Category: Affiliate Marketing Tips

We’d love to hear a little bit about your role at Revolut and it would be great to hear about your journey. Can you give us a quick overview of how you got to your current role as senior business developer with Revolut?

Anita Koimur: It has now been more than a year since I joined Revolut, described as the fastest-growing Fintech startup in the UK and Europe, the Financial Super App with over 10m users and $5.5bn valuation, and many more titles. Previously I was heading business development at Aitarget, an ad tech partner of Facebook, Google and Snapchat and where my key vertical was finance. Quite naturally, one day I bumped into Revolut and could not resist its relentless drive and global ambitions; so I joined the team quite soon to help build an ad solution – Revolut Perks – inside the modern mobile fintech app.

Regardless of being in charge of strategic partnerships at Perks for over a year, I can only say this journey has just started and only 1% complete. 

Can you tell us how Revolut fits into the affiliate marketing ecosystem? How do you work with publishers and merchants?

AK: At Revolut, we launched a strong acquisition and engagement platform called Revolut Perks, through which we can promote partner brands through tailored promo campaigns sending cashback or discounts offers to our 10 million user base. From the beginning, we needed a strong offering of consumer brands to make this a success. Therefore, working with leading affiliate platforms fitted perfectly within our growth strategy. We found a natural partner in these networks like Partnerize. They have helped us build our amazing product by giving us access to top brands from a wide range of different categories. We love working with partner brands that truly meet our customer expectations on a daily basis.

What does Revolut do to create customer loyalty in space that is dominated by established brands/banks?

AK: We still believe that loyalty is a key lever for sustainable growth and customer engagement, but we took a different approach towards it. While other big companies and banks work with classic rewards schemes like points and miles, we use the high tech capabilities behind Revolut to bring personalisation and hyper-segmentation into the rewards space. We followed a completely different approach when we built our Perks programme from scratch; we built an actionable data-driven infrastructure that delivers the most relevant offers to the right customers in the right time. 

In short, what opportunity does Revolut offer brands, when working with Partnerize, other platforms and networks?

AK: Revolut Perks can drive incremental sales for any brand. We have an ever-growing, global customer base that we can hyper-target with the best offers while actively promoting them through different owned channels, like push notifications, in-app banners and email. Also, the attribution process is handled automatically through the affiliate partner, so no integration or manual process is required. As a result, brands find in Revolut Perks a solid growth partner that offers precisely tailored campaigns, reasonable customer acquisition cost with high ROAS and no operational overheads.

Everyone talks about data-driven marketing. How does Revolut go above and beyond to leverage data when creating value for advertisers and users alike?

AK: We built a Recommendation Engine within the Revolut Perks product. It is based on machine learning algorithms that are capable of automatically choosing which cashback offers or discounts will be more likely to be relevant for each set of customers. This powerful “machine” uses multiple variables like purchase history, consumer behaviour and other demographics data to determine the best audience for each brand and offer. This is highly valuable equally for our customers as they always receive relevant offers and for advertisers because they can obtain higher engagement, conversion rates and lower acquisition costs from these campaigns than from other digital acquisition platforms or channels.

What does fintech mean to you, and how does Revolut fit into the fintech landscape?

AK: Fintech as an industry is absolutely exciting as it is deeply integrated in my everyday life. As per Revolut, it wants to go far and beyond traditional finance. Our vision is to build a Financial Super App – a single app where consumers can manage all aspects of their financial life. This is what has made Revolut become a reference in the sector and one of the fastest-growing fintech companies in the world. 

How has access to richer campaign and demographics data helped you prove the value of the business you are driving. What benefit do partners see in using Revolut?

AK: Our partners work with us because they rely on our ability to add value to their prospective and existing customers. They find on Revolut Perks a powerful acquisition and retention tool that complements their digital marketing strategies. We own the real-time data, not only the demographics but also the transactional and contextual data, so we can use it in a smart and non invasive way to launch relevant campaigns and harness the power of personalisation.

Can you give us an example of a co-branded partnership campaign that Revolut has facilitated and how it worked?

AK: We launched a very successful campaign with Trainline, a leading train ticketing platform through the Partnerize affiliate network. Offering tiered rewards for Revolut and Trainline customers, the campaign resulted in a steady increase in the number of transactions, a 6x uplift on average, a 400% increase of Revolut purchasing from for Trainline over six months; as well as a consistently higher Average Transaction Value (ATV) +15% among those using the Perks offers to purchase from Trainline.

What are Revolut’s plans for focus and expansion in 2020?

AK: In 2020, we’ll keep growing and increasing our capacities globally. We’ve just rolled out Revolut in the US in March and we will carry on launching in new big countries throughout the year, as well as introducing new products like Junior accounts for kids from 7-17 years old. After its success, we will be also rolling out our Perks platform to more countries very soon as it is now only available in the UK.

Do you have any parting advice for brands and/or partners looking to expand their operations to the UK?

AK: I believe that a global mindset is key for international success, at Revolut we are a very international team, with people from all around working together. Also, finding reliable global partners is fundamental to scale rapidly, we will definitely rely on global affiliate platforms like Partnerize and global brand partners to continue scaling our product internationally.

The post Revolut on fintech, Affiliate Marketing and the Value of Data appeared first on PerformanceIN.

,Read More

What is performance marketing?

The definition of Performance Marketing is quite hard to pin down, and usually varies depending on who you ask. For many, it is the absolute tip of the marketing funnel, where leads convert into sales through channels like affiliates and retargeting. For others it is a catch-all for all digital channels, and all digital channels are thought of in this light as being last click revenue drivers. 

The Performance Marketing Association defines it as “a comprehensive term that refers to online marketing and advertising programs in which advertisers (a.k.a., “retailers” or “merchants”)  pay marketing companies (a.k.a, “affiliates” or “publishers”) when  a specific action is completed; such as a sale, lead or click.” 

While this is a solid definition, it is not always accurate. What, in this definition, would display prospecting, or video pre-roll be? Not performance in this sense, but probably also not quite brand marketing in the sense that a creative director might talk about it.

In fact, this distinction between “brand” and “performance” marketing is, in the first place, a completely false one. No individual channel is innately only suited to driving direct response or long-term brand perception, as the two are inextricably linked. When it comes to specific marketing channels, they can all do both tasks in different ways and to different extents. “Performance marketing” as such needs to develop from being a very narrow view of direct response tactics and channels, into a broader set of approaches and methodologies.

Developing a performance approach 

This is, of course, easier said than done. The first, most critical, step however is to broaden the way we look at marketing by considering all channels as part of a complex mix, and consider the phases consumers pass through in any purchase decision journey. Broadly, and extremely simplistically, consumers are either passively or actively thinking about products and services. 

When they are thinking passively, they may not be “in market” to purchase, but they are consuming content and being exposed to messaging that will influence their decisions further down the line. This might be how we most conventionally think about “brand” advertising such as TV or print ads, but it is not exclusively the case, especially considering prospecting-style activity on social on display. Moreover, performance tactics can trigger a change of mind state, from passive to active. For example, a TV ad that includes the call to action of “Sale this weekend only” could prompt a consumer to start actively considering the product, which would be a performance approach applied to a brand channel, communicating with a consumer that is not conventionally in-market.

When consumers are thinking actively, they are in the process of exploring their options and evaluating the best choices. Exploration is an additive process of adding additional brands and products into their comparison set, while evaluation is the narrowing down of that set to their preferred final option. The role of any marketing is to shorten this process down as much as possible, up to the point where the consumer simply repeatedly buys from their preferred brand without considering alternatives. This is a highly complex mixture of branding and performance tactics that drive either brand/product consideration or taking action and purchasing. This final act of purchase is historically where “performance” marketing sat in the journey, but this final trigger could be prompted by any touchpoint or combination of touchpoints.

Applying a performance approach

Now that we have developed a more holistic view of how marketing (and performance marketing specifically) interacts with a consumers decision making process, we come to how we apply this in a practical sense. The simplest way to layer this thinking into your planning is to consider the two basic states of thinking: passive and active, and the two sub states within active thinking: evaluating and exploring, as moments that can be influenced. 

Then, the task of marketers is to map the various spectrum of channels, tactics and activations they can use to the various moments of influence in a way that maximises their impact. For example, while retargeting can have a role in all stages, it is perhaps best deployed on those in an evaluative mindset to trigger the change towards purchase. 

Lastly, we need to consider that the correct answer in this view of marketing may not always be, or even include our “performance” channels and tactics. And that is part and parcel of having a more sophisticated approach to performance marketing: knowing when it is not the best answer.

The post Is Performance Marketing Much Broader Than Just Affiliate And Retargeting? appeared first on PerformanceIN.

,Read More