Newton’s Proven Playbook for Influencer Marketing Success With Aaron Zagha

Aaron Zagha is the Chief Marketing Officer at Newton Baby, a company specializing in innovative, science-backed sleep products for babies and families. With a professional background in corporate finance and a data-driven marketing approach, Aaron oversees the brand’s marketing strategy, branding, and growth. He previously led international ecommerce operations for Teleflora. Under his leadership, Newton Baby collected over two million pounds of ocean-bound plastic and grew the brand through impactful influencer marketing.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [2:18] Aaron Zagha discusses why influencer marketing is especially effective for first-time parents
• [4:25] Tracking metrics that matter: views, clicks, code redemptions, and post-purchase attribution
• [6:49] Volume versus targeted influencer strategies and why diversification is key
• [8:51] The importance of frequency in influencer campaigns and matching it to the customer lifecycle
• [11:18] How to segment influencers by category, size, and engagement to maximize impact
• [15:53] Deciding what to manage in-house versus outsourcing to agencies for macro-influencers

In this episode…

Influencer marketing is one of the fastest-growing channels for ecommerce brands, but too often it leaves marketers questioning what truly drives results. Should success be measured by likes, reach, or sales? And how can companies ensure their investments in creators generate sustainable growth instead of vanity metrics?

According to Aaron Zagha, a seasoned marketing leader with a background in finance and analytics, the answer lies in tracking every possible data point and treating influencer marketing like a performance channel. He highlights the use of unique codes, post-purchase surveys, and custom signups to attribute revenue back to specific creators. This level of tracking ensures brands can identify which partnerships drive actual conversions and which don’t. Aaron also stresses the importance of frequency aligned with customer journeys, diversifying influencer portfolios, and vetting for brand safety. These practices not only optimize budgets but also protect credibility and drive long-term results.

In this episode of the Minds of Ecommerce, Raphael Paulin-Daigle interviews Aaron Zagha, CMO at Newton, about building measurable and scalable influencer marketing programs. Aaron shares why tracking attribution is critical, how to balance micro and macro creators, and the role of frequency in customer journeys. He also explores agency partnerships, brand safety vetting, and why credibility outshines influencer categories.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Raphael Paulin-Daigle: LinkedIn | X
• SplitBase
• Aaron Zagha on LinkedIn
• Newton Baby
• “Scaling Restricted Products With AppLovin: Lessons From cbdMD With Wade Brown” on Minds of Ecommerce

Quotable Moments:

• "We allow customers to write in the actual individual creator name, which they often do."
• "It tends to be the case that creators that perform for one brand will perform for another."
• "You don't need the same person talking about your brand 30 times a month."
• "We need to make sure that generally the things that creators are saying are in-line."
• "Doing it properly ensures that we avoid a lot of controversy and potential boycotts and cancel culture."

Action Steps:

1. Track every possible influencer metric: Measuring clicks, codes, and signups ensures you identify true revenue drivers.
2. Diversify your influencer portfolio: Spreading budget across creators reduces risk and improves campaign performance consistency.
3. Align influencer frequency with the customer journey: Matching outreach to buying cycles maximizes impact without overspending.
4. Vet influencers rigorously for brand safety: Careful screening protects your brand from controversy and potential boycotts.
5. Leverage agency partnerships for macro influencers: Agencies offer broader data insights that guide smarter investment and rebooking decisions.

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by SplitBase.

At SplitBase, we design, test, and manage high-converting landing pages and on-site experiences for fashion, luxury, and lifestyle ecommerce brands. Our optimization program pinpoints exactly where your store is losing money most, and then we help you fix that.

The result? Increased conversions and profits for our clients.

With our team of conversion optimization specialists, performance marketers, and conversion-focused designers, we've got your back when it comes to testing and optimization.

Request a proposal on SplitBase.com today, and learn how we can help you get the most out of your marketing spend.

You can find us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Don’t miss out on our exclusive podcasts at Minds of Ecommerce.

Episode Transcript

Intro  00:06  

Welcome to the Minds of Ecommerce podcast, where you'll learn one key strategy that made leading ecommerce companies grow exponentially. We cut the bullshit and keep the meat in a 15-minute episode. Founders and executives take us through a deep dive of a strategy, so you get to learn and grow your online sales. In the last episode, I had a chat with Wade Brown, VP of marketing at cbdMD, and we talked about how to scale with AppLovin, the do’s, the don'ts, and, well, the why. Now, today on episode number 65, get ready.

We've got Aaron Zagha, who's the CMO at Newton, a baby sleep brand. And well, today he's going to be sharing some influencer marketing secrets that's helped scaled Newton. And well, I'm your host, Raphael Paulin-Daigle, and I'm the founder of SplitBase. This is Minds of Ecommerce. Now this episode is brought to you by SplitBase.

At SplitBase, we help leading eight and nine-figure brands such as Dr. Squatch, Once Upon a Farm, Hyperice, and Amika grow through customer-focused conversion optimization programs. What that means is we find out where your website is leaking money, where the opportunities are at, and then, well, we help you fix it through AB testing, ongoing optimization, new landing pages, and conversion-focused design. The result? Well, you get increased conversions, higher AOV, and of course, more money, which in return allows you to scale advertising profitably. We've been at it for over a decade and can help you manage a CRO process from A to Z, so if you want to learn more, go to splitbase.com today and see how we can help you get the most out of your marketing spend.

All right, Aaron, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here.

Aaron Zagha  01:52

Thanks. Good to be here.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle  01:54

Yeah. So you're a CMO at Newton, and you guys have had quite a bit of success with influencer marketing. Now there's about a million ways of doing it. Channel-specific or not? I'd love to maybe just get some context.

What is influencer marketing for you? How do you do it at Newton? And then we're going to dive into, well, I guess your secrets.

Aaron Zagha  02:18

Sounds good. So early in our evolution as a company, and pretty much right when I came on board, we really started experimenting with influencers or creators. Just the nature of the channel makes it really relevant to our customer journey. Our customer tends to be a first-time parent. They really have no idea what to buy, what products are reliable, what really makes the safest possible sleep environment for a baby?

And as such, they tend to follow people that they respect and trust. And when one of those people recommends a product as being, you know, particularly safe, backed by science. Reliable. I think it tends to have an outsize impact on that customer's buying journey. So that was the thesis.

We leaned into influencer marketing early on, and it definitely worked out. And when we talk about influencers or creators, we actually kind of refer to the full gamut of both size and scale. So everything from micros with maybe 700 followers that were just gifting product to those who come to us inbound and reach out and say, hey, can we work with your brand up through macros who were paying north of five figures to share, you know, whatever the content is or to discuss the product. And we run all the different channels a little bit differently. So the micros that are inbound, we tend to handle mostly in-house, the macros through a larger agency.

We do work with creators across almost all channels the primarily on Instagram are largest, but we do also work on YouTube, TikTok, a little Pinterest, even, and even we'll kind of experiment wherever we think it's relevant. So we run them seven different ways, both in-house and through an agency. But yeah, at the core is really the fact that we run it like a performance channel, and we measure and track everything that we possibly can, and that goes back into who we work with and how much we pay.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle 04:25  

Awesome. Measure and track. I think I'd love to go a little deeper because, I mean, that is so important. I mean, I'm also an analytics guy, so I'd love to know in your case, obviously, when it comes to influencer marketing, I've heard it often that some brands don't find it super clear as to what exactly they should measure. What's vanity, what's useful, and then how do you best use that data?

So, you know, if you were to kind of guide a brand that's either starting with influencer marketing or scaling with influencer marketing, are the critical metrics to track to really evaluate the health of an influencer program?

Aaron Zagha 05:04  

Yeah, and I think this is unfortunately where art comes into the equation. I'm a science guy. I'm a quant guy. My background's in investment banking. So I like the math.

And I wish it were you know last click attributable with you know geo hold out live tests available. But unfortunately, none of that works for an influencer. So I think the answer is you track everything you possibly can. And for us, that means from a, you know, from a tracking perspective, not necessarily from a screening perspective. That's a bit of a different analysis we can talk about in a second.

But once we agree to work with a creator, we track everything we can. So that's the views of the content that's clicks. If there's a link like on Instagram Stories, for example, we provide every creator with their own unique code, generally speaking, especially on the macro side. So we look at code redemptions on orders. We also in our how did you hear post-purchase analysis.

We allow customers to write in the actual individual creator name, which they often do because they want the person to get credit, which is great. Yeah. We also customize email and SMS signups per creator so that we can then track any future email or SMS revenue back to the creator as well. So really, everything we can possibly do to track, we track.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle 06:24  

Got it. Now, I'm also curious here. Well, of a couple of things. First, I've had some people on the podcast that said that influencer marketing was all about volume. It was as many creators as you can work with.

Do it. I've also sometimes heard a slightly different approach that's maybe a bit more niche and targeted. In which camp do you sit in and why?

Aaron Zagha 06:49  

Yeah, I think it really depends on kind of where you're at. Out in scaling your influencer program. But I do agree that you have to have somewhat of a diversified portfolio in any given month if you're going to be judged on a month's performance. So you know, I would never recommend paying, you know, one influencer your entire budget and just praying, you know, don't blow it all on a Kardashian model. I would not recommend that one.

So, from that perspective, I think volume and enough volume to have enough diversification probably makes sense. I probably wouldn't put more than 20% of my budget in any individual in any given month. But that having been said, once your program takes off and you're figuring out which influencers to rebook, I think it can become a little bit more scientific and mathematical, and you can use past performance to somewhat predict future results, and you should be using all of those data points to then, you know, reevaluate which which influencers continue working on. And one benefit of working with an agency, for example, is that they have that data across multiple clients. And obviously the more data, the better.

It tends to be the case that creators that perform for one brand will perform for another brand also, and vice versa. Ones that don't drive revenue won't won't work for other brands either. So, you know, institutional knowledge can play a big role in helping evaluate as well.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle  08:14

I'll we'll get back to the agency bit because I do want to touch base on that. But one thing we never really addressed on the podcast is the question of frequency, right? When it comes to meta, right, the concept of ad frequency is very much talked about. But when it comes to influencer impressions or just which influencer we work with, that is something that I haven't heard a lot of people talk about. So what are your thoughts here?

Is it better to work with new influencer every time, or is there a percentage of new influencers that you try to work with every month? When do you rework with the influencers? Ultimately, let's talk frequency. What do you think?

Aaron Zagha  08:51

Yeah, I love talking frequency. And I'm really glad you brought it up. People don't talk about it nearly enough, and I think it's one of the most important inputs in your overall marketing mix. And getting it right. There's nothing that can do more to improve your efficiency than getting that right.

Unfortunately, this is one of those cases where you're not going to be able to test and get really precise. And I think at the end of the day comes down to your customer journey. So, and your product and the frequency with which your product is purchased. So we're really at one time purchase. You're only going to buy one crib mattress for each baby you have, unless maybe you have a vacation house.

But generally speaking, our entire customer base turns over every 3 to 4 months because once you outfit your nursery, you're done. And so, generally speaking, we follow that cadence with our frequency for influencers. Now obviously we have very different frequency for Facebook and YouTube and our other channels because it'll it'll take more than one impression typically to really make sure that you, you get in someone's mind. But creators are more expensive, certainly on a CPM basis or however you look at it and you don't need the same person talking about your brand 30 times a month, whereas you might on Facebook, especially for a considered purchase, and especially given that influencers have very top of funnel for us. So yeah, we just match it to our, our kind of customer funnel.

And if it takes on average about a month to two months to work through the funnel, we want to make sure that we're not necessarily doubling up with the same creator. I'm happy to hit them with different creators, and that happens all the time. But generally we don't want the same creator pitching the same product to the same customer more than once in their journey. So that's why we typically will rework every 3 to 4 months with the same influencer.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle  10:43  

Okay. Very interesting. I'm also wondering about kind of the types of influencers, right? So obviously, you have different sizes. But I'm also thinking you may have different segments of influencers.

I know you're always targeting mom and kind of the baby and the kid angle, but you also have different product lines. I mean, you even have pet products, right? So yeah. So what is the strategy for doing you, do you group or segment influencers in separate categories? Are they grouped or segmented by size by type?

What's the strategy there?

Aaron Zagha 11:18  

Yeah this is an interesting one. And as a quant guy, one that I've been trying to really grok forever. And unfortunately, there isn't a really great way to do it. We found that basically the ability to drive revenue or, you know, call it persuasiveness, is a much larger determinant of performance than category. And so we've had like nutrition influencers drive a ton more actual performance and revenue.

Then mom influencers. And it really just comes down to how credible they are to their base. There's a little bit of correlation with engagement. So engagement tends to be a great metric to look at overall. But yeah, I mean we've had mom influencers who drove more pet beds than dog influencers.

And I mean, in the early days, we really did a ton of regression analysis on category. And we saw some categories where there was really poor performance. So typically bikini models were awesome at driving crib mattresses, but that was like one of the few cases where, you know, we stopped working with bikini models that like literally, but otherwise we didn't. We really didn't find much category correlation.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle 12:35  

How do you decide which influencers to work with? Like let's go back to the metrics, right. You are you looking at engagement rates? Are you just looking at kind of the overall types of followers that they get. What are kind of guidelines and metrics that you look at when deciding to create an influencer campaign?

Aaron Zagha  12:56

Yeah. So there's a couple of different factors. First of all, they have to be large enough to at least get a free product from us. You know, our products are expensive. So if we're sending a $300 mattress, we need to make sure that there's at least the possibility of enough impressions to offset the cost of sending that product.

So that's certainly like the bare minimum.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle  13:13

Just a quick question there. How do you determine large enough? I'm sure it's different from brand to brand. And obviously as you said, based on your AOV. But what is that definition?

Aaron Zagha  13:21

It's basically just expected view count. And then we convert it to CPM. And you know, what would we get in other channels for CPM. Yeah. Great.

So that's the first step. The second step is typically especially on the macros the agency will pitch someone. And if they're net new to us it means typically that they've driven performance for their other brands. And I mean it could be someone they're just trying out for the first time with us as well. We have, you know, a huge budget at this point.

So in our diversified portfolio, I'm happy if 10% are totally new people that were just trying out, even if they all zero out, we're going to be fine. So they'll they'll pitch someone. And then the third vector is brand safety. And this is a big one. And it's been a huge issue for us.

So we need to vet the heck out of these people. We are a science-driven company, so we need to make sure that generally the things that creators are saying and have promoted or whatever else are in line with best practices, according to pediatricians and the current state of pediatric medicine. And so we also need to make sure that there's brand safety there. So we tend to stay away from controversy, from you know, kind of outrageous claims, inappropriate behavior, criminal records. Because any time we've worked with someone who is more controversial or does something inappropriate or counter to modern science.

We get boycotts. So it's like, you know, instantly the cancel culture. It's like, oh my gosh, Newton worked with so and so. You know, they're anti-vax. You know the vaccine.

We should all boycott Newton. And it's like, oh boy. Now we have to come out and say we weren't aware of these views or whatever it is, you know, and distance ourselves and publicly say that we're not going to work with this person. So we really do a lot of background checking and vetting, and it's a really manual, intensive process. But doing it properly ensures that we avoid a lot of controversy and potential boycotts and cancel culture in general.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle 15:29  

Makes sense. We're almost out of time. But I do have one last question for you, because you touched on doing some of your influencer marketing activities in-house, and some are outsourced to an agency. What's the what ultimately is the method and the rationale behind this? When do you give it to the agency?

What do you do in-house? Why? I'd love for you to chat a little bit about that.

Aaron Zagha  15:53  

Yeah. So, you know, basically, the inbound influencers are the micros, and we just have them in-house. We have a very pretty clear flow chart process that we work through to vet them and see, like we said, if they're big enough to support sending free product to it's a fairly streamlined process. And there's not much benefit to outsourcing that we can do it more cheaply and quickly, and effectively than an agency for the macros, which generally is anyone over 50,000 or so followers that we're going to make a significant payment to. I really like having that institutional knowledge.

They can pool their learnings across multiple clients and really understand which influencers are driving performance, right? Even like I said, if they're not category specific, You know, maybe there is a, you know, an architectural influencer that works really well for a couch company. Chances are they're going to work well for us. So I like having that institutional knowledge. And once an influencer stops performing for some of the other brands, they'll stop rebooking them for us as well.

And that's why I like agencies in general. Institutional knowledge is always going to, you know, be more robust than our individual knowledge working with individual creators.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle  17:09  

Yeah, definitely. We've been talking with Aaron Zagha, who's the CMO of Newton now. Aaron, thank you so much for all these insights, your knowledge. Now if people want to connect with you, check out the brand. Right.

Where should they go? What should they do?

Aaron Zagha  17:29  

LinkedIn is always the best place to get me. I respond to pretty much all my messages there, and you can go to Newtonbaby.com. Check out the site.

Outro  17:36

Awesome! Thank you so much. All right. Well, that's it for today's episode. And thank you so much for tuning in.

Now, if you like what you've heard, and you don't want to miss any of the new episodes that are about to come out, make sure you subscribe to the podcast, and well, bonus points if you also leave a review in the iTunes store or wherever you're listening to this. Now, if you're working on an ecommerce store that does over $1 million in revenue and you need help with conversion optimization or landing pages, well, I've got some good news because there's a pretty good chance we can help with that. Go to splitbase.com to learn more or even to request a proposal. If you have any guest requests, questions, or comments, tweet me @Rpaulindaigle, and I'll be super happy to hear from you.

And again, thanks again for listening. This is Minds of Ecommerce.

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