As a Senior Vice President for the Affiliate business for Lazada Southeast Asia, I look after the channels user growth and revenues. I was fascinated by the potential of e-commerce in Asia as I was fortunate to be part of the International expansion team for Amazon. Over the past 10 years I have been part of early launch and scaling teams in e-commerce industry.
Could you give us a short introduction about yourself and what you do at Lazada? As the Senior Vice President for Affiliate business for Lazada Southeast Asia, I look after the channels user growth and revenues. I was fascinated by the potential of e-commerce in Asia when I was part of the International expansion team at Amazon. Over the past 10 years, I have been part of early launch and scaling teams in the e-commerce industry.
What recommendations do you have for product owners to successfully promote a product to stay on top of consumers mind?
Product owners should think of the end to end customer journey and how to wow them at every touch point. Since digital touch points are a significant portion of the customer journey these days, product owners should measure impact and carefully assess the RoI in each step.
How does Alibaba tap on affiliate marketing to drive customers to their website? By nurturing and growing high quality channels present in the Southeast Asian market, we work very closely on expanding all types of partners in the eco-system from programmatic partners, advertising networks, news, gaming and utility portals, KOLs to micro and nano influencers.
What are some ways retailers can grow their affiliate programmes?
We work with many retailers and help them onboard as affiliate partners. We are creating a win-win model with the brands and sellers, helping them tap on their loyal customers who shop on the Lazada platform and stand out from their competitors. We also give them the access to tools that takes them from x to y very fast.
How do you measure the success of Lazada’s affiliate marketing program?
The number one method to measure the success is if you’re able to create a win-win model between sellers, retailers, and brands as one entity, the affiliate partners as the second entity and the customers as the third entity. Firstly, you would want to make sure that the retailers are gaining additional traffic and additional sales by working with our affiliate partners. Secondly, the affiliate partners should be getting the best Roi in terms of diverting or channeling traffic and their customers to Lazada’s portal. Last but not the least, the customers need to find the best value by engaging with our platform. They should be able to find the products that they want, reach them on time etc.
Can you talk us through the approaches used to grow your Affiliate Program?
I think affiliate marketing is still in early stages in Southeast Asia compared to other developed markets. We want to grow content creators in Southeast Asia, making sure that we’re able to tap into the best and high-quality content creators, making sure that they work with us.
We give them the right support and incentives so that they continue to work with us. We want to ensure that we tap into different communities in the SEA markets for credible sources of passive income or income opportunities. We work with YouTubers, Instagram influencers, influencers on Twitter or KOLs on different social media platforms, young students, fresh graduates and different communities of women from different parts of SEA. We really want to double down on that segment and then grow those segments for our partners and at the same time, we’re also quite conscious that there are many frauds, fraudulent partners surfacing in the market and then calling themselves as affiliate programs. We are conscious that this exists and we want to spread the message that all our content creators come directly through Zeta’s Portal and sign up. We never work with any third-party agencies that are promoting through SMS and other mechanisms.
How has eCommerce Affiliate Marketing changed over the years and what are some new things we will see in 2022 and beyond?
The three points I summarized earlier is testament to what has really changed in the past few years. A couple of changes took place. Number one, the top e-commerce companies came up with the affiliate program that that kickstarted the affiliate marketing revolution then a lot of new players in the market attempted affiliate marketing. Most of whom were primarily blogs and then a couple of other advertising tech companies which were trying to do affiliate marketing in the recent past, especially after COVID, since they realized that affiliate marketing is a credible way to make revenue. We had a lot of new segments of partners that came into the ecosystem. Yes, number one, we see that it’s going to be a rapid proliferation of the influencers and the key opinion leaders and content creators, which is in line with the creative economy boom that is happening across the world.
How effective is affiliate marketing in recruiting new customers?
Affiliate marketing is a great channel for new customers of eCommerce or someone who’s not familiar with an eCommerce model to try online shopping for the first time Primarily, because this is a channel which works on building trust with partners. Second is price – we also work with a lot of cashback sites in SEA, which takes away the inhibition of making that first purchase. We also work with a lot of fintech companies, payment companies and banks which gives good vouchers and incentives for new buyers.
In the hopes of supporting your staff and moving them forward decisively and productively, what are the key characteristics for being an effective leader? How has this proven successful for you?
Having had the good fortune of working in big tech companies like Amazon and running my own startups, I’ve seen how employees or the current generation of the workforce that is coming into the companies are thinking about work and what work means to them. Also, how they look at leaders – I think number one is they definitely look for authenticity. And second, they want to see that they are learning, that value being added to them to their day to day lives. Thirdly, they’re the kind that values two-way connection. I feel a leader should be conscious of these three items before they go and recruit or build their team.
How do you evaluate where to prioritize digitalisation across different areas of the business?
As a retailer or a B2C brand, the first area that they should really prioritize digitalization is their is their supply chain. We see a lot of retailers kind of missing that out, which of course can add a huge value because that’s the first part in the overall supply chain or overall chain of selling their products or goods. I would say the second area to digitize would be the customer acquisition or the marketing trend, making sure that they’re using the right tools to track the customers and their behavior and ensuring that the buyers are getting the best value for the money that they are spending.
What is your vision for the future of Lazada and which verticals do you foresee the most growth?
Think for Lazada, it’s still very early stage not just for Lazada but all all e-commerce companies in SEA. Unlike the developed economies where e-commerce accounts for easily 25% to 30% of the total retail in a specific market, e-commerce is still in single digits in SEA which I would say is possible to grow in the coming few years. In fact, a Google report predicts that the e-commerce economy will be worth $1,000,000,000,000 by 2030 which is quite a significant achievement. $1,000,000,000,000 would probably be the top in economy of top ten countries in the world by GDP. Lazada is doing the right things for the partners and for the customers so that they can also enjoy the fruits of the good opportunities available in the e-commerce market.