Brands spend a lot of money building equity with new and future customers. For especially beloved brands with great name recognition, this comes with tremendous benefits, not all of them measurable.

In one big 2023 sale, DMi Partners and a big-name apparel client wondered if we could actually achieve (and measure) the impact of brand awareness on lowering affiliate commissions.

Here’s what happened (and how the brand saved over 5 figures of commission costs and made our publishing partners happy at the same time):

Our big-name client rarely runs sales, but they saw the period before, during, and after Memorial Day weekend of 2023 (6 days total) as a good time to run a sales offering.

We worked with the brand and publishers to agree that the publishers would receive 0% commission on any sales of the discounted products. Our theory was that customers would find the sale through the publishers and purchase a variety of products from the brand, including full-price items on which the publishers did earn commissions.

It worked! The publishers drove a great deal of traffic to the brand’s website that, when compared with 7-day periods before and after the sale, resulted in a daily sales lift of 302% (and a corresponding daily revenue lift of 216%) for the brand over the course of the sale.

More good news for the brand: per-order commission charges during the sale were decreased by 25% from previous affiliate commissions thanks to a 10% reduction in average commission rate. This saved the brand more than five figures in commission fees over the six-day sale.

The publishers, meanwhile, drove an average of 216% more revenue per day and earned nearly double their daily commission revenue during the sale compared to the 7 days before and after the sale. Our theory was correct: customers who found the sale through affiliate links made a range of purchases, including many on full-priced, commission-eligible products.

So what’s our happy conclusion? We don’t recommend trying this unless your brand has extremely strong name recognition. Since this is such an in-demand brand (that rarely runs sales), our publisher partners were willing to post about the sale even after we negotiated lower affiliate commissions.

Ultimately, the brand and publishers were both pleased enough with the affiliate commission rates and revenue for the sale in aggregate that we’ll be putting a similar strategy in place for future holiday sales.

If you’re on the brand side and looking for a resourceful partner to help maximize returns on your affiliate campaigns, give us a shout at info@dmipartners.com.