September 18, 2024
The Data-Driven Case for Reevaluating Coupon, Cashback, and Loyalty Partners
Why Data Should Lead Your Affiliate Partner Choices, Not Gut Instincts
In affiliate marketing, it’s tempting to paint entire categories of publishers with a broad brush. Brands often assume that certain types of partners—like coupon, cashback, and loyalty affiliates—don’t align with their business goals or brand identity. But, dismissing these partners without considering the data can result in missed opportunities for growth.
It’s important for brands to embrace that data and use targeted insights to help them unlock incremental value from partners they may have previously discounted. Here, we explore what that looks like in action.
The Start: Breaking Through Assumptions
Many brands, especially those with a premium identity, mistakenly assume that certain affiliate categories will negatively impact their values or customer base. For example, coupon sites have garnered a bad rap over the years—being labeled as purely “transactional” with no potential for contributing incremental value. Assumptions like this often lead to brands ruling out entire categories of affiliates that could, indeed, generate such revenue.
It’s clear why such an approach can be limiting. By avoiding certain publisher categories based on guesswork rather than data, brands may miss out on valuable partnerships that could expand their reach and improve customer acquisition rates.
The Solution: A Data-Driven Approach to Affiliate Growth
Rather than relying on instinct—and industry misconceptions—brands now have the opportunity to tap into advanced technologies to inform their affiliate strategies. Namely, PartnerCentric’s FUSE Incrementality™ tech portfolio. By utilizing tools that provide data-backed insights into customer behavior, brands can identify partners that deliver real, measurable value.
With this access to performance data, affiliate programs can go beyond traditional biases, opening the door to new partners. FUSE Incrementality™ provides clarity on which specific partners—regardless of category—deliver results.
The Process: How Performance Data Drives Incremental Growth
By incorporating FUSE Incrementality™, brands can analyze how customers interact with different types of publishers and determine which partners are driving new purchases. Through a benchmarking process, brands can draw from aggregated client performance data to identify top-performing partners, even within categories they may have been hesitant to explore.
Doing so transforms affiliate programs from a gut-instinct-driven approach to one backed by quantifiable insights. This is particularly helpful for brands that are looking to uplevel customer lifetime value (CLV) among customers with a very specific life-stage.
The Win: Results That Speak for Themselves
Brands that adopt a data-driven approach often see significant improvements in their affiliate program’s performance. In fact, we’ve witnessed many brands that were initially uncertain about working with coupon and loyalty affiliates achieve remarkable year-over-year growth by strategically partnering with the right publishers. With FUSE Incrementality™, these brands have been able to focus their affiliate investments on partners that provide true value—delivering both increased revenue and sales.
One client in particular, a leader in the food and beverage category, approached PartnerCentric to identify the most effective affiliate partners that would help them achieve their ambitious customer acquisition goals. At the outset, this company believed that coupon, cashback, and loyalty partners did not align with their positioning as a premium brand and therefore would not contribute to incremental growth for their business.
Using FUSE Benchmarks, part of the FUSE Incrementality™ technology suite, we made recommendations based on aggregated client performance and applied these insights to the client’s FUSE Incrementality™ dashboard to assess the potential incrementality of these partners. When a partner achieves strong scores within FUSE Incrementality™, the PartnerCentric account team proposes viable test scenarios. Since the client’s affiliate program pays commissions exclusively for new customers, they place significant emphasis on incrementality scores.
Our data-driven partner recommendations quickly became top performers. FUSE Incrementality™ has since become a critical tool in affiliate program planning, with their team relying on its invaluable insights.
With all of this as the foundation, the company has achieved remarkable results:
- YTD the company’s affiliate program is up 39% in revenue YoY and up 63% YoY in sales.
- The coupon/deal partners that were added because of FUSE Incrementality™have yielded 29% of that revenue growth YTD.
- Using FUSE Incrementality™, the client’s affiliate program demonstrated a strong incrementality score of 81. Typically, any program that has an overall score of 60 or higher quantifies incremental growth when brands partner with the right publishers.
The Bottom Line: Affiliate Success Requires a Data-Driven Approach
In today’s affiliate landscape, brands can no longer afford to dismiss an entire category of affiliates. Rather, they need to identify which partners within those categories can add incremental value. With data to support these decisions, brands are empowered to make more informed choices—leading to considerable growth in both customer acquisition and revenue.
In an increasingly competitive market, brands that leverage data to guide their affiliate partnerships are better positioned to succeed. The days of relying solely on gut instincts are over—performance data is the key to unlocking new opportunities and driving growth.
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