Driving Scale with Card-linked Offers

Drive 10x more scale than affiliate offers – here’s how to do it.

Card-linked offers (CLO) are a great tool to drive in-store activations and reward your most loyal customers. But that is not the only reason why they’re becoming more popular with business and consumers alike. CLOs with Drop for Business have proven to drive 10x more scale than affiliate offers – here’s how it works.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is an advertising model where publishers (such as Drop) earn a commission for successfully promoting a product or service for an advertiser (ie. brand or merchant). The publisher is rewarded a payout for providing the result desired by the advertiser, usually the sale of a product.

Affiliate marketing attribution is tracked via unique web URLs, capturing data points that inform the advertiser where the end-customer originated from and attributes the sale to the publisher responsible for attracting the customer to make their purchase.

While affiliate marketing has been an extremely successful approach for direct to consumer and ecommerce businesses, traditional brick and mortar businesses struggle with associating online marketing activity to offline purchases.

Card-Linked Marketing

A new advertising channel gaining popularity with the rise of open banking is card-linked marketing (CLM). CLM operates similarly to affiliate marketing, with the key difference being publishers and advertisers attribute customer purchases using the bank-level transaction details, rather than web URLs. Card-linked offers are capable of measuring both online and offline purchases, and gaining traction with omni-channel and brick and mortar marketers.

Benefits of Card-Linked Marketing

Card-linked offers (CLOs) are the most popular way in which consumers choose to interact with brands on Drop and, as a result, they consistently unlock 10x more scale than affiliate offers.

Card-linked offer attribution has historically been a challenge for marketers because purchases are measured in the bank environment as opposed to tracking click activity. Advertisers are accustomed to a 1-to-1 marketing attribution known as “Last-click Attribution”, where the last Publisher to receive a click from the consumer is granted commissions for the sale.

But with Drop Pulse, our partner success tool, marketers get the best of both worlds, the increased scale of CLOs with the same last-click attribution as affiliate offers.

Attribution with Drop Pulse

Drop bridges the gap with a unique click ID that correlates the card-linked offer activation to the consumer’s transaction; Drop For Business is able to provide 1-to-1 tracking data to brand partners, accessible through Drop Pulse. CLO click attribution by Drop for Business is an order-of-magnitude improvement in marketing reporting that allows marketers to measure when the digital offer activation occurred and correlate it to the resulting online or offline purchase.

At Drop for Business, we empower marketers to drive cost-efficient advertising campaigns by targeting the right customers, at the right time. Get in contact with our team and find out how Drop for Business is able to leverage CLO click attribution to exceed your advertising goals.