How five brands used affiliate marketing to boost business in 2024

The model of affiliate marketing that gained notoriety in the 1990s dotcom bubble may still loom large in some marketers’ minds, characterised by discounts, cashback and coupons designed to nudge consumers over the line.

But in the decades since, much has changed. Today, affiliate marketing delivers numerous benefits for brands whilst maintaining a tight control on ad spend.

With the emergence of new platforms, partners and technologies the channel has transformed, points out Awin’s regional managing director, Rosalyn Berrisford. Now, the channel provides brands with an incredibly diverse mechanism with which to address their biggest challenges. “Affiliate marketing can do everything, from build brand awareness to fuel new customer acquisition, increase basket value, boost retention rates and grow customer loyalty,” she says.

In part, that’s due to the sheer breadth of potential partnerships now on offer.

“When people start to really explore the industry, they quickly find there’s a whole host of very different types of partners they can work with now,” Berrisford explains. Brands can connect with specialist bloggers and content creators on social platforms who use affiliate partnerships to supplement their income. But there are also traditional media opportunities with newspaper and magazine websites – not to mention the ‘win-win’ of brand-to-brand partnerships.

But how exactly are marketers using the affiliate channel to elevate their business? And what results are they seeing?

Here are five brands taking five different approaches to affiliate marketing in 2024.

1. Currys: Improving customer experience with post-checkout rewards

Consumer tech retailer Currys was looking to enrich customer experience online, while finding ways to bolster its existing retail media channel. To achieve that, the company partnered with BrandSwap, a tech partner on Awin’s platform. This enabled Currys to promote attractive, non-endemic advertiser offers to customers once they’d completed their initial purchase.

BrandSwap is available via Awin’s ‘MasterTag’, a powerful piece of JavaScript that makes it possible for brands to integrate seamlessly with Awin’s premium technology partners. Thanks to the MasterTag, Currys was able to rapidly activate the solution into its website without the need for any in-house development work. Once live, customers who had bought something from Currys were presented with relevant offers from complementary brands that matched their purchase. Meal kit subscriptions were offered to customers who had just bought cooking appliances, and laundry products for those who had splashed out on a new washing machine.

Personalisation and timing were key, points out Berrisford, to ensure the affiliate offer added value to Currys’ customers, rather than disrupting their purchase journey. And the BrandSwap solution was seamlessly integrated with the wider Currys website experience to ensure it maintained the same look and feel for the end user.

The partnership resulted in an average CPM of £61 for the retailer since launch, with a peak of £71, plus a 10% click-through rate on offers. “Using our post-checkout rewards solution has allowed Currys to extract a higher premium from its retail media space by showing relevant non-endemic partner brands at scale based on the transaction,” sums up Ryan Kliszat, co-founder at BrandSwap.

2. SharkNinja: Rewarding key workers via agile product promotion

The partnership between home appliances brand SharkNinja and employee rewards platform Blue Light Card (BLC) has “flourished” since it kicked off during the pandemic, says Berrisford.

SharkNinja’s merchandising team were looking for a means of shifting specific product lines at speed, but without relying on up-front ad costs to gain prominent exposure to relevant audiences.

BLC, a partner on Awin’s network, has an audience of key worker employees. This made it a perfect brand fit – providing rewards and discounts to emergency and NHS personnel. And because BLC was looking for exclusive offers from well-known brands to bring to its members, it was willing to offer SharkNinja  prominent exposure without charging thousands in advertising costs. In fact, the brand only pays a commission for the products BLC’s members buy.

The partnership has proven to be a great match. “As a business, we’re very trade-led and that means there are times where we need to move inventory quite quickly,” says Elliot Horn, senior affiliate and partnerships manager at SharkNinja. “And one of the most impactful and efficient ways to do that at speed is via the affiliate channel. If you’re looking for a channel where you can reach really relevant, engaged audiences to showcase your product on a performance-based level, affiliate is super-efficient for your business.”

3. Vodafone: Slashing basket abandonment through technology partnership

Telecoms purchase journeys can be some of the most protracted, as customers explore different deals and options before committing themselves to a contract with a single provider. It’s normal for a customer to abandon baskets mid-journey as a result. An effective remarketing model is therefore crucial for a brand like Vodafone.

Rather than handle this in-house however, the company opted to outsource its remarketing efforts to SaleCycle, a specialist in this space available via Awin. In fact, this was another example of a technology solution easily deployed by Vodafone via Awin’s MasterTag.

“To have the expertise of a partner like SaleCycle that deeply understands basket abandonment is really valuable,” says Vodafone’s ecommerce specialist Tanita Dickson. “We trust that they can help provide us with the best solution for reducing that rate.”

Vodafone can identify visitors who added a product to their basket and left without purchasing. SaleCycle’s technology then kicks in and enables the brand to re-engage these visitors. A series of emails and SMS messages are sent to encourage the customer to return to the Vodafone site and complete their order.

Everything is rigorously tested by SaleCycle to ensure the optimal return, says Berrisford. The team try different subject lines, tones and incentives to tempt back shoppers.

The partnership has successfully helped Vodafone reduce its abandonment rates and the solution now drives more than 2,000 sales every month by converting visitors at risk of abandoning their basket into buyers.

4. Glossybox: Boosting customer acquisition & loyalty with brand partnership

Affiliate partnerships aren’t limited to just brands working with affiliates. The channel has also seen a steady growth in ‘brand partnerships’. These enable brands to work with other non-competing brands, to create reciprocal marketing value.

A beauty subscription box and premium pet food brand might not seem like an obvious pairing, but when Glossybox customers were offered an always-on 40% discount for Pooch & Mutt it turned out to be a win-win.

Glossybox was looking to increase value for its subscribers in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis where shoppers were trying to get the most for their money. Using insights on its customer base in combination with SimilarWeb traffic data, the team identified that the rate of pet ownership among the brand’s subscribers was double the national average. Glossybox and Awin’s brand partnerships team went hunting for the perfect match.

“We identified Pooch & Mutt to have the ultimate synergy and relevance, tapping into a premium pet food for female pet owners with a further focus on wellbeing,” says Glossybox’s global head of commercial marketing, Steph Fisher. “This campaign felt like a perfect example of finding a data-driven category target,” she adds.

Glossybox generated over $19,000 from media fees and commission-based payments, while Pooch & Mutt saw more than 600 new sales, with more than half of these coming from totally new customers to the business – a shared success for both brands.

5. Ann Summers: Amplifying reach by harnessing the power of word-of-mouth

With in-person referrals and recommendations a cornerstone of early successes at lingerie and sex toy retailer Ann Summers, the brand was keen to extend this same approach into the digital sphere.

Soreto provides social referral technology, making it a perfect fit. It provided Ann Summers with a route to easily incentivise new customers to share an endorsement of the brand, along with a discount with their friends, on social media. Upon sharing the post, these customers were then also rewarded with a discount.

With Soreto’s solution easily activated via Awin’s MasterTag, it was live on the Ann Summers site within just a few hours, opening up a new way of tapping into customers’ own social connections, increasing the brand’s reach and, eventually, delivering a £15 ROI for every pound spent.

Soreto’s tech allows for a high degree of customisation. The on-site experience, and individual rewards that were promoted were all aspects that could be tweaked by Ann Summers’ team to help refine what was most impactful for its customers.

“We worked with Soreto to improve the look and feel of the referral creatives and the process by which customers navigate through to convert,” says Laura Whittaker, customer lead at the brand, “and by doing so we’ve been able to really improve the customer journey.”

Five brands, five partners, but one common trait: where brand marketers have faced challenges, there’s been an affiliate out there to help solve it. The wide choice of affiliates available today and the unique ways they can connect you with your next customer make the channel one that many brands are increasingly turning to for marketing success.

Join Rosalyn Berrisford at Festival of Marketing to learn more about the dos and don’ts of affiliate partnerships, and hear how brands are using affiliates to drive effectiveness.