Affiliate marketing is often considered to be a "bottom-of-funnel" tactic, especially with publishers that deliver coupon codes or cashback rewards seen as effective conversion drivers.
While this may be partially true, the affiliate channel can also contribute to top- and middle-of-funnel by driving consumer awareness, interest, and consideration. Advertisers can leverage publishers in categories such as influencers, content creators, bloggers, mass media affiliate partnerships, and so on to expand reach and further influence interested customers.
But wait! Advertisers (aka Merchants) in Wildfire’s shopping rewards network can receive additional exposure opportunities, too. While our platform delivers cashback offers and digital coupons to consumers while they are browsing online retailers in our network, ultimately helping to drive conversion, Wildfire's bank-grade shopping rewards platform can also deliver different ways to increase awareness for advertisers, which helps them to be included among online shoppers’ consideration sets.
SERP Integration
First, Wildfire’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP) Integration is a feature of our white-label rewards browser extensions. When customers using one of our clients’ cashback browser extensions searches for a product in Google, we add a small decoration to the organic search results highlighting merchants with cashback offers.
Merchants in our network benefit from this small decoration in the organic results, and consumers are empowered with the info that helps them choose the brand which maximizes their cashback earnings.
SERP decorations can differentiate a brand in the search results and influence customer choice before they even know what merchant to shop from.
Featured Merchants
Another way we can help the advertisers in our network gain additional exposure to the shoppers using our white-label rewards platform clients’ cashback tools, is through our Featured Merchant Placements.
With this placement, advertisers agree to an increase in commission paid for a set time period. In exchange, we feature them in special placements like this one, in our clients’ browser extensions and offer walls.
Alternate Merchant Alerts
An additional feature that benefits merchants with incremental exposure is our Alternate Merchant Alerts. At a site with no cashback available (e.g. a merchant not in Wildfire’s network), Wildfire’s white-label cashback browser extensions display closely-related alternate advertisers which do offer cashback on purchases.
This feature helps surface additional shopping opportunities to consumers who are looking to maximize their cashback rewards. "Alternate" merchants benefit from more opportunities for brand discovery, expanded exposure, and potential conversion of in-market shoppers.
Boosted Offers
Finally, Boosted Offers are one more way our clients drive more value for their customers using shopping rewards offers. With Boosted Offers, our clients can set a special budget to enhance customer cashback rewards at select merchants, effectively increasing their customers’ cashback payouts.
This helps our clients differentiate their rewards program and incentivize more customer engagement.
Merchants benefit from increased exposure because our clients will promote boosted merchant offers more strongly in their other channels such as email, social media, and offer walls. And, with higher rewards payouts, merchants are likely to see higher conversion rates and larger order values.
Wildfire is always looking for ways to maximize the benefits for our network of Advertisers. With features like these which deliver additional exposure opportunities, we continue to bring more value to the merchants participating in our cashback rewards platform.
