Take one beloved leader in a notoriously price-competitive industry, remove a swath of affiliate partner options, and keep a tight grip on ROAS and product pricing specifications. If that sounds like a recipe for risking market share and revenue, let us tell you about how we cooked up a better outcome for a big-brand retail client in 2023.

The affiliate challenges

For a leading global brand in the food industry, 2023 presented several marketing challenges, including internal policies that negated formerly fruitful affiliate loyalty and CLO partnerships (which historically accounted for 40-50% of the brand’s affiliate revenue) midway through the year. Add to that picture a limited budget, strict ROAS-based restrictions, and a product pricing policy that restricts marketing efforts through certain channels, and DMi’s affiliate team had to get creative to find a path to growth.

How we overcame the obstacles

First, our affiliate team did a holistic analysis on the brand’s KPIs and viable growth opportunities in its affiliate partner network. Our relationships with the brand and our partners helped us conduct frank conversations to understand where we had flexibility and growth potential from new and existing partnerships.

Next, we engineered a strategic pivot of the brand’s affiliate campaigns, featuring a revamped commission structure, more flexible CPA goals, and expansion of coupon and content partnerships with latent growth potential. Our overall approach was designed to respect the integrity of the brand while addressing their business goals and providing wins for our content partners.

Our work on a more flexible commission structure had kicked off earlier in 2023, when we sought to make the brand more competitive across content publishers linking to Amazon or other third-party retailers. We updated the program’s commission structure from 5% across the board to a tiered structure that allowed us to increase CPAs for strategic content publisher partners to 10-20%. To assess our commission structure for each publisher, we analyzed performance across our network and produced four scenarios where we could increase CPAs and onboard new publishers while maintaining ROAS and projecting a 20-30% year-over-year revenue lift.

As we dove into the data, we also sought to prioritize partners for whom CPA increases could provide significant leverage and who would be well positioned to drive sales for holiday promotions. Our analysis led to a focus on RetailMeNot and Savings United, both partners that showed a lot of latent growth potential.

With Savings United, we ran a +3% CPA increase to gain additional coverage that covered holiday promotions and kept the brand top of mind with consumers. For RetailMeNot, we ran a paid campaign of in-feed ads through November and December; we also created custom content that focused on all holidays, not one specific promotion.

The results

In the first half of 2023, when loyalty and CLO campaigns were still active, DMi helped the brand drive the following year-over-year increases in the overall account:

• 13.3% revenue
• 26% orders
• 79.1% clicks

This growth was led by content publishers, who produced the following year-over-year increases in the content category:

• 165.9% revenue
  
• 256.4% orders
• 125.8% clicks

Our strategy to loosen target CPAs for strategic publishers helped the brand achieve its goal of increasing market share through affiliate linking. In 2023, affiliate links including the brand and its products were included in more than 200 pieces of organic content coverage – laying a strong foundation for increased revenue in 2024 and beyond.