You’re looking for every edge you can find to attract and retain customers. Have you figured out yet how powerful a targeted offer can be? Offer targeting — a tool and a strategy for driving more effective card-linked offers — tailors your ad spend so it goes directly to consumers with the most likelihood to move the needle on your marketing strategy. It’s one of our secret weapons here at Kard. For now, we’ll keep the discussion focused on targeting an offer based on a user’s purchase history.

How Does Offer Targeting Work?

Considering a user’s purchase history most often involves looking back a certain amount of time to see whether they’ve shopped at your store before. Depending on your vertical, it could be a one-, three-, six-, or twelve-month lookback. This piece of data helps you determine this customer’s purchasing behavior toward your brand. Are they a loyal customer? A lapsed customer? A new customer? It’s also possible to investigate whether a customer has shopped at your competitor, although based on your specific card-linked offer provider, this request can come with extra complexity or cost. 

Once you’ve decided on the nature of your look at customers’ purchase history, you’ll set guidelines that differentiate the offer available to each cohort of customers. This is where your broader marketing strategy dictates your decision. Many card-linked offer campaigns are designed to capture new customers or lapsed customers by serving those groups a higher percentage cashback offer than existing customers, or by simply showing them an offer that other cohorts don’t receive. But there’s certainly value in rewarding your most loyal customers — especially if you tailor the details of your offer so that these customers know they’re receiving a reward for having remained loyal and consistent in their purchases for some amount of time. The old adage can still hold true: Sometimes a bird in hand is worth two in the bush!

Why Launch a Targeted Offer?

Campaign alignment:

The primary reason most brands will target their offers is to align their ad budgets with their campaign goals. New customer acquisition, lapsed customer reacquisition, and loyal customer retention are powerful goals to align your card-linked offer to. When you run a CLO (card-linked offer) on a platform like Kard’s, where you only pay for proven performance, targeted ad dollars can really start to show significant results.

Better data:

Depending on how you structure them, targeted campaigns can provide you with richer data than you’d otherwise receive. A broad-stroke CLO with no targeting can be reviewed after the fact for performance within certain groups of customers, of course, but targeting is an important layer to consider when you’re designing more in-depth campaign goals and KPIs, alongside more powerful experiments that properly measure incrementality.

Enhanced personalization:

Targeted offers are among the only ones that can feel meaningfully personalized. Personalization fosters a sense among your consumers that they’ve received individual attention, leading to higher customer satisfaction and increased loyalty.

Increased 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, in turn, makes them more likely to engage with the promotion, resulting in higher conversion rates and increased sales.

How Can You Get Started?

Kard’s platform can get targeted card-linked offer campaigns up and running with ease, putting your offer in front of millions of primarily young, diverse cardholders across the United States. (We can also run offers that everyone on our network sees!) Drop us a line through our contact form and one of our representatives will reach back out to you soon.