Episode #43 – The Performance Marketing Spotlight with Michael Cole

Marshall Nyman [00:00:05]:
Hello and welcome to the performance Marketing Spotlight. I’m your host, Marshall Nyman, founder and CEO of Nymon Company. Each episode I will be bringing you someone with deep experience in the performance marketing space where they highlight their experiences within the industry. Today I have Michael Cole, SVP of Marketing at Everflower. Welcome to the podcast, Michael.

Michael Cole [00:00:28]:
It’s great to be here.

Marshall Nyman [00:00:30]:
Awesome to have you, excited to have you on today. And let’s jump right into it. Can you briefly introduce yourself to the audience?

Michael Cole [00:00:37]:
Sure, yeah. So I’m the SVP of marketing at Everflow, which means I’m in charge of the marketing team here. And yeah, I. I guess for background. So my original, like, childhood was growing up in Yosemite, and my parents are actually like very early of the first computer video games. So one of the first video game companies came out of. They just wanted to live where they wanted to live and that was right next to Yosemite. So it was.

Michael Cole [00:01:08]:
One of the first video game companies was Sarah Online next to Yosemite. Cool.

Marshall Nyman [00:01:14]:
And how did you get your start in affiliate marketing?

Michael Cole [00:01:18]:
Yeah, so my start goes way back at this point. I think it’s 17 years at this moment. I went to school at UC Santa Barbara and I was in an entrepreneurial class and one of my professors was like, hey, I have this marketing agency on the side. Would anyone be interested in applying? And as I learned later, I was the only person who applied, so I didn’t have any competition. But that agency was an affiliate marketing agency. And anyone who knows about Santa Barbara, that’s where a lot of the early affiliate networks came out of. So it was a very thriving ecosystem for affiliate marketing. And we had lots of very exciting clients come in.

Michael Cole [00:01:55]:
So we launched the program for Things like Shopify, ZipRecruiter, Quest, Protein Bar that have all become billion and multiple billion dollar companies.

Marshall Nyman [00:02:08]:
And then about seven years ago, you joined Everflow. What led you to that?

Michael Cole [00:02:13]:
Yeah, so before I joined Everflow as one of the early customers, I launched a mobile affiliate network on top of Everflow. Managed to scale it quite large. But anyone who’s ever worked for affiliate network knows that there’s a huge up and down of clients where when the clients are high budgets, money flows like water. And when they arbitrarily need to cut budgets, suddenly everything’s hard. And it’s very much a roller coaster of emotions. And I was very excited to switch over to the SaaS platform side where you can just keep serving customers and if the customer is happy and making money, they’ll repeat they’ll recur, they’ll keep coming back month after month, year after year. And so it’s been wonderful to be on the tech side.

Marshall Nyman [00:03:01]:
What is Everflow and what makes it unique?

Michael Cole [00:03:04]:
Yeah, so Everflow is a partner marketing platform. And it’s important to state that we truly are a platform versus a network. Like, we’re a SaaS tool that allows you to manage all of your affiliates, influencers, to expand beyond that to turning happy customers and referral partners or ambassadors, taking diversifying into, like, strategic partners and down to also tracking them, attribution for anything else that drives performance, whether that’s paid ads, organic, etc. Having everything in the same place, having full control over it with no middlemen, taking a cut out of every transaction and just providing that technology to customers. And so that serves an interesting niche in our space of being not a network, but giving the tools to basically have your own network or your own brand with all your own relationships.

Marshall Nyman [00:04:06]:
What do you do in your role as SVP of marketing at Everflow?

Michael Cole [00:04:10]:
Yeah, so I’m the head of marketing, which means I oversee all of our events, how we actually do our own customer acquisition, how we do branding, how do we hop on things like this wonderful podcast. What’s interesting about Everflow is that our marketing org also contains all of partnerships and our partnership team is spread into a couple different sets. So one of those is agency relationships, really making sure that agencies are successful on Everflow and that their clients are being supported. Then you have the whole marketplace team. Like a network. We have a marketplace, but it’s much less focused on every affiliate under the sun. It’s not about taking a cut out of there or being the gatekeeper. It’s more like we know when you sign up for Everflow, you need to see traction, success.

Michael Cole [00:05:00]:
So we make sure that the key affiliates are there and that we have a, like, much more diversified base of like, the emailers and media buyers and all of the ones that are hard to find on a traditional network. So that you can see new revenue by using Everflow. And then the third piece is just strategic partnerships. We work a lot with like, tech partners and we bring on a lot of customers as referral partners. All of that fits within partnerships as well.

Marshall Nyman [00:05:32]:
Anything exciting in store for everflow in 2025?

Michael Cole [00:05:36]:
Yeah, I would say one thing that’s pretty exciting that’s up and coming is we already have integrations with all of the major media buying platforms, so Google Ads, Meta and TikTok, but we’re working on building a standalone module here that allows your media buyers on your team as an agency, whoever handles that, as a client, whoever handles that, where they can log in, they can see reporting that is very media buyer specific, which is important for it to be easy for them to digest, understand what’s working there and to be leveraging the same tracking and attribution data that is being used for tracking all partnerships and organic traffic, et cetera. And by having media buying affiliate partners, partnerships and organic all in the same place, it means that everyone is speaking the same language, that the affiliate manager is reporting data that’s being seen also by the media buyer, that’s also being seen by the VP of marketing. So that there’s no silos here that everyone agrees, like when affiliates are adding a ton of value versus the media buying channel. And it also allows you to sort of like really scale up media buying affiliates because you can see like here’s the media buying we’re doing internally and here’s the performance coming from this affiliate versus that affiliate. So it’s a combination of making it very clear user experience for media buying while not forgetting how much media buying intersects with all the other partnership activities.

Marshall Nyman [00:07:08]:
Why should someone get started on Everflow?

Michael Cole [00:07:11]:
Yeah, so there’s two major reasons to get started with Everflow. One, as a a pure SaaS platform, this gives you the tools to not only scale like current affiliates, but also expand beyond that I mentioned earlier for our own growth. We see so much success out of taking customers that are already using Everflow, that truly love using Everflow and turning them into referral partners and having them recommend other people. Who is a better advocate than someone who actually understands why your product matters and is passionate about it referring their industry peers to also use that product. So that ability to bring on referral partnerships or ambassadors for E commerce company is very powerful. And with a traditional network, the network has to be in the middle because they are the one. Basically it’s infrastructure for everything and also payments. Which means that you want to bring on an ambassador, they have to sign a contract with a third party.

Michael Cole [00:08:09]:
They have to understand exactly what they’re agreeing to. They have to set up their payment information. That’s a very painful process. That means that usually referrals ambassadors is separated from affiliate. With a platform like us, this is your tool. There’s no third party contract in there. So you can just set up all the partners right away. You can track them immediately before anything is done.

Michael Cole [00:08:31]:
Contractually you can be like, hey Ambassador, actually you drove five sales and we owe you $200. Then ambassador can then log in at that point, agree to contracts, get their payment set up, get paid. So that ability to just start tracking right away and then when, when actually you’re owed money, start paying them, that solves a big problem there. And also because we’re not doing the middleman in this, like there’s a lot more margins because we’re not taking a transaction fee, which means you can pay your super affiliates more, which some affiliates can scale a lot more if you can pay them an extra 1% on every transaction. So that’s why the platform model helps a lot. And as a more modern company and built by a bunch of industry veterans, we build it from day one to handle a ton of data and to leverage all the cloud reporting capabilities that are out there. So the ability to sort of drill deep into your data and be very granular with your analytics is very powerful because you want to really understand like not just the affiliate, but which placements are driving performance and which ones are not. So that’s all the platform side.

Michael Cole [00:09:44]:
I think the other part that we see our platform adding a ton of value and our best users use heavily is event tracking. You can track unlimited events and events to us is basically everything outside of the conversion of the purchase or lead. So there’s one set of events which is engagement. So if you’re working with content or influencers, a lot of times that they are undervalued in a traditional affiliate network because you’re just looking at the end of day performance of the purchase. But influencers drive a ton of like engagement, new demand, high value users. So if you’re tracking things like did this influencer drive someone who signed up for a webinar or a newsletter or went to your fashion showcase, you actually have another story to share with your clients or bosses about affiliates ability to drive new demand on top of performance. So that’s the engagement events and then the other parts of events that’s very relevant is like what happens after that leader purchase in the lead situation? Like did that lead get approved? What was the value of that lead? You can pay your partners a lot more if they’re driving high approved leads at high values. And the more you pay affiliates, the more they scale.

Michael Cole [00:10:56]:
And then on the E commerce case, you have the purchase, but the purchase is not the end of that relationship. Like that user can come back and purchase again and again and again and again. Having that ability to attribute that back to the partner tells you a very different story about how much value affiliates are truly bringing to the table. And then on top of just repeat purchases you have things like upsells. Do they sign up for other products? Did they sign up for subscription boxes? There’s so much other ways that revenue is driven from affiliates and right now we’re only showing a small pinpoint window into the real value affiliates. So of course affiliate is undervalued. If that’s the only thing that’s being looked at and you’re telling your story in one network and your bosses or your clients are all looking at a different analytics platform is totally different data. Like you’re always going to be arguing for who deserves credit.

Michael Cole [00:11:50]:
So we see a ton of value of this. Having all the data in one place where you can show when affiliates add value and showing way more revenue that happens after that first conversion. That really paints a different story about like the real value of influencers and content and things like that. So we see a lot of value of how much revenue you can truly report on and, and what stories you can tell internally of the value of these channels.

Marshall Nyman [00:12:16]:
What has been your favorite part of working at Everflow?

Michael Cole [00:12:20]:
Yeah, so I think my favorite part is I’m in the Bay Area, I’ve worked in many startups and I can tell you that investors are a challenging thing. When you take money, there are real consequences to how you can grow your company. And Everflow is a bootstrap company. From day one, we served our customers, we kept building products that our customers wanted and we grew organically from customers referring other customers to us. So that very healthy way of actually making sure the product is serving our customer versus just trying to hit an arbitrary growth metric so we can raise the next round really changes our ability to grow the business. And as like sort of a corollary of that, we’re very different structured than a traditional VC company. Our largest team is actually customer success because we know if we serve customers really well that they see a lot of success with Everflow, they will talk about us at conferences, they will refer business and it’s really allowed us to grow in a very healthy way. And now, I mean we’re over 1100 customers, we have 100 plus people and that’s with taking no outside funding.

Michael Cole [00:13:35]:
Like we can make the smart decisions that are long term towards the growth and for agencies and stuff like that, they know that we aren’t going to just like pull the rug under them to take a little bit extra margin to get that next investment round. Like we can grow with the the entire industry together versus try to pull a Little margin here and there to hit a new VC funding round.

Marshall Nyman [00:14:03]:
Well, we’re just coming off an exciting Affiliate Summit West. Curious what other conferences you have planned for this year.

Michael Cole [00:14:10]:
Yeah, so in terms of conferences, our big ones will be the Affiliate Summits, the PI Lives and Affiliate Worlds. At all these conferences, we will always have a big industry party and we’ll be doing a lot of stuff around that because this is the best thing to not only like, obviously get new prospects and leads, but we really want to celebrate our customers and they should know they’ll always have a cool place to go as being a customer of Everflow. So we’ll have parties at all those shows, we’ll have lots of other side events, etc. And then on top of that, we’re doing a lot of vertical testing of shows. So we’ll be at E commerce shows like Commerce Next we’ll be at a lot of insurance. We’re growing a lot in the Middle east, so we’ll be at all the Middle east conferences and we have a Rockstar team that’s been growing fast there. But yeah, that’s our spread right now.

Marshall Nyman [00:15:07]:
Any predictions on the future of performance marketing?

Michael Cole [00:15:11]:
Yeah, so I think one prediction is we’re gonna have this weird thing for next year’s of basically what is attribution and what is truth and attribution? The mmms, like the multi. Oh my gosh, I lost it already. The media mix measurement companies where they’re telling you like, hey, this channel drove 10% of the value, this channel drove 5% of the value. Like, that’s becoming hot and trendy again because people are desperate to show performance again and figure out like, what’s really driving value. But the challenge with that, the whole media mix stuff, is that it ends up being very probabilistic of like, I think it’s this and I think it’s that. And a lot of times it arbitrarily says affiliate doesn’t really drive value. Because a lot of companies that are offering this, they sell their own ad units, they have their own paid ads. It’s to their favor to say like, hey, buying media on Google is way more valuable than affiliate.

Michael Cole [00:16:17]:
And they’re gonna say that there’s a lot of vested interest there. And like the challenge with probabilistic stuff is that you end up being like you. It’s kind of same with antifraud where it’s like, you have to really believe that it’s accurate and you have to spend a lot of work making sure that it’s actually based on reality versus what someone internally thinks. And it’s going to be rising for a while because people need to understand performance. But it’s also going to undervalue affiliate for a while. And so I think these things always go in waves where it gets really hyped up, it gets popular and then it slowly crashes back down from our side internally, we’ve always stuck with deterministic attribution which is just like this is either the first source or the last source and you want to give credit first on who’s really driving value. So say like first attribution. If they’re an influencer content website, you just want to give them protected window of 30 or 45 days.

Michael Cole [00:17:19]:
Does it matter that it came from influencer and then paid ad actually drove that conversion? Not really. I want that influencer to keep driving new users in demand, so I want to give them protected window. So I’m just going to say first touch attribution and not worry about the, the fact it touched five other sources. Like they drove new users. I want them to keep doing that. So I think that solves for one thing. And also with event attribution and looking at these like much easier to understand stages, like did they drive a user who then went to my pricing page, there’s engagement there. I can immediately say this influencer drove people to my pricing page.

Michael Cole [00:17:55]:
I want to scale that up. I don’t need to understand like was at 10% of the actual conversion. I just want to make sure that I’m rewarding the partners where I want them to do more and that they are making enough money that they can keep scaling their promotions.

Marshall Nyman [00:18:11]:
What are some major challenges the industry is currently facing?

Michael Cole [00:18:15]:
Yeah, so I think the industry is always challenged by just like how much value does affiliate really drive? Is an open question. And from my perspective, like a lot of this comes out of silos. If you’re managing all your affiliates in affiliate network and you have that’s your source of truth as the affiliate manager, but then your client or your boss is looking at Google Analytics and maybe they have a second analytic tool on top of that. Like they’re looking at data very different than you and you don’t have the ability to say like, no, this is the truth. Because if everything else is tracked through another platform and you have just your single source of data and they have everything else, they’re going to use whatever roles makes their main initiatives look best. And that’s what’s going to be argued to the VP of marketing. The cmo, et cetera. So the silo is a huge challenge in the industry and always has been.

Michael Cole [00:19:17]:
And it really means that affiliate gets undervalued because, yes, there’s a lot of bottom of the funnel stuff where it doesn’t always add value, but that’s just like a piece of story. Like, even with like coupons, there’s two types of coupons. Like, there’s one where I was about to purchase, I saw a promo code box and I went to coupon. Probably not adding a ton of value, but maybe that’s what got them to purchase. But there’s also the other type of coupon, which is like, I want to buy shoes, I don’t know what. And I go to this loyalty website and I see there’s 20% off at Adidas, and I stop my start my shopping experience there and I spend 20 minutes shopping in Adidas. That adds a ton of value. And there’s ways to look at that with things like what was the time from the click to the actual purchase, that’s reporting that we provide, that tells you a story about this loyalty website is actually driving shopper activity, which is high value versus being in the bottom of funnel.

Michael Cole [00:20:09]:
So that’s like an example of there’s a lot more nuance and there’s a lot more stories to tell about where affiliates are actually adding value. And this is why, like, we really recommend that our customers not only track the affiliates, even if they’re just an affiliate manager. You want to see affiliate versus organic traffic. You want to have the media buyer logging in, speaking the same language, looking at the same events, looking at the paid ads in the same way where everyone is reporting using the same kind of data where, where now you see like actually affiliates driving maybe like half as many sales as paid ads, but those users are coming back, they’re purchasing again, like, these are repeat customers. That’s a much higher value action. And that breaks down the silos because now there’s more people logging in, there’s more people looking at the reporting, and I see a ton of value there. As soon as you have the VP of marketing logging in the same platform that you’re using for your own data.

Marshall Nyman [00:21:09]:
What has been your favorite part of working in the performance marketing industry?

Michael Cole [00:21:13]:
Yeah, I mean, the great thing about performance marketing is that in the good times and the bad times, there’s always performance marketing. Because again, if you’re actually making money, you’re not going to cut that channel it, you’re going to continue to grow it. And the good times and the bad times. And as long as you are truly driving performance and it’s adding value versus just taking attribution credit like you should be doing that all day, every day. And the more you can prove that you’re actually adding value, the more that it’s like a ironclad channel that we know will always be here. It always evolves naturally as people figure out what is the next thing. But at the end of the day, if I’m making more money than I’m paying, I want to do that all day.

Marshall Nyman [00:22:00]:
Well, that’s a great place to end. A big thank you to Michael for joining the podcast this week. Some great insights into his background and how you can leverage Everflow. What’s the best way for listeners to connect with you?

Michael Cole [00:22:13]:
Yeah, you can always connect with me on LinkedIn just Michael Cole plus everflow because they have a very generic name and you can always check out Everflow’s website, Everflow IO and yeah, like, I guess it’s like a parting thought. Just keep in mind that Everflow is not a direct competitor with any of these affiliate networks. You can always expand onto us and find additive revenue and have analytics what you’re already doing. So there’s always a place to sort of find where we can help you be more successful in your role on top of what you’re already doing.

Marshall Nyman [00:22:47]:
Awesome. Again, thank you to our guest Michael Cole and to our producer, Leon Sonkin. If you’ve enjoyed this content, please give us a like and a follow. Thank you for listening in. I’m Marshall Nyman, host of the Performance Marketing Spotlight and founder and CEO of Nymo & Company. Signing off. Thank you and have a great day.

Michael Cole [00:23:09]:
Thanks.