Partner Spotlight: Wildfire Creates Customer Value Through Loyalty & Rewards

This spotlight is part of Acceleration Partners’ ongoing blog series where members of our Partner Development team highlight different partners from across the region. This month, we caught up with Megan Stephenson, Merchant Development Manager, International at Wildfire.

Can you explain what Wildfire does and how advertisers can benefit from working with your company?

Wildfire works with predominantly financial institutions and FinTech companies to help them develop online shopping rewards programs, such as cashback, with our white-label platform. Wildfire enables advertisers to promote their brands within the loyalty and rewards programs of notable companies like Microsoft, Samsung, and Revolut.

By working with Wildfire, advertisers will have an infinite number of opportunities to incrementally grow their affiliate program. Through our platform, advertisers gain exposure to massive audiences of potential new customers through the combined impact of the millions of end-user shoppers our current clients bring to the table. They can quickly scale-up their affiliate program without having to build relationships affiliate-by-affiliate.

Our consumer reach continues to grow; our Business Development team is creating partnerships with new companies every day looking to expand their engagement with consumers by offering a loyalty platform that allows them to earn rewards and save money when shopping at any of our retail merchants.

As you’ve mentioned, Wildfire has some big partners, including Microsoft and Revolut. Can you describe how these partners stay on-trend in the affiliate space and what plans Wildfire has for continued growth?

Wildfire’s rewards platform addresses companies’ key challenges in the following ways:

Enables them to participate in the customers’ online shopping journey from brand discovery all the way to conversion
Reinforces brand recognition and positive association by being the entity delivering the customer valuable coupons and discounts
Reduces customer acquisition cost (CAC): cashback rewards for the customers are actually funded by merchants’ e-commerce affiliate marketing budgets
Contributes to Annual Revenue per User (ARPU) expansion: companies earn a percentage of the cashback paid by merchants when the customers make their purchases
Drives tender preference for banks and issuers: For banks/issuers, the user is typically opting-in for a cashback browser extension from their card or primary financial institution. The consumer can do the simple math because if they are using their credit card or bank’s program where they already get cashback, the additional merchant-funded cashback on shopping augments that reward, so they are more likely to use the preferred card to pay and effectively “double stack” their rewards.

What are some of the biggest challenges that Wildfire and others in the industry face today?

In an uncertain economic environment, consumers usually tend to pull back on spending (although you wouldn’t know it from the US January 2023 consumer spending report!) That said, when times are “bad,” saving money becomes a necessity instead of just a nice-to-have.

With that in mind, our white-label rewards platform is uniquely positioned to help our clients deliver consumers a seamless way to earn cashback and apply coupons, saving money on their online purchases. But aside from delivering rewards to end-user shoppers in their natural shopping flow, our platform also addresses the full consumer shopping journey, from brand discovery to consideration and conversion to advocacy.

Wildfire already offers browser extensions for all the major desktop browsers, which act as shopping companions to surface merchant cashback and coupon opportunities, as well as for iOS and Android on the mobile side. Our team is working on additional product innovations and enhancements that will drive brand discovery and higher conversion rates for merchants and in turn offer more shopping benefits to our clients’ end-user customers.

We will also continue our pursuit of global expansion by building relationships and launching shopping rewards programs for clients in UK, LATAM, EMEA, and MENA.

As a global partner, you get to see shopping trends across multiple regions. What key differences are you seeing across markets right now?

E-commerce is global and we benefit from the borderless opportunities with clients like Microsoft.
Our core markets today are US, Canada, and the UK. However, we also hugely benefit from consumer orders in over 30 countries. South of the US and into MENA are on our clients’ radars right now, along with mainland Europe.
Partnerships are partnerships no matter the country, though our culture and spending habits do differ. Providing a product and advertiser base that can stand the test of so many variables continues to be part of our winning strategy.

Lastly, if you could invent a holiday, what would it be?

Reward Day—it would be a day dedicated to treating yourself. On this annual holiday, people would be encouraged to pamper themselves, get away with someone they don’t get to see that often, or just sleep in. Like an annual pat on the back.

Ready to grow your affiliate program and partner with affiliates like Wildfire to reach millions of potential new customers?

Connect with Acceleration Partners today to unlock your brand’s global potential!

Author: Acceleration Partners