We at AffiliateFuture have decided to conduct some small interviews with the people behind both Affiliates and Merchants, to give a greater understanding of who they are and how their respective companies are run. Today we got a chance to speak with Mike of PeopleValue, this is what he has to say…
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Can you explain, in short, what your company does?
We focus on engaging employees through the delivery of three different technology platforms for employers:
Voluntary Benefits, which focuses on delivering retail discounts and salary sacrifice options for employees through a benefits hub, optimised for mobile delivery.
Reward and Recognition, which is point-based non-cash reward, allowing employers to reward employees for a number of reasons and employees to spend points on over 15,000 products and experiences.
Wellbeing, which is a portal that provides a range of health and wellbeing tools in the physical, financial and emotional wellbeing areas to help improve employees wellbeing in turn improving engagement and productivity.
All three platforms can support companies in their efforts to engage employees. Our strapline is “The Employee Engagement Company”.
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What would you say your main USP’s are, and which you believe differentiate yourself from competitors?
Our ability to combine solutions to create a one stop shop for benefit needs is our main USP, though specifically in the voluntary benefit space we have added a FuelCard and direct debit functionality into our platform to make it as complete as possible.
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How long have you been at your company?
Since 2002, so 13 years.
- What is your role there, and what does your typical day-to-day include?
I am the CEO so I am responsible for driving the strategy and performance of all parts of our business.
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Where were you before your company now and what was your role?
Before starting PeopleValue, I worked for AXSOne and was UK Country Manager and also had responsibility for Sales over EMEA.
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What do you believe are key factors to a high performing programme?
A high performing programme needs to be easy to navigate and clearly communicated. I think if you can combine those two factors you will usually see a strong performance.
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What do you envisage to be the biggest challenge for the sector this year?
The biggest challenge for our sector this year is companies who haven’t been a specialist in our market space adding new functionality to compete in these spaces to value add to their propositions.
- What is the vertical that works the best for you as a business?
We are not limited to any vertical so I would not say there is specifically one that works best. However our business is mainly focussed within the HR sector as our products serve employees. We are also working in the affinity space (ie Associations) with a third party organisation that will increase our consumer audience significantly over the next 12 months.
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What do you find are the best selling product categories through the affiliate channel?
Travel is our biggest selling category in terms of numbers and value of sales followed by High Street stores.
- Do you monetise your website using another strategy other than affiliate marketing?
We charge our corporate clients a fee for having access to our services. This is either a per capita fee or a management fee.
- What do you hope to achieve within the next couple of years as a business?
We have an aggressive growth strategy over the next 5 years which will see a tenfold increase in our user community.
- Do you have any predictions for affiliate marketing over the next few years?
Affiliate marketing into the Employee Benefits B2B market offers unique opportunities to retailers. This is because we can segment by client, interest and demographic. We run regular email campaigns direct to employees which can either be to the entire user base or solus by client or user interest. Sales are growing by around 25% per annum as users value discounts for their employees.
