The Performance Marketing Awards 2022 are fast approaching. It is highly important that the evolution of partnership and performance marketing must not go unobserved.

With some brand new categories designed to support the development and acknowledge the efforts of those pushing the boundaries of performance-driven marketing, this years’ PMAs will be the perfect opportunity to be recognised for doing exactly that, and showing how you are a changemaker in the performance marketing industry.

The final deadline to enter the awards is 14th February 2022, so there is still time for you to curate your conquering entry.

We understand that inspiration will be highly appreciated in the lead up to the entry deadline, so we spoke to one of the winners of the 2021 awards.

Giftcloud, Santander, Moneysavingexpert.com and Moneysupermarket.com all worked together on a ‘A Revolutionary Way to Incentivise New Customers With a Helping Hand’ which won them the Best Finance Campaign. Here’s how they bagged it:

Why was winning a Performance Marketing Award so important to Giftcloud?

At Giftcloud we see ourselves as being a small organisation that delivers a big impact. We have worked in the affiliate space since almost day one (2015) growing our reach and fine-tuning how we operate every day.  Since 2019 in particular, we have developed our proposition to utilise a wealth of data by then we had built up, to support a number of household names to acquire new customers using rewards.

Rewards are a commercially effective way to incentivise a purchase, we know it, our clients know it so in order to grow and establish ourselves in the affiliate space we are always looking for ways to get ourselves out there and be able to stand head and shoulders above our competitors.  The team at Giftcloud work their socks off each and every day to ensure our client’s campaigns are as effective as possible. So it is really important for us to be able to demonstrate to the team that what we do is seen as being industry-leading outside of our own four walls. And where better to be recognised than the PMAs!

Can you give readers some insight into the efforts that won you the award?

The MoneySuperMarket Group (MSMG) briefed Giftcloud with the aim of creating an appealing acquisition incentive with a difference. The collaboration resulted in an industry first – the solution being a digital gift card which ‘auto-redeems’, meaning less time and effort for the consumer.

Santander wanted to offer a Balance Transfer Credit Card promotion by rewarding customers with a £20 Amazon gift card (the only promotion of its kind offering an incentive and 0% interest on purchases for three months) ensuring that the offer would be the strongest available to customers.

This was promoted across the MSMG websites and produced brilliant results, with Santander seeing a traffic increase of 161% and a sales uplift of 103%. It also proved to be highly profitable too, adding an 80% uplift in net profit over five years compared to a non-incentive led campaign. The Giftcloud team offered customers the best possible journey by ensuring they were efficiently rewarded and by using their voucher status tracker, kept customer queries to a minimum, adding a new dimension to the Money Saving Expert brand.

How did your learnings from this campaign inform the work you have been doing since?

Powering incentive campaigns that are attractive to customers is not a new thing for Giftcloud, but what this campaign brought home was that the COVID-19 pandemic had changed the perception of what a reward (digital gift card) was or could be to the consumer.  When you think about it, this makes sense as at the time the campaign ran, the world was coming down from the hangover of the first two lockdowns and that still came with a sense of financial uncertainty for many.

Throughout the months prior, we had noted a change in habit when customers were offered a choice of brands; luxury retail brands were beginning to lose market share to more essential brands such as supermarkets. Identifying these trends in post-pandemic recovery and the lessons learned with the MSMG campaign, we began to introduce a prepaid Mastercard into campaigns with other clients and immediately saw a rise in consumers selecting a prepaid Mastercard over other brands that we had not seen pre-pandemic.

Offering a prepaid card allowed customers to manage their finances further as the balance could be used to pay a bill or for essential shopping, etc. What is important is that we are now seeing the use case of gift cards change overall. They are increasingly being seen as having a real financial value and as the digital currency they represent, which is a seismic change from the use case of old, e.g. a forgotten Birthday present.

The efforts detailed here earned the companies impressive comments from the judges, with them congratulating the great results. They said:  “This is a great success for all parties involved, with a customer-centric focus for the gift card. This has paved the way for other retailers working with MSMG.”

The Performance Marketing Awards Shortlist will be announced in April 2022, and the ceremony will be held in the Great Room at the Grosvenor House Hotel on 18th May.

Download the entry kit to begin shaping your entries if you have not already done so, and keep your eyes peeled for more upcoming insight from previous winners…