Paula’s Choice

A new affiliate programme for branding and performance

The power of partnerships within affiliate marketing relies on accurate data insights. Unilever-owned international beauty brand, Paula’s Choice, teamed up with DEPT® to launch an affiliate programme to reach new customers, while forging stronger bonds with existing influencers. Success was brought to life through the platform Partnerize, bridging the gap between performance and branding.

A new affiliate programme

Paula’s Choice stands for fair skincare. With each product backed by scientific research and unlimited ambition, the brand is growing rapidly. This growth led the company to reevaluate its affiliate programme, which led to two main goals being established:

01 Create an extra revenue stream based on content
02 Reach new customers through affiliate collaborations

We set up the affiliate program in Partnerize as broadly as possible. Partnerships were established with both traditional affiliate publishers and influencers with whom the PR team of Paula’s Choice had already built good relationships. In addition, Partnerize provides additional data insights into product performance and customers that were previously untapped.

Our approach

Affiliate for branding and performance

Paula’s Choice hadn’t previously considered the affiliate channel a suitable tool for influencer marketing. In many companies, influencer marketing falls under the umbrella of branding, but this can also be linked to performance marketing via affiliate. With ambitious performance and quality targets to deliver against, the team needed a creative solution to relaunch the affiliate programme from scratch.

Valuable data and specific target groups

The PR team had proactively invested for years to build a strong base with influencers. With the help of DEPT®, the affiliate team was able to build on this with a more performance-driven approach. Influencers who previously promoted Paula’s Choice as part of branding campaigns could now join the affiliate programme and earn commission based on their performance. In this way, a win-win situation is created for the advertiser and influencer. Extra commission for influencers and valuable data insights for Paula’s Choice.

In addition, Paula’s Choice can now set up smart collaborations. Influencers know their target group like no other, so that the brand can introduce new products to specific target groups. One case study saw a 58% uplift on an existing product line when a TikTok micro-influencer promoted it to her target audience with a unique code.

Strong PR and affiliate collaboration

The successful solution could not exist without the close collaboration between the PR team, affiliate team and DEPT®. Despite having different KPIs, the teams worked together towards a common goal of growing the brand, which in turn paid dividends to both teams.

The relationship between the selected influencers and Paula’s Choice PR team appeared to improve thanks to the affiliate activities, while the branding team now had access to comprehensive data insights such as new/existing customers, conversion times and product performance which enabled them to optimise their own activities.

Reach specific target groups and create additional revenue streams with an affiliate programme

Results

The partnership between DEPT® and Paula’s Choice produced an affiliate programme that hit all main goals within three months of the launch.

40% of affiliate revenue was generated by content publishers at the beginning of the customer journey, of which 36% was through influencers
MoM turnover increased from 43% to peak at +94%
82% of those purchasing through the affiliate programme were new customers

Combining the strengths of performance and influencer marketing to build on strong existing partnerships, our strategy contributed to the growth of additional sales and the brand’s customer base.