Reengaging Consumers with Affiliate Marketing

While these strategies are effective and should remain a core focus of a consumer marketing campaign, there are additional tools at a marketer’s disposal to reach, engage, and ultimately convert repeat customers.

The introduction of new commissioning strategies and financial services publishers (card-linked offers, buy-now-pay-later etc.) allow brands to work closely with their publisher partners to achieve their repeat customer goals. These publisher partners can also support broader audience acquisition strategies, whether reengaging lapsed consumers, acquiring new ones or reaching millennial and Gen Z buyers. Let’s find out how.

Commissioning Strategies

Commissioning strategies, like Dynamic Commissioning, allow advertisers to align business objectives and KPIs with a brand’s affiliate programme. For those tasked with retaining customers and driving repeat purchases, Dynamic Commissioning enables them to offer a higher commission for the conversions they drive.

By offering a higher commission for publishers who drive repeat purchases (or new customers if that is your goal), brands can incentivise their partners to work with them in achieving their KPIs. Outside of running specific campaigns, the increase in commission communicates a brand’s objective to their long-tail publishers and allows them to flex their audience communications accordingly.

Buy-Now-Pay-Later

Buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) publishers such as Klarna, ClearPay and Zip have experienced exponential growth recently. In fact, the publisher model is on track to account for 4.2% of all global e-commerce payments in 2024. In the UK specifically, our recent survey found that 35% of UK consumers are using these services.

BNPL solutions’ success is partly due to their ability to attract younger consumers, especially Gen Z. Having watched their parents go through the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, Gen Z are determined to not make the same mistakes. As a result, they shun credit cards and are drawn to interest-free options like BNPL.

Besides being a payment provider, BNPL partners offer brands additional marketing opportunities, including curated content, newsletter features, brand search and loyalty programmes. Additionally, BNPL can support a consumer reengagement campaign without brands having to rely heavily on discounts or promotions. BNPL publishers give consumers a curated shopping directory that enables people to pay for products in instalments, targeting a full-price strategy. For brands with a higher basket value, such as those in the Luxury or Travel vertical, giving consumers the option to purchase a product and pay for it in up to four instalments is an opportunity they can’t ignore.

Card-linked Offers

Before the pandemic, Card-linked Offers (CLO) were one of the top O2O strategies for affiliate marketers, and rightly so. The very nature of CLO publishers means that brands can track purchases regardless of where a person makes them. How do they do this? It is quite simple. Consumers sync their debit or credit card to a loyalty programme, and promotions and discounts are automatically received via CLO publishers. Now, more than ever, brands are beginning to recognise the value that CLO partners provide in improving customer retention and reengaging consumers. Our client Harvey Nichols has had recent success engaging customers with card-linked offers via Cardlytics. This allowed the brand to reach to relevant new audiences and communicate with existing and lapsed shoppers via the trusted environment of the customer’s bank.

Banks and credit cards sit on a wealth of individual consumer data. Through CLO, shoppers are targeted based on past purchases, giving them offers for brands they may have forgotten they shopped with.

By leaning on financial publishers and employing commissioning strategies to work with a broader portfolio of partners, brands can reengage lapsed customers and drive repeat purchases through the affiliate marketing channel.

To discover how you can reengage customers visit rakutenadvertising.com and speak to an expert.