SureSwift Portfolio Spotlight: LeadDyno's New GM on Trends and Innovations in Affiliate Marketing

At SureSwift, we operate in nearly every corner of the SaaS world. One exciting area we’re involved in is affiliate marketing. LeadDyno, one of our portfolio businesses, empowers businesses to manage and grow their affiliate programs.

We had the pleasure of sitting down with Emily Mathison, LeadDyno's new General Manager, and Gui Gomes, Product Manager, to catch up on what the team's up to and how it's working hard to fill market needs in the growing affiliate space.

Keep reading to learn all about what LeadDyno is exactly, its target markets and customizations, Mathison's experience so far as a new team member, current affiliate marketing trends and how LeadDyno is responding to them, along with what's coming up for the product and its busy team.

What is LeadDyno?

LeadDyno is an affiliate program management and marketing SaaS product within the SureSwift Portfolio of businesses.

It helps organizations streamline and expand their affiliate programs and manage relationships with their affiliate representatives, including through reporting and payouts. Users can easily track and measure how their affiliate program and individual affiliates are performing versus their overall sales.

Key target markets

LeadDyno's main target markets include health & wellness, fashion & lifestyle, SaaS, and e-commerce.

Because LeadDyno is so customizable, individual users across all of these target markets can design an instance of the product to fit their own unique needs in helping their affiliates promote products to customers.

A customized fit for organizations of any size

Aside from its customized fit, the nice thing about LeadDyno is it's flexible to suit organizations of all sizes:

Smaller organizations. LeadDyno works well for someone who runs their own business, like an e-commerce store, and wants a way to work with affiliates to help sell their services.

A smaller initial program might later ramp up to something more established with a dedicated affiliate manager who communicates with different affiliate groups and is looking to recruit more affiliates to scale that program further.

Larger organizations. LeadDyno can be set up as a tiered marketing structure 

to enable affiliates to invite other affiliates — giving users the freedom and flexibility to experience as big a layer of complexity as best suits their needs.

The product comes with corresponding features often ideal for larger or enterprise clients, like:

• the ability to design multiple reward structures across different products,
• a white-labeled affiliate website & custom CSS,
• a dedicated LeadDyno account manager, and
• new customer bounty — which rewards affiliates for bringing in net new customers and driving business growth.

Flexible customizations. An endless amount of customizations to leverage across different plans helps inform a commission structure design to best suit each business.

For example, the structure can be bound by certain amounts of time, commissions based on a recurring revenue model paying out extra returns, bonus commissions for bringing in new customers, only paying out commissions after affiliates generate a certain amount of sales, and more.

Users can also:

• customize the event that triggers a commission,
• reward affiliates for purchases they drive to the business, leads to incentivize website traffic, or individual products to support a promotion, and
• offer non-cash rewards like a free gift.

Over 1,500 trusted health & wellness, lifestyle, and SaaS brands rely on LeadDyno to help manage their affiliate programs. In 2023 alone, these customers generated over $188 million in affiliate-driven revenue.

Meet LeadDyno's new General Manager: Emily Mathison

When asked about her onboarding experience to LeadDyno and what excites her the most, Mathison, the team's new General Manager, had a lot to share.

"I'm really grateful to have joined such a cohesive, collaborative, integrated team. Everyone is incredibly supportive of one another and works really well together," Mathison says. "There's a lot to learn about this business and everyone has been really open and supportive in helping me find the information I need."

Mathison has found the learning to be self-led mixed with some frameworks, but nothing overly prescriptive. "I'm starting to feel like I'm getting my feet underneath me now, a couple of months in, which has been great!"

She also highlights the fact that Gomes' leadership has been paramount to the team and its endeavors. "We're really excited for him to fully take on the role as Product Manager," something he's contributed towards in the past and recently started in an official capacity.

Finally, Mathison notes that LeadDyno offers a lot of opportunities for growth and that it's been very exciting to come in and join a team that's passionate about driving that growth.

Today's affiliate marketing trends

The LeadDyno team has noticed several overall trends popping up in the affiliate marketing space these days:

1. Small brands hoping to enter this growing industry increasingly turn to affiliates to promote their offerings.

With the affiliate industry projected at $15.5+ billion and having grown nearly 85% in seven years, more and more brands are looking to get into it. As they do, they're seeking the help of affiliates more than ever before.

Accordingly, there are more and more influencers out there available to sell these brands' products and services.

2. AI (artificial intelligence) and automation becoming more popular.

Certain affiliate program aspects naturally lend themselves to being performed through AI and automation. For example, communication to keep affiliates up to date on new products is a big one. A brand can pass along what their new products are, special promotions running, new marketing content, or other resources for their affiliates to share with their audiences.

Automating these communications is pretty common now, with a large focus on data, reporting, and understanding performance.

3. Data telling a story and providing understanding of product integration performance.

Integrating with the tools a business already uses is key to ensuring accurate data tracking and understanding what's working and what's not in a program. LeadDyno integrates with many products, like Stripe and CRM (customer relationship management) tools, that are becoming increasingly common in the industry.

Mathison points out that the data around these integrations is key to understanding what's working and what's not in a program.

"It's really important for businesses to be able to understand the performance of their affiliate marketing overall, and accurate data is the basis of that. This helps them drill down to see what's working and what's not so they can optimize the program," she notes.

4. Quality relationship management using a fulsome environment for a complete user journey.

More companies are building complete, comprehensive environments to track user journeys from their initial visit to becoming a customer.

Doing this helps to facilitate quality relationship management with both affiliates and customers. Plus, these users won't finish their lifetime after the first purchase — rather, through receiving promotions and other touchpoints, they're consistently encouraged to continue the relationship.

How is LeadDyno responding to these trends?

While LeadDyno is constantly monitoring ongoing trends in the industry and market, here are a few specific initiatives and approaches the team has taken and continues to take that address some of these affiliate marketing trends.

An easy-to-launch-and-use, scalable platform. Small brands can get started in affiliate marketing at a low cost and continue to access the LeadDyno features they need as their affiliate marketing program grows.

Restructured pricing. The team has restructured pricing to be feature-based and offer various pricing tiers suitable for different-sized brands.

New and enhanced features. LeadDyno is releasing new and enhanced features to continue to serve this growing industry.

Full integrations with easy setup. LeadDyno integrates with a full set of various tools, apps, and platforms — nearly 30 of them — that are specialized in their own function. These integrations are facilitated so that setting up, starting, and fully running an affiliate program using what's on hand is an easy, seamless user experience. 

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The product is bundled within different platforms a user might already have — for example, a payment tool like Stripe or their own store within Shopify, BigCommerce, or another e-commerce platform — and what's great is there's no manual process or building from scratch since everything is automated.

Users simply install LeadDyno and from there, it integrates with their existing tools to automatically track everything that happens within the store/business. This includes data on visitors, newsletter subscribers, those buying a new product, first-time customers, and more.

Quality relationship management in a complete environment for the full user journey. As well, the team ensures it fosters quality relationship management through its automated communication tools, customized affiliate dashboards, and outstanding customer support.

Here are some examples.

1. New Multi-Websites for Affiliate Groups feature. With the new Multi-Websites for Affiliate Groups feature, coming out in October, affiliate managers can create separate websites for each of their affiliate groups. This is useful for those promoting different products and services and requiring different marketing materials to share with their followers. The sites also give insight into the leads each group has brought in and the customers they've turned those leads into.

Use case: Users might have separate affiliate groups selling different items or promoting things in various ways.

This could be, for instance, their TikTok influencers and their YouTube influencers. In this example, everyone who signs up for an affiliate program as a TikTok influencer gets immediately put into the TikTok group with a dashboard and resources optimized for them specifically. The same goes for the YouTube influencers. Managing affiliates like this helps to support each relationship in a more personalized and focused way.

Or, programs might run in different countries, like the US and Canada, for example. Each jurisdiction may need different marketing content for social media, and there could also be different terms of service based on each region or country's standards and requirements.

However the groups are composed, each will likely need different communication and resources and would therefore need to be grouped independently, which this feature easily enables. Users will have total control over what they show affiliates in terms of different views within the program and different social media or marketing resources to share publicly. This will especially help larger client accounts.

2. Communication and reporting. LeadDyno recently updated its main reporting dashboard that affiliate managers access:

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This improved dashboard has been designed to provide real-time insights into what’s happening in a user's affiliate program and what needs their attention, helping them make informed decisions for their program and business.

Affiliate managers can get a quick snapshot of their program’s lifetime performance with essential metrics like profit, conversion rates, and active affiliates. Data-driven, personalized reporting allows them to track sales, sign-ups, and conversions within a specified date range across all reporting screens, making it easy to compare with previous periods.

Users can easily view top-performing affiliates, including their sales, conversion rates, and new customers. They can also stay on top of pending commissions, requests, and purchases with actionable alerts, and receive real-time updates on their program’s progress through the recent events feature.

3. Customer support. LeadDyno users run the gamut in terms of understanding affiliate marketing and the robustness of their programs, and the team fully recognizes this. So, through its world-class customer support, available through live chat, email, or video formats, LeadDyno meets users exactly where they're at to help them with whatever they need. Support is available for many aspects of the product including setup and tracking, which ensures LeadDyno works properly to accurately capture the right leads within the right purchases.

That being said, the product's higher-tiered plans especially benefit from the robust customer support offered. This can include a dedicated LeadDyno account manager who becomes the customer's main point of contact. The account manager is responsible for ensuring users have optimized their affiliate program and that everything's running correctly.

Custom Setup. LeadDyno also offers something called Custom Setup, which only comes with the higher-tier plan. Custom Setup allows customers with a complex use case to work with LeadDyno's developers to customize their instance in a way that fits their business's unique needs. This gives customers without their own developers the chance to tap into LeadDyno's expertise.

The program provides 16 hours of the team's time for just about anything. However, most requests fall into these categories: 

• Customization to integrations
• Complex data (affiliate, lead, customer, purchase) imports
• Custom data (affiliate, lead, customer, purchase) reports not available in-app
• CSS customizations for the affiliate dashboard

For information and insights from LeadDyno's customers on how their experiences have been with the product and team, check out these case studies.

What's next for the product?

With the new Multi-Websites for Affiliate Groups interface, the team wants to give users more control and open up more possibilities around their groups. Here, they envision next steps as continuing to focus on helping these larger accounts succeed.

LeadDyno is continuously investing in and facilitating the product for smaller accounts as well so they can keep growing and scaling.

On the other end, for those just getting started with their affiliate program, the team is limiting the number of available features so these new users can focus only on what's required to get their program launched successfully. Then, as they see the program optimizing and performing, LeadDyno will roll out many different possibilities and features for them to work with.

To expand marketing efforts, Mathison says the team will explore new micro-verticals. They'll test the market to see what other groups LeadDyno resonates with. "For example, there's health and wellness, but then there's e-commerce within that space as well," she explains. "It's about breaking these up a little bit more."

The goal here is to find serviceable portions of the market being underserved and figure out how LeadDyno can fill that gap and meet the needs of those prospects. "Just because SureSwift acquired a product with customers already in certain verticals doesn't mean we'll assume those are the only verticals appropriate for LeadDyno," Mathison notes.

And the team is well set up for this exploration, thanks to its strong go-to-market strategy, balanced well between three pillars — product-led, marketing-led, and sales-led growth — all managed by strong leaders ready to hit the ground running with plenty of experience, expertise, and intuition.

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Learn more about LeadDyno and how it works or reach out directly to the team. And, as always, you can check out the wide range of SureSwift Portfolio businesses or learn about our Investors and Founders.

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