Performance marketers are facing a double bind. CPCs show no signs of dropping, and digitally native consumers are actively dodging traditional ads, scrolling past or blocking them entirely.
Card-linked offers (CLOs) offer a smarter path forward.
Delivered natively through secure banking and rewards apps, CLOs surface personalized offers when consumers are already in a financial mindset. No wasted ad campaigns in interruptive formats, just gentle nudges to earn cash back.
CLOs also complement how people shop today. With 85% of Gen Z and 82% of Millennials preferring contactless payments, CLOs deliver rewards with zero friction. Consumers just tap their card and immediately earn cash back at their favorite brands.
In this guide, we break down how CLOs work, the benefits they bring to performance marketers, and how you can start using them to drive loyalty, acquisition, and long-term growth.
What are card-linked offers?
Card-linked offers (CLOs) are automated rewards (usually in the form of cash back) tied directly to consumer credit or debit cards or other fintech products.
CLOs are powered by platforms like Kard, which use machine learning to match billions of transactions to live in-network offers. Whenever a customer makes a purchase that qualifies for a reward, they get a notification in their app that they got X% cash back.
Because platforms like Kard have visibility into billions of transactions, they can precisely target specific audiences — new customers versus existing customers, high spenders, pet owners, underbanked communities — a key feature for brands looking to get in front of niche groups of people.
6 Benefits of card-linked offers for performance marketers
Because card-linked offers integrate directly into consumers’ banking apps or credit card rewards platforms, they have a significant edge over traditional ads in terms of:
1. Not feeling like an ad
Unlike pop-ups or display ads, card-linked offers don’t show up on a recipe or random news story.
They’re displayed in a highly secure, authenticated environment: banking apps. Consumers see card-linked offers when they go to the rewards section of their banking app, creating an experience that feels intentional rather than intrusive — thereby maximizing attention and driving higher engagement.
Plus, consumers associate financial institutions with trustworthiness and protection, and tend to extend that trust to card-linked offers.
In fact, in their minds, cash back offers seem more like a coupon. Whenever they have to make a similar purchase, they’ll remember the cash back and great product they got, and likely shop at the same retailer, driving loyalty with the brand and cardholder spend.
2. Brand safety
Even if you pay the big bucks, programmatic ads can appear on content that’s not aligned with your brand’s values. Every time that happens, your reputation takes a hit.
With a CLO platform, you never have to worry about where your ad is placed — it’s always going to show up in people’s banking apps.
Even better, the rewards listed next to your offer have been hand-selected by the issuer, ensuring that they are legitimate. Depending on what CLO network you go with, showing up alongside those other brands’ offers could give your brand reputation a boost.
3. Right-time targeting
Card-linked offers promote your brand to people already in a money mindset.
“Consumers are in their banking app because they’re thinking about spending money and trying to get a deal. If your brand pops up there, they associate you with something worthwhile to spend money on,” Blake Ziolkowski, Kard’s Senior Director of Merchant Sales and Operations, explains.
With some platforms, like Kard, you can get even more granular with who you’re targeting and adjust your offers accordingly. For example, you might give consumers a diminishing discount structure:
- Get 15% off on a first purchase
- Get 10% off on a second purchase
- Get 5% on the third purchase
A continuous rewards cycle shows your customers you care about their loyalty, which improves retention and LTV. In our experience, this framework often leads to higher average order values as well.
4. Free impressions
Some CLO platforms, like Kard, only charge when a consumer uses an offer. Potential customers could be looking at your offer in their banking app every day, nudging them closer and closer to making a purchase — and you wouldn’t have to pay for any of those impressions.
And once the consumer does make a purchase, brands potentially gain a new customer for life.
5. Personalized engagement
CLO platforms like Kard collect impressions and view events, tracking whenever users engage with rewards experience touchpoints. This data clues issuers and brands into:
- What offer messaging works best
- What offer presentation drives clicks
- What kinds of offers produce the most engagement
With these datapoints in mind, issuers and brands can develop more personalized offers that drive engagement and loyalty.
As Chris Di Censo, Kard Merchant Sales Director points out: “At Kard, we are collecting all the transaction data, so can tell you what other stores your ICP shops at and other spending habits they have, helping inform not only additional CLO campaigns, but other marketing campaigns you may want to run in the future.”
6. Zero fraud
Ad fraud is a persistent challenge in digital marketing. A study by Juniper Research found that 27% of organic and direct traffic consists of bots and fake users. And by 2028, $170 billion in ad spend will be lost to ad fraud.
With CLOs, you don’t have to worry about bots eating up your ad budget.
For CLO fraud to happen, a hacker would have to steal someone’s phone, log into their banking app to see what rewards they have, use the proper card to make a purchase, and somehow route the cashback back to them. The chances of that happening are extremely low.
Every interaction with a CLO campaign represents genuine consumer engagement — and that’s a great thing when you consider that some CLO platforms only pay for performance (more on that next).
How card-linked offers work in loyalty programs
For a cardholder, card-linked offers are seamless. They simply use their card to make a purchase, and then get a notification that they received a reward. That’s it!
The technical backbone
Not all card-linked offers are built the same way — most have a click-to-activate structure that puts the onus on cardholders to add offers to their card before they make a purchase. These CLO platforms also tend to be more rigid in their presentation. Issuers and brands can’t modify the look and feel of their rewards program or even offer notification messages.
From day one, Kard’s API-first approach has empowered its customers to shape the consumer experience, with full control over how rewards are presented, triggered, and personalized.
Fintech marketers can accelerate brand growth, boost engagement, and push their cards to top of wallet — all without unnecessary overhead. At the same time, brands gain access to customizable notifications, gamified offers, and clear attribution.
Plus, Kard’s use of machine learning also allows for real-time offer optimization, adjusting visibility, spend caps, and targeting parameters on the fly to maximize campaign performance.
Read more about our newest product updates here.
Key features of successful card-linked offer programs
The most effective card-linked offer programs don’t just turn on a campaign and hope for results. They’re strategic, data-driven, and tailored to both brand goals and consumer behaviors, which means they:
Have a variety of high-quality issuer partnerships
Card-linked offers work best when they’re catered to a specific audience. High-performing CLO programs partner with issuers that support the audience they’re trying to go after.
Kard, for example, helps connect merchants with a wide range of issuers, including popular digital-first banks like Atlas and BM Technologies, Inc., ensuring access to younger, tech-savvy consumers who are just beginning to establish their spending habits.
Note: Some CLO platforms share issuer relationships, which means you run the risk of diluting your brand’s exposure. And if there’s one thing you don’t want to be doing in advertising, it’s double-dipping. Kard maintains exclusive relationships with issuer partners, which makes it a ‘one-stop shop’ for marketers who want to target consumers who have accounts with modern banks.
Launch customized offers
Offer customization is crucial for tailoring campaigns to your goals. The best CLO programs:
- Target new customers with introductory offers.
- Reward loyal customers with tiered or repeat-purchase incentives.
- Incentivize lapsed customers to come back with exclusive cash back rewards.
And they adapt their offers to changes in their marketing strategy (or in transaction data) in real-time.
Act on offer and audience insights
There are so many actionable insights you can get from examining billions of transaction records, from what time of day consumers spend most to whether they tend to buy in-store or online to where else they’re shopping.
The best card-linked offer programs take advantage of the data they get from their CLO platform to continuously customize their offers according to:
- The time of day people buy
- Where they shop (online, in-store — with store specificity)
- What customers buy (at a brand’s store and at their competitors’ stores)
- How much they spend, on average
Doing so ensures they get the most value from their CLO program — even as their target audience behavior evolves.
Use an omnichannel offer marketing strategy
According to McKinsey, the majority of consumers now use at least 3 channels for each purchase journey. Omnichannel excellence is especially important given that omnichannel consumers are at least 1.25 times more valuable than their single-channel counterparts.
Standout card-linked offer programs choose a performance-based rewards platform that partners with issuers who make marketing a priority — in their banking app, through push notifications, SMS messages, and emails.
Kard, for instance, only works with banks and fintechs that put a lot of time and thought into their marketing. Though some CLO platforms charge extra for omnichannel marketing, it's part and parcel of every Kard plan.
CLO in action: Fazoli’s brings in 81% new customers with Kard
To give you a sense of just how impactful card-linked offers can be, let’s take a look at how Fazoli’s, a leading fast-casual Italian chain, used CLOs to drive serious results in a competitive quick-service market.
The chain found that attracting a younger, digital-first customer base was becoming harder and harder. And they had very few levers to increase average order value and re-engage past guests. Their team saw card-linked offers as a way to:
- Reel in a younger audience
- Drive more, higher order value purchases among existing customers
- Tap into their lapsed customer base
With Kard’s first-party data, Fazoli’s targeted a more tech-savvy demographic, giving them 4% cash back on their meal. In just a few months, the CLO campaign brought in:
- $530k+ in sales
- 6,000 offer redemptions per week
Even more impressive, 81% of campaign redemptions came from people who hadn’t eaten at Fazoli’s before. Today, Fazoli’s is using card-linked offers to turn passive audiences into engaged, high-value diners.
Challenges with card-linked offers — and how to overcome them
Implementing card-linked offers can present several challenges. But that doesn’t mean they’re insurmountable.
Here’s a deeper look at what those obstacles are and how leading CLO programs overcome them to ensure successful adoption and user engagement.
Data privacy concerns
Consumers are getting more and more privacy-savvy and can be wary of programs that collect (and potentially share) their financial data. The key to assuaging their concerns is to use a CLO platform that doesn’t collect any PII.
Kard’s API operates in full compliance with SOC 2 and PCI SAQ standards. As we continue to build more modular features. And in the coming months, our engineering team is working on rolling out optional VPNs, adding another layer of protection for enterprise issuers if they choose to use it.
Ease of integration
Card-linked offer platforms are notoriously challenging to deploy, maintain, and update, leading to frustrating experiences for developers. Using an API-first CLO platform can accelerate time to value, with a straightforward implementation for engineering teams and customization options for marketers.
Kard's API is future-proof and highly modular, allowing issuers to seamlessly adopt Kard’s evolving feature set in a plug-and-play fashion — without the need for extensive reworks.
Consumer education
Some consumers aren’t familiar with how CLOs work, and get frustrated having to click to activate rewards or link their current cards with new rewards programs.
Seamless card-linked offers, like those that Kard provides, eliminate this challenge. All users have to do is spend with their card, and the Kard engine matches up their transaction to a card-linked offer automatically.
Future trends in card-linked offers
There’s already so much card-linked offers bring to the table, but that’s not all they can do — more improvements are on the horizon, including:
- Gamified offer formats like click-to-boost or progression milestones, designed to increase cardholder engagement, loyalty, and lifetime value
- Versatile, out-of-the-box redemption offers like merchant category, brand-level, and SKU-level offer types, helping merchants to target specific groups of customers and encourage repeat purchases.
- Event-driven push and email notifications, that give issuers and merchants more opportunities for user engagement.
- AI-powered personalization, with deeper audience segmentation, predictive modeling, and offer timing optimization, spurring more purchases at higher average order values.
- Cross-brand ecosystems and collaborative loyalty programs, where multiple brands can share visibility, rewards — and audiences.
- Mobile wallet integration, with native Apple Pay, Google Wallet, and other digital payment methods, ensuring card-linked offers are available no matter how users want to pay.
How to get started with card-linked offers
Not all CLO platforms are alike, and finding one with the right audience, customizability, support, and reporting features is the key to unlocking the kind of growth you’re looking for.
To help you solidify which one is right for you, check out our list of 6 questions to ask when evaluating CLO solutions.
Once you’ve selected a platform:
- Set up your offer. In Kard, for example, you choose a percentage or flat cash back amount — as well as minimum and maximum cash back amounts — to make the most of your CLO budget.
- Define clear success metrics, such as number of new customers to expect, desired increase AOV, and ideal ROAS.
- Set up and promote your campaign. Schedule campaign start and end dates and publicize the cash back offer through the participating issuer network. Usually, promotion happens via email, SMS, and bank app push notifications.
- Make tweaks to your campaign once offer redemptions start to roll in so you can continue attracting the audience you want. Kard, for example, shares granular transaction data that brands can use to design customized offers for specific segments, spend level, or time of day.
CLOs: Low-risk, high-reward
Card-linked offers are reshaping performance marketing by delivering results that traditional ad channels can’t touch. With built-in brand safety, proven consumer appeal, and a pay-for-performance model, Kard’s CLOs are the rare win-win for marketers and customers alike.
Whether you’re trying to reach Gen Z, drive in-store foot traffic, or boost loyalty among subscribers, Kard can help. Explore what’s possible by contacting one of our experts. Or, check out the platform for yourself in this interactive demo.
FAQs:
What is a card-linked offer?
Card-linked offers (CLOs) are automated rewards (usually in the form of cash back) tied directly to consumer credit or debit cards or other fintech products.
CLOs are powered by platforms like Kard, which use machine learning to match billions of transactions to live in-network offers. Whenever a customer makes a purchase that qualifies for a reward, they get a notification in their app telling them that they got X% cash back.
How do card-linked offers work for merchants and marketers?
Kard helps merchants increase sales by connecting them with consumers through rewards built into everyday spending moments. We use first-party transaction data to reach people who are ready to buy, especially those who are comfortable shopping online. Our platform gives merchants access to tens of millions of consumers—without any upfront media costs—by delivering rewards through banking apps, rewards programs, and EBT platforms.
Kard is a rewards infrastructure platform that helps issuers, fintechs, and rewards platforms increase engagement, loyalty, and usage by embedding merchant-funded offers into everyday digital experiences — including banking apps, rewards platforms, and EBT environments. Powered by first-party transaction data and delivered through flexible APIs, Kard enables partners to provide personalized, relevant offers with minimal operational effort.
Are card-linked offers secure and privacy-compliant?
Kard’s API is built for security and privacy from the ground up. By design, we don’t collect any PII, and we operate in full compliance with SOC 2 and PCI SAQ standards. Soon, we are rolling out optional VPNs, adding another layer of protection for enterprise issuers if they choose to use it.
What are the best practices for creating effective card-linked offers?
Card-linked offers should be incorporated into your go-to-market strategy like any other marketing tactic. That means you need to:
- Integrate CLO into each stage of the customer journey. Most merchant marketers tend to synonymize CLO with low-funnel. But really, it can be a play for the entire consumer lifecycle, helping you acquire new customers, convince old customers to come back, and upsell existing customers with higher order value offers.
- Segment your audiences effectively. For card-linked offers to work, you have to target the right prospects or customers at the right time. Vendors like Kard have access to a vast database of consumers with specific attributes, making it easy to drill down to the audience you want to hit.
- See CLO as a branding opportunity. CLO can give your brand an instant boost. Not only are you offering your customers a promotion, you’re also establishing credibility. Whether a consumer uses your offer or not, your brand will appear in a consumer’s banking app (which they use regularly) next to other household name brands, urging them to explore your products.
- Continually experiment. Sometimes, the best results come from making small tweaks. Making these kinds of adjustments has helped our customers get the best of both worlds — reeling in new customers and building brand loyalty with existing ones.
For more advice and examples, check out How the best merchants integrate card-linked offers into their omnichannel strategy.
How does Kard’s platform support card-linked offers?
Kard’s card-linked offer platform has helped name brand retail, QSR, subscription, and everyday convenience stores get free impressions, increase their AOV, and steal market share away from their competitors.
Unlike traditional card-linked offers, Kard’s ecosystem extends beyond a single payment method, giving brands more flexibility to engage consumers wherever they shop. With 47M+ users in our network and access to $31B+ transactions per year, we’ve developed a 360° view of how America purchases – and can help you catch the attention of the people you want to reach.
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