ZBiotics scales its influencer and affiliate program with Superfiliate + Tremendous

Highlights

• ZBiotics® is a direct-to-consumer biotech company that runs a rapidly growing influencer and affiliate program to promote its products.

• Previously, its marketing team would spend hours every month managing program logistics and manually sending payouts. It had no easy way to measure performance or identify suspicious behavior.

• After switching to Superfiliate and Tremendous, ZBiotics can scale influencer and affiliate recruitment, communications, and payouts, prevent fraud, and granularly track its program performance and budget.

Challenge

ZBiotics is a direct-to-consumer biotech company that sells two genetically engineered probiotic products. ZBiotics Pre-Alcohol Probiotic Drink breaks down a toxic alcohol byproduct that leads to rough mornings after drinking, and its Sugar-to-Fiber Probiotic Drink Mix is designed to improve microbiome health through enzymes that make fiber using sugar.

As a young company creating a new product category, ZBiotics has leaned heavily on word-of-mouth marketing, with influencers and affiliates playing a significant role in growing its early fan base. Anna Lamb, Senior Growth Marketing Manager at ZBiotics, oversees the program for individual influencers and businesses such as discount code sites. As the program scaled from a handful of influencers and affiliates to over 1000, Anna knew she needed more sophisticated technology to help her program mature and scale.

Manual, generic influencer and affiliate experience

Early in its marketing journey, ZBiotics brought on an affiliate solution — but it didn’t offer the level of automation and personalization the team wanted as the program evolved into a cornerstone customer acquisition channel.

“When we were getting started, we didn't have a lot of resources to devote to the influencer and affiliate program. We worked with a vendor that had basic functionality — we could point our early adopters to the program and share discount codes,” says Anna. “After three years, we were seeing really awesome results. But to be completely honest, we had outgrown the platform.”

While this initial solution supported landing page and referral code creation, the marketing team couldn’t customize influencer and affiliate touchpoints as much as it wanted to. The technology also lacked communication and payout capabilities. This created additional work for Anna, who had to manage recruitment, onboarding, program updates, and payments manually. And it made it difficult to scale the program as ZBiotics’ products grew in popularity.

Time-consuming, manual payments

One of the big challenges with ZBiotics’ initial affiliate solution was that it didn’t handle payouts. Every month, Anna would sit down and process payments for hundreds of influencers and affiliates herself.

“I would go into Venmo and put in their phone numbers, then check off each payment. It was such a manual and grueling process,” says Anna. 

At one point, she decided to outsource influencer and affiliate payouts to a third party. However, this alternative didn’t solve her underlying payment challenges.

“We’d send the vendor an Excel sheet with the amounts and the Venmo handles of our influencers and affiliates, and then they’d send the payments for us — but it wasn’t an efficient solution. Payments often got delayed because it took four business days to fund our account,” says Anna. “Naturally, they would complain because payments were past due. And I get it. Why would they be incentivized to get the word out if they’re not getting paid on time?"

Lack of insight into program activity and ROI

Another major challenge was the lack of detailed analytics and tracking for influencer and affiliate program activity and payments.

“I didn’t have much insight into who our influencers and affiliates were, how they were driving sales, and if those sales were legit or not. It felt like a big black box — I wasn’t getting the full picture,” says Anna. “By the end, I was looking forward to having a more advanced platform with a holistic view of how my influencers and affiliates were driving sales and if those sales were real.”

Processing payments manually also caused marketing reporting issues. “We wouldn’t have accurate CACs when we were reviewing month-end data because payments weren’t getting processed in time,” she says.

Increasing risk of fraud

As ZBiotics gained market traction, its influencer and affiliate program encountered another growing issue — incentive fraud. 

“People see a product like ours that’s doing well — it’s a premium product that actually works — so they figure there must be a big return for selling it,” says Anna. “Eventually, questionable influencers and affiliates came into this space because they thought, ‘This is selling itself. If I get my discount code out there, I'm going to earn a lot of money, and their program isn’t set up to identify if my sales are fake or not.’”

Solution

After evaluating different marketing solutions, the ZBiotics team moved its influencer and affiliate program to Superfiliate and Tremendous in 2024. 

“ZBiotics was excited to level up its program with co-branded landing pages, integrated communication tools, and automated payouts,” says Victor Dominguez, Customer Success Lead at Superfiliate. 

In just a few weeks, the ZBiotics program was up and running on the platform. The positive impacts were immediate. 

Benefits for ZBiotics

Automated recruitment and payouts

With Superfiliates, ZBiotics’ influencer and affiliate program is streamlined and scalable. Recruitment is a breeze with automated monitoring and outreach tools. 

"We’re able to pull anyone mentioning the brand on Instagram or TikTok into a feed that shows the content and what they’re saying,” says Victor. “The team can use this feed to recruit new folks organically talking about their brand. They can automatically send a DM to accounts with enough followers, share a signup form, and review applications in the platform. They don’t have to do social listening every day to look at influencer mentions — it's just something that happens."

And with Tremendous, Anna’s days of Venmoing individual influencers and affiliates are officially over. 

“Using the Tremendous integration, the team can easily select all the fee dates and send the payments in a couple of clicks. This was a process that Anna was doing manually before,” says Victor.

“The ease of use, lack of manual work, and smoothness of the program now is amazing. And at the end of the day, Tremendous and Superfiliate are what's getting it done,” says Anna. “Knowing that I could have been doing this the whole time — I wish we’d switched sooner.”

Improved influencer and affiliate experience

Instead of juggling multiple systems, spreadsheets, and logins, ZBiotics can now manage its end-to-end influencer and affiliate program in one centralized platform. Not only does this save Anna and team time and hassle — it also delivers a better experience to the brand’s advocates.

“It’s really easy to communicate with influencers and affiliates by sending them DMs and emails directly from our platform,” says Victor. “Each landing page is customized per creator with the images and products they want to display. And on the payout side, it’s super easy to get every creator paid out for the month on time."

Built-in fraud protection

Not only are Superfiliate and Tremendous making the influencer and affiliate payout process faster and more automated — they’re also helping ZBiotics weed out fraudsters from its program.

“I’m paying the majority of my commissions to business affiliates — we're talking thousands of dollars per influencer or affiliate. So that's why it's important to have a payment system that has built-in fraud functionality, a really good VPN detector, all of those things — because it will prevent me from sending thousands of dollars to the wrong people,” says Anna. “If I can get $1,000 back and spend it on other people, that’s totally worth it. There are now so many safeguards in place that I feel really good about who's in the program."

With automated emails, ZBiotics can keep influencers and affiliates in the loop as flagged payouts are being reviewed, providing a transparent and polished experience.

“The influencer or affiliate gets a notification so they know that we processed a payment, but also that it got placed on hold. Then they'll email me and ask why they haven't gotten paid, and I can provide a reason for the delay — for example, because we detected a VPN or something on their end that’s holding it up. It’s just a more professional way to go about things,” says Anna.

If influencers or affiliates ultimately don’t meet ZBiotics’ program criteria or performance standards, the team can bulk remove them in seconds, saving time and money.

Flexible payment options

When Anna processed payouts manually, she let influencers and affiliates choose from a few different payment options — but it wasn’t easy to scale. “I gave them options because I wanted to let them pick how to get paid and make it as easy as possible. But it was not easy for me at all," says Anna.

Now, Superfiliate and Tremendous do the heavy lifting, providing payment flexibility without adding administrative friction. 

“I lean on what the platform offers for both individual influencers and business affiliates. That’s a big function that I love — they get to pick which payout type they want,” says Anna. 

Offering multiple payment options also helps ZBiotics flush out fraudsters. “I think that's also why the platform is so good at picking up on whether something is fraudulent,” says Anna. “For example, PayPal is a popular option for international people — but we can't work with them because we only ship our products in the US. A lot of influencers and affiliates lie and say they’re based in the US on their application, but when their payment is scheduled for outside of the US, I can tell they clearly broke the contract.”

Centralized tracking and reporting

Before, pulling together data on influencer and affiliate performance, results, and payments was a huge headache. Now, Anna can quickly tell what’s happening with her program in real time. 

“Being able to see our orders, reward history, and billing has been really helpful. I can easily export and send reports to my boss if he ever wants an update on our budget,” she says. “I used to always overestimate our program budget, and he would as well. But now, we get accurate numbers using the transaction history. It's really helpful for predicting future budgets and optimizing our spend.”

Having influencer and affiliate-specific program activity and payment information also opens up new opportunities to reward ZBiotics’ most effective evangelists.

“I look at the program at a CAC level, and when you have a system that shows you exactly what you're paying per individual, you can really tap into them beyond just a commission-based structure,” Anna says.

Impact

Now that ZBiotics has a strong technology foundation in place, its marketing team is ready to scale up its influencer and affiliate program, with a goal to triple participation by the end of 2025.

“We have a scalable payment solution with Tremendous, we have automated ways to find and recruit new influencers and affiliates with Superfiliate, and we have ways to mass communicate using the Klaviyo integration. Everything's on point so we can scale a program like this,” says Anna.

• 36% increase in YTD influencer and affiliate referral revenue over previous period

• 5+ hours saved per month on payout processing

• $5000 saved monthly by preventing fraudulent payouts

• Accurate, timely monthly CAC reporting

• Improved affiliate experience with instant reward delivery

• Scalable platform to support affiliate payouts

Ready to streamline and scale your marketing programs? Explore Superfiliate for influencer and affiliate program management, and schedule a demo to see Tremendous payouts in action.