Non-Traditional Affiliate Marketing Matters for Lulus iROAS Growth at +94%

The Challenge

Since their inception in 1994, Lulus has been the place to shop for affordable luxury, serving millions of customers worldwide. As they continued to grow and expand their customer base, Lulus prioritized finding new customers in a post-pandemic economy.

Lulus looked to Acceleration Partners (AP), their affiliate marketing agency partner, to bring innovative strategies to their program to accelerate performance. As the leader in partnership marketing, AP’s singular focus is creating and nurturing partnerships that drive exceptional outcomes for clients. Lulus’ strong affiliate program was successful for customer retention, but there was opportunity to improve acquisition. The AP team needed to combat competitive pressure from other brands and capitalize on new shoppers entering the category.

Lulus and AP aligned on a strategy that delivers the following:

• Drive net new, incremental customers
• Increase their market share in the digitally native fashion space
• Leverage more analytics and insights to inform their strategy going forward

The Solution

The AP team introduced Cardlytics to help Lulus achieve their customer acquisition goals. Cardlytics is a trusted AP partner providing access to exclusive bank partnerships, massive scale, and consistent generation of incremental revenue. With visibility to in-market demand and the ability to shift consumer spending, Cardlytics was well suited for Lulus/AP’s strategy.

Based on insights uncovered by the AP and Cardlytics teams, recruitment and optimization strategies were developed to deliver on Lulus’ client acquisition goals to gain new customers:

• Cardlytics’ in-depth reporting showed where Lulus customers had been shopping. This shopping data was then used to refine AP’s recruitment lists for Lulus’ direct and indirect competition. This opened a new set of content partners for the brand that hadn’t previously been targeted.
• Cardlytics and Lulus’ promotional and product insights provided the data needed to create meaningful optimization campaigns with current partners to drive new customer sales.

Lulus, AP and Cardlytics collaborated on an extensive performance analysis of the program, leveraging Cardlytics transaction data to prove out incremental lift. iROAS was reported via a precise TvC analysis, revealing not only incrementality but also what served as the drivers of this revenue – increase in transactions, increase in basket size.

The Results

As a result of AP’s creative strategy and the partnership with Cardlytics, Lulus was able to meet and exceed their KPIs for each quarter in 2021. The growth percentages and results, below, are based on a year-over-year assessment from Q2 2021 and Q2 2022 and are based on Cardlytics data and analysis and specific to the Cardlytics offer.

• 304% increase in customers served in Q2, YoY
• 326% increase in sales driven in Q2, YoY
• 94% increase in iROAS in Q2, YoY

After seeing the significant impact Cardlytics made towards Lulus’ goals, AP and Lulus extended the partnership into 2023. Provable results matter. Insights-driven strategies can help brands maximize their full customer potential. Cardlytics addressed both for AP and Lulus.

Learn more about how Cardlytics can help drive engagement and spend for your customers. Contact us today!