiment a lot. And then fail fast. Then when you find your winners – double down on them like there’s no tomorrow. Either way, data will lead you to the light at the end of the tunnel.
ST: What are your future plans?
We’re constantly experimenting with new tools and methods to help increase a publisher’s yield. So we’re really focused on doing that and introducing new line products to do just that for them. On the other hand, we’re also diving deep into finding more new ways to help our clients increase their sales. It’s an exercise that’s ongoing and one that we pride ourselves in paying a lot of attention on.
But in terms of which market and what we’ll be launching big next, I suppose you’ll just have to read the news for that one.
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