Case Study
The effect of a structured recruiting campaign on driving retail revenue
Program & Revenue Growth
Through Affiliate Recruitment
This case study on the Master of Malt affiliate recruiting campaign is adapted from an article originally published on the Performance In website.
The Challenge
Master of Malt had been operating online since the 2000s and following a new partnership with AB InBev were keen to grow their customer base by developing their affiliate programme. The objective was to recruit and engage with additional valuable content publishers and their wider audiences - and to grow online sales through affiliates.
The Plan
Stephon Anthony, the MoM affiliate manager and their affiliate network, Affiliate Future worked together on a plan to increase focus on recruiting new affiliates, initially from the wider base of affiliates already on the AF network.
Affiliate Future used the integration of Publisher Discovery into the network, giving real-time recommendations driven by AI and machine learning. It was planned in the initial phase to look through these recommendations from the internal network analysis to identify quick wins to recruit and activate.
The second phase was to access the unique global view of affiliates across all networks and markets to identify additional opportunities. This enabled a quick assessment of each potential website for their relevance and likely traffic levels, as well as social engagement in their markets.
This tool also enabled MoM to look more closely into their competitors' affiliate relationships using the Publisher Discovery analysis tools.
Putting the Plan into Action
Master of Malt focused mostly on the quality of the services the affiliates could bring to the programme, their reach and particular demographics. The Publisher Discovery platform provided detailed analysis of all the affiliate publishers on the network. This meant that the tools suggested the most relevant and potentially valuable to MoM, giving a short cut to a target recruitment list.
Extending the view to the full Publisher Discovery app brought in millions of other potential affiliates. One of the highlights of the campaign was identifying a strong selection of good content publishers across mainland Europe and the Nordics, which were already small export markets.
Recruiting this group of influential bloggers and whisky content websites gave wider access to entirely new audiences in these important markets.
Results
Over the period of the recruiting period, over 50 new high-value affiliates were recruited and added to the programme. The majority of these were small to medium content/blog affiliates, pretty niche compared to other affiliates in the market. This fulfilled the objective of reaching new audiences in the Wine & Spirits vertical to find those engaged consumers keen to read and buy from Master of Malt.
As Steff described it, "The tools that Publisher Discovery had available was like the missing cog to our affiliate recruitment process. When we got ourselves integrated with them, it synchronised perfectly with our Account Managers suggestions. What’s more, it adds further transparency to what opportunities are available rather than wait for affiliates to find us (Master of Malt), or for a network to notify us."
The effectiveness of the Publisher Discovery tools meant a significant saving in account management time and effort. That was across the MoM team and the account managers at Affiliate Future.
The campaign delivered a significant increase in overall online sales, largely attributable to the new affiliates discovered. There was an additional business benefit in higher average basket values from the new European geo markets.
The affiliate recruiting campaign resulted in a 26% increase in overall online sales revenue, directly attributable to the affiliates recruited using the Publisher Discovery tools. It more than justified the already reasonable data cost in terms of ROI.
Stephon Anthony
Steff Is the Affiliate Manager of Master of Malt, having joined directly from Affiliate Future in 2019. See more >
Master of Malt
Master of Malt was originally founded in 1985 as an independent bottler of single malt whiskies and mail order. This operation moved online in the early 2000s, and continued to grow steadily over subsequent years.
In 2018 Master of Malt partnered with ZX Ventures, a division on AB InBev which enabled the brand to move faster and do more towards achieving the goal of creating the most delightful drinks-buying experience ever.
About Affiliate Future
Publisher Discovery partner Affiliate Future is a UK performance-based advertising network, and one of the largest affiliate networks in the UK, providing advertisers with an effective marketing solution.
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