If you work in the e-commerce space, ClickBank is no stranger to you. In this interview, we get to see behind the curtain at ClickBank and hear about the next stage for this e-commerce giant that’s been in the field for over 20 years.
The best clients are those that have the resources to do business right and handle things quickly. That sometimes means being willing to fill gaps they have in their team. These clients recognize that they may need an affiliate manager, a copywriter, or a developer. Of course you need yourself to be running the show, and you might be able to assume many of those roles. However, you also have to have the bandwidth to focus on the big picture, which may need hiring someone else to fill those other roles.
ClickBank was built as a digital platform, but roughly five to six years ago we got into the physical space. We help you qualify for a physical or even a digital offer. We look at all the compliance for the FTC and FDA. Using ClickBank tends to create higher average order values and better payouts to affiliates. Your margins might be lower, but the average order value can be higher. For example, adding a product like a printed book into your funnel is a great way to start.
I’m from a super small town in northern Idaho called Hope, Idaho. It has a population of 100 people. I got hired at a link building firm, Page One Power. Then, I was hired as an account manager at ClickBank. I thought I knew internet marketing or SEO, and realized that I actually only do a sliver of internet marketing. About a year after that, I moved into a business development role.
At the core, we’re a merchant processor with a robust affiliate platform built on top. We handle, essentially, a lot of the unsexy back-end work. Without us, you’re tracking affiliates yourself, and then paying the affiliates yourself as well. We’ve been an online retailer for 20 years. We’re kind of in there with eBay and Amazon. So, you know that when you work with us, the offer owner can rest easy. You can have a $2 million sales day as a single vendor and be just fine.
ShipOffers partnership has been great because, while the compliance is a good value-add, it also removed a friction point to getting on-boarded for new physical products. For example, if you don’t know how to sell (or if you’ve never sold) a supplement, you don’t know the hoops to jump through. We require some insurance, and other things like that, which can be expensive for a white-label product. You’ll also want to test and see if it’s got legs in the market.
It’s a very tactical and strategic advantage to have a partnership with ShipOffers since we’ve pre-approved large swaths of your white-label supplements. That means when someone wants to add ShipOffers products, all we have to do is make sure the label is good, the product name is good, and that no one has drastically edited the facts panel. A lot of people can get started as fast as one or two weeks in if their copy is compliant and they are working with ShipOffers.
We’ve got a lot on our roadmap when it comes to plans for improving our platform. We keep rolling out features that our existing clients have been asking for. We have an improved UI coming down the pipeline. We want to make sure that you’re as high converting as possible. In the industry itself, we’re seeing a lot of good wind at our back right now. I’m looking forward to establishing more partnerships, as we’ve done with ShipOffers.
If it’s physical or digital, high-ticket or low-ticket, or really any product that can run on a revenue-sharing base, it’s worth looking into and chatting with ClickBank.
If there’s a way for us to work together, it can be a really good driver to your bottom line profit margins.
Thomas McMahon
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