Brand partnerships at Awin
Brand partnerships at Awin provide businesses with access to an industry leading marketplace. With Awin, you can better discover, track, and reward, your brand partnership efforts at scale.
What are Brand Partnerships?
A brand partnership is a mutual collaboration between non-competing brands who partner together for combined success. A brand partnership campaign enables advertisers to engage with new customer audiences, enhance customer loyalty and drive incremental revenue.
Using brand partnerships to drive success
Brand partnerships is a strategy where one brand (the brand partner) earns a commission for successfully referring their customers to purchase with another brand (the advertiser).
The Advertiser
Partnering with a brand partner will enable you to market your own product or service to their already engaged customer audience. By tapping into a valuable database of first-party customers you can acquire new shoppers based on complimentary demographic and customer values. By being promoted by a brand partner you can also enhance your own reputation through complimentary association.
Reach
new customer audiencesElevate
your brand awarenessDiversify
your marketing mix
The Brand Partner
When promoting another advertiser, you can enhance your customers shopping experience by recommending complimentary products or services. Consider your customer database as an untapped marketing resource. By successfully marketing a complementary advertiser to your customers you can begin to generate inbound revenue whilst also enhancing the customer shopping experience and likely future loyalty to your brand.
Improve
your customer experienceEnhance
customer loyaltyDrive
incremental inbound revenue
Who can be a
brand partner?
Brands of any size, from start-up to enterprise can become a brand partner. Consider your customer database as an untapped and marketable revenue resource. As the brand partner, you would promote another advertiser to support them in reaching your customer audience. The advertiser would pay a commission to tap into your database of engaged customers.
How should I work with other brands?
Delivering customer value should be at the heart of any brand partnership. Advertisers should provide the best possible offer to acquire new customers. Brand partners should ensure that the advertiser aligns with their customer demographic and compliments their own product or service. Brands should consider using brand partnerships at each stage of the customer purchase journey.
Where can I start?
Brand partnerships will be an integral part of brand marketers’ digital strategy, not just today, but long into the future. Get started with Awin’s industry leading marketplace, operating campaigns with thousands of brands globally, across all sectors, empowering brands to better track, discover, and reward their marketing efforts at scale.
The ultimate guide to brand partnerships and collaborations
Access a free and complete guide for brands looking to launch brand partnerships.Learn how a brand partnership campaign can offer many benefits to support your existing digital marketing efforts.
This guide will support you in taking the first steps on your brand partnerships journey. Join over 3600 brands who have already run brand partnership campaigns with Awin.
Submit your details and get started today
SimplyCook and Myprotein partner to enhance customer loyalty and reach new audiences
Myprotein sought to explore how they could enhance their customer loyalty whilst also monetising their first-party customer database. Their aims were to partner with a non-competing retailer, better retain their existing customers, and create a new inbound revenue stream for their business.
After identifying SimplyCook as a suitable brand partner, Myprotein began to offer their customers a free SimplyCook recipe box subscription trial with four unique recipes. Customers could choose to redeem the free gift with purchase reward at the basket during the checkout process. After completing their purchase, Myprotein shoppers were then sent redemption instructions through a post-purchase email notification, and for each successful customer referral, Myprotein were paid a commission by SimplyCook.
During the initial two-month campaign, Myprotein referred 56,000 customers to SimplyCook with a conversion rate of 26%. In return, SimplyCook paid Myprotein more than £150k in commission payments.
Types of brand partnership ad-placements
A successful brand partnerships campaign can take many different forms. This could be a short-term partnership,or a more strategic and collaborative approach to have maximum impact.
At checkout
Offer a free gift at checkout.
Member perks
Offer gated rewards as part of a loyalty programme.
Embed advertiser offers into your customer email strategy.
Search
Sponsored search listings, display banners, or shoppable video content.
Social
Consider sponsored posts or hosted competitions.
Offline
Consider offline promotions, product inserts, or out of home placements.
Explore more affiliate partner types
Publisher partners
Increase sales by working with publishers, including content creators, influencers, comparison sites, and more, to promote your products.
Klarna
LTK
Redbrain
Technology partners
Retain and convert customers by seamlessly integrating technology partners into your website.
intent.ly
Soreto
Upsellit
Case studies
Related case studies
How Plusnet used brand partnerships to improve customer retention
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Cellar Rats create powerful acquisition channel from ‘gift with purchase’
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Brand partnerships raise profitability, CVR, and AOV at Secret Sales
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Currys rapidly unlock new revenue stream from brand partnerships with BrandSwap integration
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Articles
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Brand Partnerships Wrapped: 2023
Awin Talks: An introduction to brand partnerships
Awin Makes Brand Partnerships Available in One Click with BrandSwap Integration
How subscription brands are using brand partnerships to drive record performance.
FAQs
Yes, sort of. Brand partnerships are typically non-endemic retail media opportunities where one advertiser (the brand partner) promotes a complimentary advertiser’s product or service to their customer audience. A non-endemic retail media partnership is where the brand partner doesn’t stock the advertiser’s product or service on their own site. On the flip, an endemic retail media partnership is about enhancing the visibility of a product or service that the advertiser does sell. You could refer to this type of activity as supplier funded placements.
The opportunities are endless. Anywhere that an advertiser can positively influence their customers shopping experience could be a brand partnership ad-placement. One of the most successful is gifts at checkout. The gift can be shown pre-purchase to drive purchase intent, or post-purchase as ‘surprise and delight’. In either case, the customer can only redeem their complimentary gift once they’ve completed their transaction. So, there is no leakage.
Other placement opportunities include customer reward programmes. This is a great way of engaging customers outside of shopping moments, continuing to provide added-value as a means of maintaining their customer loyalty.
Some brands have also opened up email marketing placements. That could be a full dedicated solus to your customer base on behalf of a complimentary advertiser, or a small, featured placement which compliments the content of your customer newsletter.
This is a common problem for a lot of advertisers. Perhaps you want to run brand partnerships but do not have the technical capabilities to create or monetise ad-placements on your site. This is why Awin have partnered with specialist plug-and-play solution providers. Our preferred solution providers are all integrated into the Awin MasterTag. By activating our solution, providers through the Awin MasterTag advertisers can deploy their functionality without needing to involve their internal technical teams, saving time and resource.
Once deployed through the Awin MasterTag, our solution providers will have access to the required website data to properly load their script and deploy their solution on your site.
Awin has a market leading brand partnership platform. We work with thousands of advertisers globally. Using those existing relationships, we can connect you with complimentary advertisers and support the set-up of a brand partnership. Our tracking infrastructure also provides a fully transparent tracking solution for both the advertiser and the brand partner. Both parties can view campaign performance in real-time, allowing them to make optimisations during the campaign. Finally, we streamline the commercialisation of brand partnerships. Using commission-based payments we offer flexible and risk-free commercial opportunities to monetise brand partnership placements. Awin will also take care of the financial exchange between two brands, negating the need for you to contract directly.
Put simply, no! To become a brand partner on the Awin platform and promote complimentary advertisers to your customers is free of charge. Any commission that you generate through brand partnership placements is yours. Awindoesn’t take any sort of cut. Instead, we charge the advertisers promoted by brand partners. If you’re an existing Awin client, then your standard Awin network fees apply to being promoted by a brand partner.
If you’re not yet working with us, but want to be promoted by brand partners, then please get in touch. Our commercial offerings are flexible and allow you to maximise your brand partnership efforts.
Firstly, Awin will track all transactions from your brand partnership campaign. You’ll have visibility of those transactions within the Awin platform. Advertisers then have a period to validate those pending transactions, factoring in cancelled orders, customer returns, etc. Once the transaction is validated, the advertiser is billed, by Awin, for your owed commissioned. Awin will then pay you your owed commission. Brand partners can set their payment frequency to once, or twice, monthly, and set payment thresholds which must be achieved before they are paid.
We give you as much flexibility to determine how often you want to be paid your owed commission.