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March 25, 2022

The Value of Cashback Sites to Your Affiliate Program

By Alex Cramer

It’s an odd fact that people love to be scared. That’s why we watch horror movies, go sky diving, ride roller coasters and do all kinds of activities that create emotions of fear or terror that, logically, we should do everything we can to avoid.

But these days, you don’t have to go to an amusement park or climb into a plane to be scared. All you have to do is buy a tank of gas or a week’s worth of groceries.

Inflation has become a terrifying fact of life for pretty much every American and today’s consumers are more price-conscious than ever because they have to be. When a gallon of gas can jump fifty cents in a week, it forces us to consider every dollar we spend and reevaluate how we value every purchase.

That’s why cashback sites are one of the fastest-growing segments of affiliate marketing and the biggest cashback shopping apps report a user base of over 10 million shoppers. Buyers are looking to save, and getting money back on the purchases they make is extremely appealing to them.

But knowing all of that, the next logical question is how can a cashback site benefit your brand?

How Does it Work?

A cashback site typically works by having the affiliate site direct the consumer to your brand’s website. Then, once the buyer makes a purchase from you, the cashback site will send them a portion of the commission they earned from the sale.

The advertiser can also negotiate for greater exposure on the cashback site, in their emails or on their social channels by offering a higher commission payment, which can sometimes also lead to a greater cashback payment to the consumer.

And while the benefit to consumers is clear, most marketers have also found value in working with these sites. In a survey by IAB Australia Industry Survey, advertisers believed that cashback sites were tied with content sites for the marketing channels with the greatest value to their brands.

Why does it benefit your brand?

Cashback sites are proven to have two key benefits to your brand, which are higher average order values (AOV) and greater conversion rates.

Shoppers on cashback sites tend to be further down the purchase funnel. The average cashback shopper is already motivated to buy a specific product and now they just want to make sure that they’re getting the best deal or the most money back before they finally pull the purchase trigger. A study in the Cashback Industry Report showed that cashback sites provide brands with a 3.4 times increase in conversion rates.

Additionally, the same study showed that cashback sites increased AOV by 46%, driving the average order size from $76 to $106. This is likely due to the buy more/save more paradox where shoppers feel like they’re getting a better deal and more cash back, even though they’re spending more money to get it.

How to identify a high-quality cashback site.

One of the first things you’ll want to look at with any cashback site is how easy they make it for the shopper to collect their money or rewards. Ideally, it should be a simple and fast process for a shopper to cash out their earnings directly from the cashback website and into their bank account.

The more hoops a buyer has to jump through, fees they have to pay or time they have to wait to collect the money they earned, will mean that the site will have low consumer loyalty and is far less likely to deliver conversions for your brand.

Other keys to look at is how much engagement they have on their social media channels (not just their follower count!) to see how active their user base is and how often they’re asking for deals on products like yours.

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Cashback sites can be valuable to your brand, but in order to get the most out of them, they need to be a part of a larger affiliate marketing strategy.

The reason that Advertise Purple has been able to generate over two billion dollars in sales for our clients in the last decade isn’t because we tap your buyer once and hope for the best, it’s because we hit them at every stage of the buying funnel, from content sites that create brand awareness to review sites that create social proof to cashback and loyalty sites that give them the final push to slam the buy button.

Our methods work because we know how buyers think and we give them the reasons they’re looking for to complete the sale.

And there’s nothing terrifying about that.

Are you getting started in affiliate marketing or looking to improve your current program?

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