Impact and Revolut Case Study

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Fintech innovator Revolut enables consumers to manage their finances from a single app

As a challenger brand keen on disrupting the finance industry, Revolut needed to find a credible way to persuade consumers to make a change from the status quo. Revolut decided referral partnerships were a key channel to achieve their goals. Aware that existing customers could be their biggest brand evangelists, Revolut wanted to implement a strategy to transform customer advocates into official ambassador partners.

As a technology-led firm, Revolut knew automation would be the answer to managing and growing those ambassador partnerships so they joined forces with Impact to bring this disruptor mindset to the affiliate finance world.

With the key marketing goal of achieving 100% growth in customer acquisition, Impact was tasked with several objectives to work towards this ambitious target. The new referral partnership programme had to remove manual tasks from their current partner relationships in order to free up more time to work with additional partners. Revolut wanted to evolve customers into advocates and subsequently into partners who would then be measured on their customer acquisition. Ultimately, Revolut’s main goal was to engage 1,000 active partners and double the size of the programme by the end of 2019.

With an ambitious customer acquisition goal to meet, Impact was tasked with developing an innovative ambassador programme to deliver the key objectives. Revolut leveraged Impact’s technology globally and this partnership allowed them to do less traditional affiliate focused campaigns and be more creative in how they onboard and nurture their partners. Revolut tapped into their entire customer base to identify brand ambassadors and affiliates then signed them up to the Impact platform. By the end of one week, there were almost 3,000 applications, 42% of which were eventually accepted onto the programme.

Impact’s leading technology reduced Revolut’s manual processes by automating invoices of fixed partner costs, partner onboarding and management. This led to a significant reduction in work hours by 160 hours as a result of migrating partner payments from the manual process to Impact. This improved billing solution significantly reduced Revolut’s Finance team workload and created a more efficient payment process.

In addition to moving from manual partner payment to Impact’s automated process, Revolut implemented click, lead, and customer acquisition trackers. This allowed the company to create and execute customised contracts with its different partners. By creating click, lead and customer acquisition trackers, Revolut and Impact have been able to create payment models for partners which are bespoke to that arrangement. The payouts are automated by the Impact platform, allowing for highly customised partnerships at scale.

A seamless payment process was integral to the success of the programme so Revolut utilised the Dynamic Payouts feature from Impact enabling them to adjust payout rates to partners. This innovative feature solved the problem of split commissions; Revolut can now adjust payouts to partner(s) who assisted in the customer conversion. This gives Revolut a practical way to reward early-funnel contributors without completely taking away credit from the partner who won the last click.

As a disruptive challenger brand, Revolut have always used creative tactics to acquire new customers. By partnering with Impact, they wanted to bring innovation to the world of finance affiliates.

Revolut began working as a publisher and they believed in the value of partnerships so strongly, that they built a business development team tasked with finding other advertisers to work with them directly and pay Revolut for that exposure. Revolut’s publisher proposition works via the Perks sections of the Revolut app. When a user achieves perks through highly engaged behaviour they can earn cashback on certain brands including Treatwell, Omio and Booking.com.

An example of a highly successful element of the campaign is when Revolut sent an email newsletter to their entire customer base promoting their Affiliate and Pioneers influencer programmes on Radius by Impact. By the end of the calendar week, they had 1154 Pioneer applications and 1857 affiliate applications, 42% of which were accepted onto the programme. Given the steps required in the signup flow, the response rate was truly impressive. By December 2019, Revolut had scaled their partner programme from less than 100 partners to more than 6,000.

Since partnering with Impact, Revolut have increased their active partners to 6,000 across their accounts, a six-fold overachievement of the 1,000 partner target. This puts them firmly as the largest finance partner programme in the UK. Revolut now has better visibility into their full conversion path and since working with Impact, Revolut has seen a massive 700% increase in customers acquired from the partner programme in the time period of April-Dec 2019 compared to April-Dec 2018. The new opportunities, created through automation and improved technology, allowed Revolut to achieve customer acquisition growth that was 7 times their original target.

By inviting customers to become official brand advocates, Revolut received a phenomenal response with more than 1,200 customers successfully gaining approval to join the referral partnership programme.

Ultimately, Impact helped Revolut scale their partner programme and remove manual tasks from their partner relationships. This was achieved by segmenting partner applications by country to accelerate affiliate approval rates, providing partner documentation for smoother onboarding and by paying non-affiliate partnerships at scale.

With automation as the focal point of the referral partnership programme, Impact was able to deliver a growth rate of 700% and grow Revolut’s programme to more than 6,000 active partners.

Through a series of automations, analyses and creative approaches, Impact and Revolut were able to shake up the definition of what it means to be an affiliate in the financial vertical. Impact’s implementation of the referral partnership programme transformed Revolut’s customer base into active advocates and ultimately turned the challenger brand into a multimillion-making affiliate, making their partner programme one of the biggest in the UK. By the end of 2019, the Revolut partner programme grew to have more than 6,000 active partners, saved over 140 hours in automation and delivered a growth rate of 700%.