Originally published at: https://community.envato.com/changes-to-the-envato-elite-program-rewards/
Hey folks,
Firstly, I want to thank the 100+ authors who joined me two weeks ago for the Elite Program Webinar. It was absolutely awesome to be able to communicate with so many of you in person! Hoping that will be the first of many 
Today I want to share with everyone who wasn’t at the Webinar how we’re changing the Elite Rewards. I’ve spent an incredible few months meeting a lot of fascinating authors from many different marketplaces and walks of life. It’s been great to learn about each of you, and what i’ve learned has been pretty central to informing the first round of changes we’re making towards the objective of making the rewards more useful.
I’m keen to be as transparent as possible with you folks as to what these changes are, what I’m hoping they’ll accomplish and why they need to be implemented. So feel free to read this post to get that. I’ve also included provided a link to a summary at the end.
So without any further ado- let’s get into it!
What will not change.
The rewards delivered at the 75K, 1M, 10M and 25M levels will remain the same for now. We’re also keeping all the merch (T Shirts, Hoodies and Tim Tams) the way it is for the moment.
First change: We’re removing the current advertising and marketing campaign rewards.
What it means: We are removing the Google Analytics Campaign at the 250k level, The Envato newsletter promotion at the 750k level and the custom marketing campaign at the 2M level.
Why we’ve done it: Honestly, these rewards just weren’t providing the value to our authors that we wanted them to. Whilst on some occasions, these campaigns delivered some fantastic results, too many of them were a proving disappointing.
There were over 250 marketing campaigns happening each year and each campaign took up quite a bit of time from the marketing team. For the time, money and effort required, I knew we could do better.
But there was a bigger question that I wanted an answer to. Why were these campaigns failing?
When we looked at the campaigns that had been successful we found that they all shared a few key things in common…
- They had a clearly articulated unique selling point, targeting a specific audience.
- The copy for the item was well written and optimised for that audience. It clearly communicated how the item worked and why it was unique.
- The visual design on the item page was beautifully tailored the specific audience.
Our Elite’s are experts, but only in their chosen fields. They aren’t necessarily marketers. You might be a brilliant coder, but not speak English as a first language. You can be an incredible musician, but not great at branding. So we asked ourselves how we could address this…
New Reward: Marketing Specialists for 125k, 250k, 500k and 750k authors.
Who they are: A crack team of marketing professionals who we’ve hand selected from studio and briefed to collaborate with our Elites to optimise their shopfronts.
What it means: At the 125k, 250k, 500k and 750k levels, you will be given a menu of different. ways in which you can enlist a member of the Envato Studio marketing specialists to build content. Let us know how you want your item to be optimised, and we’ll partner you up with a specialist who works in that area. We’ll cover the cost of their services on your behalf.
We know that different authors have different skills and different needs, so there’s a menu of things that you can choose for them to do for you:
- Have the written copy of your item optimised by a professional copywriter
- Have the graphics and images of your item optimised by a graphic design specialist.
- Have an infographic developed that demonstrates how your item works.
- Have a team of animators build a beautiful explainer video that promotes and demonstrates your item.
125k - (choose 1)
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250k- (choose 2)
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500k- (Choose 3)
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750k- (Choose 4)
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We want to help our amazing Elite’s to put their items in the packaging they deserve. By building the power of your item pages, we can optimise them to deliver higher levels of conversion rates from buyers.
We also want to build partnerships, between our elites and the studio marketing specialists who will work with them over time. The stronger these partnerships become, the better the work.
New Reward: Faster item reviews for 2M+ Power Elite Elite Authors
What it means: Pretty simple. When an author who has reached 2M Power-Elite level submits an item, or an update for an item into the review queue, the item’s movement through the queue will be slightly faster.
Why we’re doing it: The review queue is major pain point for a lot of authors that have reached the point of not being individual authors at all, but rather have become businesses.
Indefinite time spent in the queue can mean an indefinite amount of money if you have to pay a support team by the hour who are remaining on standby to deal with the implications of your update or your new item when it ultimately goes live. Being able to plan around faster turnaround times will hopefully alleviate some of this pain.
This will not slow down review times for others. On the contrary, with a steadily growing review team who are constantly refining the way in which they work, review times are likely to continue to get shorter.
New Reward: A highly targeted, custom email marketing campaign at the 5 million dollar level to replace the Envato Apple Macbook.
What It means: We’re replacing the macbook with an advertising campaign, of sorts! One that is highly targeted and customised with a very high chance of success.
How it works: Firstly, we take all of the email addresses of anyone who has ever purchased a product from you on Envato market. We then cross reference that data to find all of the people who have purchased your product and opted-in to receiving email marketing from Envato. This lets us build a tailored mailing list for you. A mailing list that’s comprised of people who’ve already purchased your items.
Then, you will work with our enormously talented email marketing specialist to build a custom campaign that targets those people specifically.
Why we’re doing it: Let’s get real here folks. By the time you sell five million dollars worth of stock on an online marketplace, you probably already have a computer. Moreover, you probably have a business that owns several computers. In fact, should the unthinkable happen and a crazed herd of rampaging raccoons break into your office complex and pee on your computers, you could probably afford to replace those computers four times over.
We think this reward will prove a little more useful, and more valuable than a new macbook.
So that’s the first round of changes! If you’re keen for a summary you can check out what the new elite.envato.com page will look like very soon!
This is the only worthy item I’ve seen in the rewards program.