Loyalty and Rewards Placement, Bought at a Defensible Rate

Placement on Cashrewards, ShopBack, Qantas Shopping, Flybuys or TopCashback is bought, not earned. The homepage tile, the app push and the boosted-rate window come off a rate card, and the price is usually taken as an uplifted commission for a fixed period rather than as cash, which is why finance never sees it as media spend and nobody ever calculates what it returned. This engagement buys the slots deliberately, at a rate your margin can carry, and settles afterwards whether the window paid. What a boost actually costs: A cashback site running you at eight percent and offering a doubled rate plus a homepage feature for a week is asking for sixteen percent on every order in that week, including the orders you were going to get anyway. The real price is that increment across total volume, not across new customers. I model it that way before anything is booked, using your contribution per order after cost of goods, freight, payment fees and your actual returns rate, and I will tell you when a slot is being sold above what the product can pay. Several are, particularly around Click Frenzy and the November period, when the same tile costs two to three times its ordinary rate. Which placements I buy, and which I decline: Worth buying: category-page positions on the loyalty sites where your competitors are absent, points-program eStore features timed against a points promotion the program is already running, student platform placements on UNiDAYS or Student Beans when the intake calendar supports them, and card-linked offers where the reward is funded by the issuer rather than by your commission. Declined on sight: email-only packages with no on-site placement, boosts booked into a week when you are already running a sitewide sale, because you pay twice for one order, and any slot where the partner will not commit to a date and a position in writing. Points programs specifically: Qantas Shopping and Velocity behave differently from cashback. The member is not price-shopping, they are accumulating, so the elasticity is around points-per-dollar rather than percentage back, and a well-timed bonus-points multiplier reaches a customer with a higher average order value and a materially better repeat rate than a cashback tile does. It also takes longer to book. These programs plan promotional calendars months ahead, and a request made four weeks out gets whatever is left. How the window is judged: Before the placement goes live I set the baseline: orders, new-to-file share, average order value and ninety-day repeat rate for the four preceding comparable weeks, with your own promotional calendar marked on it. Afterwards I report incremental orders net of the uplift, margin per order during the window against baseline, and repeat behaviour of that cohort at ninety days. That last number is the one that decides renewal, and it is the one loyalty partners never volunteer, because a cashback cohort that never returns is a discount you paid a commission to deliver. Not included: I do not negotiate your base commission rate here, and I do not run the day-to-day program. This is placement work. I also do not book placements on networks I have not personally transacted through, and I take no rebate, referral or kickback from any loyalty partner. Anything I recommend, you can verify is recommended because it worked. Who should not book this: Brands with contribution margin too thin to fund an increment on top of base commission, which usually means anything under the mid twenties as a percentage after freight. Brands whose returns rate has not been measured, since the whole calculation rests on it. And any brand hoping a boosted week will fix a demand problem. Loyalty placement moves an existing purchase forward and occasionally widens the buyer pool. It does not create demand that was not there.