Affiliate marketing fuels Lucky Brand’s new customer acquisition success
While fashion retailer Lucky Brandwas operating in the affiliate channel, they were lacking a holistic strategy to accelerate new customer acquisition through that channel. The fast-growing fashion brand knew that its target shoppers included free-thinking and optimistic women that are inspired by American-heritage styles. Up until this time, they had primarily partnered with coupon and deal sites and were looking for ways to expand their partnerships to include top-of-funnel partners including bloggers, influencers, mass media publications and loyalty partners that were aligned with their brand and could introduce them to new audiences. To turn their plans on paper into action, Lucky Brand partnered with MERGEto expand its partnership program on the Partnerize platform. MERGE is a full-service digital marketing agency, providing strategy, planning and execution for growing brands while Partnerize is a partnership management software solution.
In partnership with MERGE, Lucky Brand aimed to build close relationships with affiliate partners to deliver high-converting traffic and high-quality revenue.
The approach
MERGE conducted a full audit of Lucky Brand’s affiliate program and created a new partnership plan and program design that identified high-value partners, focusing on influencers, bloggers, major fashion publishers and loyalty sites that could introduce the brand to new audiences and deliver net new customers. Discover, the Partnerize platform’s recruitment and activation engine, helped MERGE to cultivate relationships with targeted content and loyalty partners. These relationships resulted in high-value partnerships with publications that attracted an audience to Lucky Brand’s eclectic Americana style. MERGE leveraged Partnerize’s dynamic commissioning tool to track new customer orders and adjust commission rates to reward partners specifically for driving new customers. With Partnerize, MERGE could review the data and raise commissions for high-performing partners to further incentivize the results.
The results
Affiliate marketing has become one of Lucky Brand’s most effective and efficient new customer conversion channels. In collaboration with MERGE and Partnerize, they developed new content partnerships and optimized existing partner strategies to increase new customer revenue.
As a result, they increased the number of active partners by 34% YOY and increased active content partners by 142%. This led to a 38% YOY increase in Lucky Brand’s affiliate channel new customer rate. They have achieved an ongoing new customer rate of 60%+ from the affiliate channel.
"We have been impressed with MERGE’s ability to define our partnership growth strategy. They have leveraged Partnerize’s technology to develop and grow robust relationships with content partners and drive tremendous growth in acquiring new customers in a short amount of time. Both MERGE and Partnerize are genuinely interested in the success of our program and we feel like they are an extension of our team."
Melissa Cohen
Senior Manager, Digital Marketing-Paid Media at Lucky Brand
Lucky Brand case study
Download our case study to learn how Lucky Brand partnered with MERGE to expand its partnership program on the Partnerize platform to deliver high-converting traffic and high-quality revenue.
