Finding new ways to connect with consumers, drive loyalty, and increase revenue can feel like an uphill battle.
We know because we’ve been there.
Many of our team members at Kard have been in your shoes: leading the marketing function at name-brand merchants or supporting enterprise companies on the agency side, helping them get the most bang for their advertising buck.
We’ve seen how difficult it is to keep up with the status quo — let alone set your brand apart.
And that’s why we’re so passionate about card-linked offers. If you haven’t given them a try yet, it could just be the growth marketing hack you’re looking for. Here’s why.
What are card-linked offers?
Card-linked offers (CLO) are an automated cash back rewards program that provide a low-risk way for merchants to extend their marketing power and generate new, loyal customers.
Card-linked offer platforms like Kard process millions upon millions of transactions a day and use a high-powered matching engine to automatically link them to in-network offers. Whenever a customer makes a purchase that qualifies for a reward, they get a notification in their app telling them they got X% cash back.
7 Reasons CLO should be part of your marketing mix (and 1 bonus)
Unlike traditional digital ads, card-linked offers integrate directly into consumers’ banking apps or credit card rewards platforms, creating a premium, curated experience. And that means card linked offers guarantee:
1. Inventory security
Card-linked offers aren’t displayed on some random free website. They’re displayed within highly secure authenticated environments: banking apps.
These apps have the highest levels of encryption and authentication, and consumers associate banks with trustworthiness and protection.
In their minds, any offer that appears in their banking app is legit. More than that, those offers (and the brands providing the offers) are saving them money, putting cash back into their pockets.
2. Brand safety
No matter how hard you try and how much money you pay, your programmatic ads can inadvertently appear alongside unsavory content. For example, your ad for premium brake pads may show up in an article about a terrible car accident.
With a CLO platform you don’t have to worry about these unfortunate juxtapositions. Card-linked offers are only displayed within carefully vetted platforms — people’s banking apps. And the brands listed in those banking apps have been hand-selected by the issuer.
3. Low competition
Digital advertising is overcrowded. Consumers are bombarded with hundreds of ads daily, many of which are irrelevant or poorly timed. Really, the only way to set your brand apart is to spend more money to develop more eye-catching creative and to get better placements.
With CLO, there’s no content competition.
Your brand is part of a hypercurated list, with 100 other brands — max. And your “ad” (read: offer) isn’t jammed in someone’s face. They see it when they go to the rewards section of their banking app, creating an experience that feels intentional rather than intrusive, maximizing attention and driving higher engagement.
4. Right-time targeting
Card-linked offers are essentially showing an “ad” for your brand when a person is in a monetary mindset — when they’re already using their banking app.
“People don’t read blogs to see what ads are going to be on the page. They’re reading blogs because they want to consume the content — and that means they’re literally skimming over the ads you paid a high price to display,” Blake Ziolkowski, Kard’s Senior Director of Merchant Sales, explains.
“CLO is similar to Google search ads in that it matches user intent. They are in their banking app because they’re thinking about spending money and trying to get a deal. If your brand pops up there, they associate you with something worthwhile to spend money on.”
5. Zero fraud
Ad fraud is a persistent challenge in digital marketing. Bots generate millions of fake clicks that inflate campaign metrics and waste ad spend.
CLOs eliminate this risk entirely. They are hosted in a secure, authenticated environment.
“In order for fraud to happen, a hacker would have to steal someone’s phone, log into their banking app to see what rewards they have, use the proper card to make a purchase, and somehow route the cashback back to them.” Blake highlights. “The chances of that happening are exceedingly low.”
This level of security ensures that every interaction with your campaign represents genuine consumer engagement, driving higher ROI and better performance metrics.
6. Exposure to notoriously tough-to-reach audiences
Tech savvy Gen Z and Millennial audiences are historically extremely difficult to get in front of. They’re immune to traditional ads, X-ing out or scrolling past them. Even opening new tabs in incognito to limit the number of ads they get.
Card-linked offers don’t feel like a traditional ad. As we’ve mentioned, they appear in a trusted environment and they feel more like a free discount or coupon than your everyday brand promotion. And they show up at a time when that audience is thinking about money — not when they’re trying to read the news.
But that’s not the only group you can target with a CLO platform. In fact, there’s one audience Kard’s targeting that no other CLO platform is: underbanked communities.
This group is especially hard to advertise to because, unlike other consumers, many of them don’t spend much time on the internet. And CLO platforms that only partner with big banks may not be able to target them either.
“We partner with issuers who offer debit cards, digital cards, and other banking products that bigger issuers don’t, which means we can capture and market straight to that audience,” says Blake.
“Plus,” Chris Di Censo, Kard Merchant Sales Director, adds, “we have transaction data, meaning we can tell you what other stores your ICP shops at and other spending habits they have, further informing CLO and other campaigns.”
7. Free impressions
Certain CLO platforms, like Kard, only charge when a consumer takes advantage of an offer. There’s no price to enter our network. You don’t have to waste all that time trying to reverse engineer CPAs off of CPCs or CPMs off of CPAs to get and show results.
“Our prospects are constantly telling us how conservative they have to be with their ad budgets,” says Chris. “Well, we’re guaranteed ROAS, so there’s really no downside to trying Kard.”
When someone uses an offer, you’re getting paid for the items they buy — but more importantly, you’re potentially gaining a new customer for life.
BONUS #8: CLO creates a loyalty flywheel
Beyond driving immediate transactions, CLOs help establish a loyalty flywheel that fuels repeat business and long-term customer relationships.
Right now, many brands are trying to reel buyers in with hefty discounts for subscribing to emails or texts for future nurturing campaigns.
But those one-off promos only attract bargain hunters who then quickly unsubscribe. CLOs, on the other hand, can create a pattern of consistent rewards. Per Blake:
“If you offer a diminishing discount structure — get 15% off on a first purchase, 10% off on a second purchase, and 5% on the third purchase — we’ve seen that you not only encourage repeat purchases, but also gain higher average order values.”
A continuous rewards cycle shows your customers you care about their loyalty, which improves retention and LTV.
.png)