“Personalized Rewards” Uses Real-Time Business Intelligence to Help Marketers Advance Their Affiliate, Cash Back Strategies

Rakuten has reached a milestone in the quest to make affiliate and Cash Back marketing more flexible, strategic and efficient channels for driving revenue from new and existing customers.  Rakuten’s Personalized Rewards capability allows brands – for the first time ever – to segment Cash Back offers on a 1:1 basis with automated audience targeting and it’s driving results. Initial campaigns show an average 128 percent lift in new shoppers and a 125 percent lift in sales.

Personalized Rewards brings together the affiliate marketing leadership and automated technology of Rakuten Advertising with Rakuten Rewards’ unparalleled reach and influence. Rather than relying on cookies, Personalized Rewards allows brands to use proprietary data from their customer relationship databases and anonymized Rakuten Rewards’ first-party data to recognize consumers in real-time. Upon identifying a customer and its attributes, Personalized Rewards automatically delivers an optimized Cash Back offer to incentivize a first-time or repeat purchase or to focus their attention on high-margin products.

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“Affiliate and Cash Back strategies will help brands of all sizes and industries thrive while also meeting the increasingly high bar for brand engagement and personalization,” said Amit Patel, CEO, Rakuten Americas. “Personalized Rewards is just the first of several innovations we will roll out over the next year that will elevate affiliate marketing and Cash Back as essential ingredients of every sophisticated digital marketing mix.”

Personalized Rewards gives marketers more control over their consumer rewards strategies by enabling them deeply optimize outcomes, improve campaign performance and better understand the efficacy of their spending. By allowing greater control over audience segmentation than affiliate marketing’s traditional dynamic commissioning, marketers can target individual consumers with products and unique offers based on their customer status and product and category preferences.

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“Traditional Cash Back and affiliate approaches that provide a uniform offer across an audience set are tried-and-true tactics,” Patel continued. “Now, by pairing together two of Rakuten Americas’ strongest platforms, we can help brands engage with consumers at a 1:1 level and build a lifetime relationship that increases marketing performance and drives incremental sales.”

Several customers are already benefitting from this new offering – including leading luxury retailer Saks Fifth Avenue and innovative footwear company FitFlop. FitFlop turned to Personalized Rewards to attract new customers to its full line of comfortable and fashionable footwear. Rakuten delivered targeted offers – with varying levels of Cash Back rewards – to select customers to incentivize purchase and conversion. The campaign was highly successful in helping FitFlop achieve its strategic month-over-month goals. The company saw a 149% increase in new-to-file buyers 83% of which were net-new to FitFlop. This improvement in new-to-file buyers helped FitFlop achieve an overall increase in shopping trips by 195%.