Key Takeaways
Expertise and cultivating strong relationships can be the cornerstone of running a successful CLO campaign correctly the first time.
You can judge the value of your agency team by the quality of the questions they know to ask.
Testing with a prominent CLO partner resulted in driving 7% of overall revenue across all channels and 39% of affiliate revenue for the brand.
Overview
Sometimes it’s the magic of new tech that clients need, sometimes it’s market conditions that illuminate an opportunity – and sometimes it comes down to basics: building and cultivating the right relationships to help clients reach their goals.
A globally recognized fashion brand – another certified woman-owned, woman-led business – needed a more detailed understanding of attribution in their affiliate program. One of the brand’s biggest initiatives to explore was Card Linked Offers (CLOs) to be able to get in front of more people on financial sites that CLOs have strong relationships with. They were concerned about how attribution would be measured, and the logistics of working with these sorts of partners. This concern surfaced because Card-linked offer purchases aren’t typically visible via a client’s internal reporting because CLOs don’t always provide order IDs that can be tracked. Because of this nuance in CLO reporting, brands can’t always be certain whether a new order is truly incremental, or one they would have received in any case. Since these offers are tracked outside of the networks, strong budget and ROAS goals have to be set with the CLO partner prior to a campaign to ensure that the goals are being met. That way, they can understand what performance to expect against a specific budget level from a given campaign, even though there isn’t the traditional data available in a standard program.
In the case of this fashion brand, getting in front of new audiences that use large banks and financial institutions, and accurately tracking the attribution of their CLO engagement in driving incremental orders, was a prime objective of our work together. The PartnerCentric account manager recommended they start with small tests on CLO partners to test attribution and results of this new approach.
Approach
After agreeing to smaller CLO test campaigns, we began to see real traction. With these preliminary results we recommended a test with a prominent CLO well-known for its privacy-friendly solution that also serves as the foundation for marketing technology and analytics.
With most CLO partners, brands typically agree to a commission rate and they send you the amount of orders every month. However, with this partner, we had to commit to a budget for a full quarter. These typically start at $100K+ but because of the CLO partner’s strong relationship with PartnerCentric, we were able to negotiate a test at $50K. Together, we backed into a ROAS target that blended ROAS with a data breakout for new and returning customer ROAS. The CLO, for their part, was even able to drive shoppers from competitor sites to the brand’s site.
Result
- The brand completed a 6 week campaign with a large CLO partner where they were featured on large financial institutions and banks. This campaign drove 7% of overall revenue across all channels and 39% of affiliate revenue.
- The target ROAS the CLO partner agreed to was 16-20X for existing customers and 9-12X for new customers. When the campaign ended they finished at a 25.06 ROAS for existing customers and a 13.33 ROAS for new customers, exceeding all goals set for the campaign
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