Card-linked rewards have often been synonymous with loyalty.
Issuers establish a CLO program, and they’ve checked the retention box.
Merchants enter a CLO marketplace, and boom, they’ve got a new set of faithful fans.
But how, exactly, does CLO work? What kinds of gains do brands actually see after running CLO campaigns?
Stay tuned — we’re answering all those questions and more, starting with a refresher on card-linked offers.
What are card-linked offers?
Chances are, you probably know how click-to-activate (CTA) credit card reward programs typically work. Let’s start there, as CTA laid the foundation for modern card-linked offers.
The CTA flow goes a little something like this:
- You identify a need — groceries, gas, fast food, a new cell phone plan, tax software.
- You open your banking app and scroll through the offer library to see if there are any rewards for fulfilling that need.
- You tap the + and the offer gets added to your card.
- You make a purchase.
- A few days later, you see your cash-back reward in your transaction history.
Super simple, right?
Well, there’s still some friction there.
You have to open their banking app and you have to physically add specific offers to your card. If you never activate an offer, you won’t fully realize the benefits of your card and may take advantage of the points or statement credits you could get from a different bank.
That’s where card-linked offer platforms come into play: they take the onus off of consumers and eliminate lost opportunities for the banks that serve them. How?
By using a high-powered matching engine.
At Kard, we process millions of transactions a day and automatically link them to our customers’ in-network offers — often tripling the percentage of matched rewards transactions with other loyalty platforms or in-house tools.
As soon as a customer makes a purchase that qualifies for a reward, they get a notification in their app telling them they got X% cash back. That nice surprise not only boosts their loyalty to the brand they purchased from, it also boosts their impression of their bank.
As Blake Ziolkowski, Kard’s Senior Director of Merchant Sales, puts it:
“With industry-leading match rates and exclusive, premium, 1st-party inventory, CLO (Card-linked Offers) is the channel that elite performance marketers leverage to engage their most active potential customers.”
Should you always choose CLO over CTA?
Click-to-activate campaigns put the onus on the end user. While that may be a more frustrating experience for them, it provides you with a direct link between offer activation and purchase behavior.
The good news is you don’t have to decide between the two.
Kard recently announced “Offer Boosts,” a feature that gives our partners the best of both worlds: a frictionless cardholder redemption experience and the opportunity to generate consumer behavior insights. Learn more here.
4 Reasons to use card-linked offers
Beyond making for a more engaging user experience, CLO ensures that you:
1. Only pay for performance
With a CLO solution like Kard, you only pay if a user makes a purchase. There’s no subscription fee or flat rate. What you see is what you get.
Plus, our veteran account managers are there to guide issuers on what brands to include in their network and give merchants tips on how to pull together the most compelling offers using Kard’s proprietary data.
And it works.
Banks typically see double the number of unique users making transactions, and 15% of previously inactive cardholders re-engage after a rewarded transaction.
Consumer brands typically see 25%+ increases in average transaction value with a $10:1 ROAS. It’s a win-win.
Just recently, we helped an outdoor sports brand hit over $1 million in new sales with a short 60-day campaign.
2. Survive a cookieless landscape
Consumers are demanding personalization at a rate that issuers and merchants can no longer keep up with — particularly in a world without third-party cookies.
They’re limited by stagnant, low-quality first-party data and very few resources to process it, making it hard to tell whether the Facebook, Google, and Amazon lookalikes are even targeting their highest LTV customers, let alone the right way.
Operating multiple steps behind, they risk losing the relationships with their existing customers and hampering their ability to acquire new ones.
That’s where the CLO ecosystem offers an edge.
Merchants gain access to a whole new suite of customers that they may have never had access to. For example, the brands in Kard’s network benefit from getting in front of Gen Z, Millennial, and Zillennial audiences — segments other players like Cardlytics can’t offer them.
Issuers gain access to a whole new suite of rewards that keep users engaged and excited to keep using their cards.
Best of all, we at Kard can marry transactions directly to consumer behavior, revealing:
- Who your audience actually is
- The brands they actually buy from
- How big their average order is
- When they usually spend money (seasonality)
- How often come back after using a card-linked offer
…while still upholding privacy compliance.
Stay tuned for more industry reports, trends, and in-app reporting coming from us soon 👀
3. Improve your average customer LTV
You don’t just want to target any customers. You want to target the ones you know will stick with you for the long haul.
Those people take advantage of reward programs that feel tailored to their needs and interests. Yet a recent survey by Accenture found that only 23% of respondents rated their bank highly for its range of products and services.
With Kard’s CLO, issuers and merchants have the flexibility to design highly customized offers for very specific segments of their audiences.
Personalization fosters a sense among your consumers that they’ve received individual attention — in turn, leading to higher customer satisfaction, increased loyalty, and ultimately, higher overall LTV.
4. Increase your relevance
Relevance is a critical factor in the success of any marketing campaign. Leveraging purchase history data not only allows you to make sure your campaign spend is aligned with your strategy but also ensures that your offers are highly relevant to individual customers.
This makes them more likely to engage with the promotion, resulting in higher conversion rates and increased sales. Our customers regularly see 50% increases in overall spend and 40% more repeat purchases.
Get the loyalty results you want with Kard
Card-linked offers give you a chance to surprise and delight customers, boosting satisfaction and getting them curious about other potential offers in your program, pushing your card to the top of their wallets.
And Kard is the only CLO platform with an exclusive digital-first audience.
So what are you waiting for? Stop throwing your ad dollars down the drain.
Set up a demo with one of our loyalty experts today to get reliable ROI — and a competitive edge.
