How Employee Benefit Sites Can Impact Your Affiliate Program
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In this blog series, we’ll showcase how we drive significant growth for our clients by diversifying their publisher mix—tapping into everything from employee benefit sites and media houses, to influencers and YouTubers. See firsthand how we turn affiliates and partnerships into the driving force behind the growth of ambitious brands. Let’s dive in!
What Are Employee Benefit Sites?
Employee benefit sites are closed platform incentive players which individuals get access to via their employer or employment sector. They allow for accessing healthcare benefits, childcare vouchers, brand discounts, perks, and benefits all in one place. In the world of affiliate marketing, they are a mid-funnel partner with the main goal being to drive significant volume to affiliate programs whilst maintaining an efficient CPA. Employee benefit sites play a key role in our full funnel approach to affiliate marketing because we see these platforms driving up to 10% of the volume for programs that we manage.
Key Objectives
We always stick to running exposure pieces on platforms that we know work. For example; email exposure pieces including dedicated commerce sponsorships and features. The core reason for running these exposure pieces is that we know simply being onboarded onto an employee benefit site isn’t enough to get traction in most cases. The goal of running exposure pieces is to not only get our clients in front of millions of potential customers, but to also help increase their brand visibility and awareness.
Our client’s key objectives for working with employee benefit sites include reaching a relevant and loyal audience. Once a client has been onboarded to an employee benefit platform and started running regular paid exposure, we often find that the overall programme CPA starts to become more efficient, due to the sheer volume it drives.
Our Approach
We approach running exposure pieces on employee benefit sites by directly reaching out to our trusted GHQ network. The first step is to ensure we can get onboarded on a CPA basis by pulling levers of previous tenancy work with other clients - these tend to be quick wins when we first set a program live.
We achieve running effective tenancies by forecasting out packages and using previous data we have from the same or similar publishers. If they’re a new publisher we use statistics from their end. For example, the average number of views a banner would get in a week, or an email send size, then we’d make informed forecasting decisions based on previous results.
The client’s objective for making the overall CPA more efficient is ensuring that we onboard employee benefit sites and run tenancies shortly after onboarding, as this period is usually discounted by employee benefit sites due to the client being new to the platform. If we run a tenancy package and it doesn’t perform well, we will always look for ways to make improvements as employee benefits are a crucial volume driver in our full funnel strategy. One example of how we’d look to improve performance would be increasing a publisher’s commission for a set period of time.
Good To Know
- Most employee benefit sites require a ‘best of web’ offer to launch on their programme, which makes it difficult when multiple publishers ask for it. To overcome this, we provide publishers with similar offers, or a difference of 1% or $/£1 in their offerings.
- Some employee benefit sites require an ‘existing users’ offer, which goes against some programme offerings of ‘new users only’. To overcome this, we ask our clients if we can give offers to existing users (sometimes for as little as a 1% discount) by explaining the impact that the employee benefit site will have on their programme.
- It can be expensive to onboard - we have long-term relationships with key employee benefit sites, therefore we’re often able to waive the expensive onboarding packages.
Results
Here are some of the incredible results our clients have seen from employee benefit sites:
- Q4 2023 - PerkSpot - 29k clicks / 708 NUS / $80k spend / $140 CPA
The key placements for this success was combining email placements such as the Loop and Deal emails with homepage exposure.
- Q4 2023 - Corestream - 13k clicks / 214 NUS / $33k spend / $151 CPA
Here’s an example of a publisher where we can select which type of audience receives the email. The key placement for this campaign was the solo email, which had the highest conversion rate of 3%, driving 32 NUS alone.
- Q3 2024 - BoostWorks - 1.6k clicks / 46 conversions / £2.4k spend / £52 CPA
This was listed for 6 months with a range of placements including 4x homepage banners and 2x solo emails.
The closed platform nature of this vertical ensures we have suitable grounds to test offers across a whole range of companies. For some employee benefit sites, such as Corestream, we can target specific companies on their network, as well as targeting audiences who are more engaged with email marketing. When it comes to reaching US audiences, PerkSpot is a reliable publisher as they have a catalogue of email placements which can reach upwards of 12 million users. Ultimately employee benefit sites are key volume drivers within our full funnel strategies due to the sheer amount of reach our clients can achieve by working with these publishers.
If you’re considering introducing employee benefit sites to your affiliate program, or you’re facing challenges to scale your existing affiliate program, we can help. Get in touch with us for a free consultation with our industry experts and discover how we can help you take your affiliate program to the next level. Simply fill out our contact form to get started!
