How Mountain Rose Herbs works with affiliates to drive over $140K in sales
Unlike many brands, Mountain Rose Herbs takes a hands-on approach to affiliate marketing. By doing so, the brand has driven over 900 conversions, $140,000 (and counting) in sales, and more than 95,000 clicks!
We recently chatted with Jessicka Nebesni, Marketing Strategist at Mountain Rose Herbs, to understand how the brand achieved such incredible results.
Since 1987, Mountain Rose Herbs has been serving its loyal customer base with the highest quality organic herbs, spices, teas, essential oils, and DIY ingredients used in herbalism. As Mountain Rose Herbs has grown up throughout the years, the legacy brand has tapped affiliates to stay relevant while continuing to express its steadfast, authentic values.
Focusing on quality over quantity
Mountain Rose Herbs adopted affiliate marketing early on, with its program growing to over 10,000 affiliates by 2016. However, due to unforeseen changes in tax laws, the brand had to cut the program — which drastically reduced the number of external links and revenue being brought in through its brand partners.
Fortunately, the brand’s Marketing Strategist, Jessicka Nebesni, was able to relaunch the affiliate program recently — this time focusing much more heavily on quality over quantity. Mountain Rose Herbs used Aspire to implement an affiliate onboarding page on the company’s website. Rather than spending time searching for affiliates, Jessicka let brand fans apply organically, so she’s able to find high-quality brand partners who already love Mountain Rose Herbs. Now, she connects with 25 new partners per week.
Turning relationships into revenue
For decades, affiliate marketing has been treated as a transactional relationship between the brand and the affiliate. Brands get increased traffic and sales, while affiliates get commission. At Mountain Rose Herbs, this strategy has been successful, bringing in over $140K of revenue already, and another $1K per day.
But each affiliate is valued beyond just sales, as they are real, loyal fans of the brand.
While Mountain Rose Herbs allows its brand partners to have creative freedom and to choose the channels on which they run campaigns, its approach to affiliate marketing is much more hands-on than your everyday affiliate program. In fact, the brand often collaborates with affiliates to create educational content, including behind-the-scenes snapshots, recipes, and DIYs. The content is then distributed across the company’s blog, as well as the affiliates’ blogs and social channels — including Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.
This is the key to the brand’s affiliate marketing success. Through co-creation, Mountain Rose Herbs gives affiliates a bigger hand in building its brand — re-emphasizing the company’s focus on treating affiliates as true brand partners.
To ensure more meaningful affiliate partnerships, Jessicka uses Aspire to respond quickly when an affiliate has a question or request, easily approve content, and even pay them in bulk via Aspire’s PayPal integration. With the time saved, she is leaning further into this incredibly successful strategy and planning to build more long-term affiliate relationships going forward.
“Aspire's hybrid approach to influencer and affiliate marketing makes their platform the best available, especially in an always changing partnership landscape. Aspire has also been crucial in the implementation of our new affiliate program. Their helpful and knowledgeable staff worked hand in hand with us to launch the program and continue to provide stellar support when it comes to scaling our initiatives and learning best practices.”
— Jessicka Nebesni, Marketing Strategist at Mountain Rose Herbs