Why you can’t run affiliate marketing like any other digital channel for savings and checking account growth: Expert insights for financial services

Here are three of the most common errors we see financial firms make when promoting their savings or checking accounts via affiliate marketing.

1. Offering a savings or checking product that’s not yet ready for the competition (or the attention of publishers)

This may seem obvious, but product really does matter. We’ve seen many financial services firms market their account products, like high yield savings accounts, without benchmarking the competition first. They then wonder why they aren’t seeing any traction with affiliates. 

We call them “Me Too” products — products that don’t stand out against the competition or offer something attractive for the end consumer. 

While there are many elements that go into the effectiveness of a checking or savings account, rate is certainly an easy one to help stand out, especially in this current environment. We understand it isn’t always easy to offer top rate in market, and so we recommend aiming to be within 50 basis points of the competition. If average top offers sit at 4.5%, try to sit around 4% at the lowest. 

Even if your rates are competitive, other variables could also impact the attractiveness and competitiveness of your savings and checking accounts. The right fees, cash bonuses, minimum balance requirements, or even tiered balance incentives can influence the competitiveness of your product. Ultimately, affiliates want to present the best products to their audiences, and so curating a compelling offer helps get your fintech or bank in the game.  

But if your savings account product doesn’t stack up against the competition, answering the “why your product” question can prove to be more difficult and create barriers to getting those desired affiliate partnerships off the ground. 

Discover how to gauge product competitiveness with an affiliate marketing audit

2. Taking a transactional approach to your affiliate campaigns and relationships

This is a bit more of a nuanced factor. We’ve had the privilege of speaking with many financial marketers and publishers in the space, and more often than not come across financial firms that approach affiliate marketing as a checklist of marketing to-dos. 

• Confirm product and offer for promotion: Check.
• Contact potential affiliate partners to pitch product: Check.
• Negotiate on a payout model to get featured in a listicle or rate table: Check. 
• Get placements on sites like Bankrate or NerdWallet: Check. 
• Repeat. 

Interactions with affiliates end up limited and transactional – it becomes a negotiation and ad placement as opposed to a true partnership approach. 

While these steps are the fundamentals of running an affiliate program, this transactional approach can inadvertently restrict the channel’s potential. It can cause you to miss valuable feedback, data and publisher opportunities that could help you drive more consistent and cost-effective growth, and reach an engaged target audience to improve account-growth quality.

This approach can also lead to strategic errors, which further hinders quality account growth over time. 

3. Being too rigid with your program parameters

Many financial firms are rigid in their approach to affiliate marketing. We see this most commonly with partner selection and payout models. They stick to what they believe are tried-and-true solutions, so they can’t understand why this approach often leaves them short of hitting targets and fails over the long term. 

Affiliate marketing, when done right, is an intricate channel that involves experimentation, testing and learning, and gathering both volume and quality metrics over time in order to successfully scale performance. You may not realize that your $150 for an approved account is delivering lower quality than your CPC partner who can be hyper targeted and scale volume. Ultimately, that latter campaign is more efficient than the former against your quality metrics. 

We also see many banks and fintechs basing the value of new accounts generated through partnership marketing on the day accounts are funded. 

Imagine you see an average of $500 deposited through publisher A’s campaign, and $1,000 in publisher B’s campaign on the day accounts are funded. It may seem like publisher B offers a better return on your investment. But what about the value of those same accounts two weeks or even a month later? 

The results could look very different, with publisher A’s average deposit reaching over $10k and publisher B’s remaining the same.  

If you can’t accurately account for what different campaigns bring in, it’s difficult to know where to best spend your marketing budget, and which affiliates are worth more of your investment. 

Then, there are many financial services firms that aim to work with renowned publishers like Forbes and Credit Karma. While these are important partners for banks and fintechs, they may not be the right choice for every financial brand looking to achieve net new savings and checking account goals. 

You’ll need the right budget to partner with top publishers because they can drive high volumes to your site. For example, the monthly views on Bankrate and NerdWallet range from 17m to 30m, respectively. Can you handle that kind of exposure and spending? You’ll also need to have a well-converting funnel and a highly functioning sales workflow to handle the spike in lead generation and avoid churn or drop offs.

Although you may want to improve your ROI, you may not be sure exactly how to get out of a rut, leading to ineffective strategic choices.

We recommend financial services firms take a more relationship, experimental and data-driven approach. Here are 4 ways you can see a substantial return in your checking and savings account affiliate programs. 

1. Build a meaningful relationship with your affiliate partners to access audience insights and know which features or messaging can resonate most

While both you and your publishers will be targeting the same audience and seeing the results via a shared tracking software, you may have two different views on why campaigns are underperforming. 

What many financial services firms don’t know is that publishers can be a goldmine of audience insights. 

Leveraging publisher feedback can be the difference between a high performing program and one that can’t get beyond a certain size. Instead of seeing partners as a transactional marketing resource, we listen to their feedback and work collaboratively with them. This allows us to bring you insight into your audience and relevant market segments you might not get otherwise. 

So, as you discuss your products and potential customer base with partners, use their knowledge to customize your products and campaigns to reach those audiences. 

For example, affiliates may flag a product feature on your high-yield savings account, like a small rate adjustment, which will increase product affinity and competitiveness they know will resonate with their audience. While a rate change can impact margins slightly, the tradeoff can be higher account balances which means lower overall carrying costs to the business per account. Their knowledge of how to appeal to their audience can then help inform your messaging. 

In our experience, those financial services companies that collaborate more closely with publishers and implement their feedback in their product and messaging see a greater account growth ROI.

Discover why a partner-first strategy can elevate your affiliate program.

2. Measure account growth across a longer window to understand your true return on investment

Limited metrics, such as only looking at the initial funding of a savings account, won’t give you the full picture. 

For accounts, we recommend looking at a longer window to include deposits made shortly after an initial funding. New customers may initially make a small deposit to open an account, followed by larger sums. This means the value of your new accounts from an affiliate campaign may be much larger than they appear if you only track initial funding. We recommend evaluating account balances 30 days, 90 days, and 180 days after the account is opened.

3. Consider affiliates an extension of your team, helping you to reach your ROI goals

Another key to improving ROI is to take a more holistic approach by treating affiliates as a true marketing partner and sharing data with them. 

For example, we find many financial firms are hesitant to share the details of their budget, goals, or KPIs. While you don’t need to give every single affiliate this information, trusting your key partners with a higher level of transparency as though they’re an extension of your in-house team can bring real benefits. 

With this approach, you can hit your marketing and growth goals faster because you’re working together towards a defined result. Your affiliates can then make recommendations on how they can maximize your budget and make strategic suggestions on how you use your marketing spend. 

Discover how to get started with financial influencer marketing.

4 Explore new partnerships

Landing an affiliate publisher like Bankrate or NerdWallet can boost your marketing performance when you have the right budget, a competitive product, and an attractive value proposition. But not every financial firm will have all three components in place.

We’ve seen that when a financial services firm opens the door to partners previously not on their radar, they’ve engaged new audience segments and driven growth. Lesser-known or niche publishers can even be a better fit to not only grow your accounts, but improve your product and messaging until it’s top-publisher worthy.  

Suppose you’re promoting a checking account with spending options in multiple currencies. Your first choice may be publishers who have featured these products before. Yet, there are publishers with your ideal audience, like digital nomad bloggers with a well-travelled expat audience, who have never promoted accounts before.

For example, we did a deep dive into the metrics of one of our banking clients to identify the partners best positioned to work toward their savings account KPIs. We then advised the client on how to best scale performance across all available tactics. This meant not limiting their campaigns to rate tables and listicles, but being open to different partnerships and commission models.

By experimenting with new strategies, our clients are reaching, on average, a $7-10 cost per $1,000 deposited on their affiliate marketing for accounts.  

Read our Live Oak Bank case study to know more. 

Here are just two examples of partnership strategies that have helped our financial services clients grow their accounts. 

1. Don’t nix ‘paid search’ affiliates just because of the model

If you have a viable product and a well-converting application funnel but are struggling with volume, working with a paid search affiliate is often the most overlooked destination. 

We understand that working on a cost-per-click or CPC model feels riskier because the payout is higher in the funnel, but there are many advantages to engaging with these types of partners and volume and ability to scale up is one of them.

Unlike content affiliates who depend on organic traffic coming to their site, paid search affiliates have much more control over how and where they source their traffic. Because they can process data at the click level, they are able to match your offers with high intent audiences. They understand clearly what keywords are driving the quality accounts and as long as the budget is there can continue to drive up volume once they find that sweet spot.  

And many paid search partners will be willing to work on a traditional cost per account (CPA) model, depending on the vertical and product. 

The additional benefits of working on a CPC model instead of CPA

If you experiment with your commercial model, you can also explore different partners, ad space and tactics. In some cases, we’ve seen affiliates who can deliver a consistent volume of high-quality accounts that CPC models can be worth considering instead of CPA models. 

By using a CPC model, you may be able to place ads in highly relevant content like this one in Rome2Rio. 

In fact, the CPC model may surface new opportunities for placements with publishers who may limit CPA arrangements to more bottom of the funnel content like listicles and reviews. 

2. Consider newsletter campaigns for more cost-effective account growth

Exclusive campaigns, like a takeover page or newsletter inclusion, can help reduce your cost per acquisition over time. This tactic can be especially effective with publishers who have shown significant results for you in the past.

For example, we helped a bank implement geo-targeted newsletters to increase net new account growth. While this involved increasing the cost-per-acquisition (CPA), the additional expense helped:

• Enhance rankings on publishers’ marketplaces (maximizing the affiliate ‘halo’ effect)
• Gain additional visibility through sidebar advertisements 
• Integrate campaign content with publishers’ content for greater exposure

The bank’s net new accounts increased by 650% from the first quarter to the fourth quarter of 2023 with a reduced CPA of 12.5% during Q4 of 2023.

Compared to other channels, affiliate marketing has made up 18% of the bank’s new membership applications year to date thanks to this newsletter approach.

The nature of affiliate marketing is that it is a partnership that offers a mutual exchange of benefits. By building strong relationships with publishers, tapping into their audience insights, sharing data, and considering them a genuine extension of your team, you will lay a foundation for reaching your account growth targets. 

If you are a financial services company ready to rediscover the potential of your affiliate channel and boost your results with expert help, contact us today.