Pair Eyewear’s Strategic SaaS Platform Migration
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We began working with Pair Eyewear in 2022, and our aim was to create incrementality for their affiliate program by proving how adding upper funnel partners and leaning less on bottom funnel partners could accelerate growth and improve results. But before we got started, we had to migrate the program from its existing SaaS platform to a new one. Discover how we executed the migration and if it was worth it!
Client Introduction
Pair Eyewear is a US eyewear brand with a difference. They offer the unique ability to customise glasses and sunglasses frames, by offering hundreds of interchangeable magnetic frames to switch up your style depending on your mood, at a fraction of the price.
Pair have also partnered with The Eyelliance, a non-profit organisation who help provide glasses and vision care to children in the developing world. For every Pair purchased, they will provide glasses to a child in need.
Program Objectives:
- Harness agency efficiencies and improve the commercial deal with the SaaS platform to increase cost efficiency of the channel as a whole for Pair, and set up the channel for scalable growth.
- Utilise the platform features on Partnerize to optimise the affiliate programme effectively.
- Only carry over high value affiliates to the new SaaS platform, and remove any dormant or low value affiliates sitting at the bottom of the funnel.
Approach
We negotiated a sustainable and scalable deal with the full tech solution provider Partnerize, and removed any program management costs from the SaaS platform agreement.
By comparing network tracked data with the brand’s internally attributed numbers, we were able to highlight the publishers that drove little to no internally attributed value, but still earned commission (giving a very high CPA), as well as the publishers delivering significant internal volume at an effective blended CPA.
We then only migrated partners to the new SaaS platform that had proven value as a publisher, and any low to no value publishers were not moved over. These publishers were usually in the bottom of the funnel (coupon, coupon sub-networks and browser extension affiliates) while the Media Houses and Review publishers were all moved across.
Challenges
Auditing the existing account to highlight value vs non-value affiliates required a significant amount of resource to thoroughly analyse the data and pull out the publisher recommendations. We needed to get a clear view on Pair's internal attributed numbers to fully understand which publishers were driving significant value. We did this by getting a daily view on internally attributed orders and clicks by publishers from Pair, which was essential for the analysis.
Results
- We secured Pair a 70% decrease in their SaaS tech fee by moving the program to Partnerize - equating to a total cost saving of over $100k per year. This gave the program the cost efficient foundation to be able to scale over the coming years much more rapidly than what would have been possible on the previous SaaS platform.
- By removing low value affiliates from the program, Pair could repurpose over $200k per year of affiliate budget into high value opportunities and publishers in the middle and top of the funnel, rather than being spent on affiliates that were driving no internally attributed volume.
Conclusion
While program migration projects are typically a lengthy and time intensive process, the return on investment is well worth it. Utilising agency efficiencies both with the commercial side and technical side is highly beneficial to brands that would otherwise continue to potentially waste budget on historic deals with sub-par networks, rather than go through this process in-house.
The results we achieved from the migration not only had immediate payback for Pair, but also set up the program for the significant growth we have seen over the last two years (120% YoY increase to internal volume in year two of being on Partnerize) and for further growth in the future.
