MONNIER Frères: Maintaining exclusivity

Client: MONNIER Frères

Industry: Luxury lifestyle

Territories focused on: UK, France, Germany, US

Target customers: Wealthy students and families with disposable income

MONNIER Frères is a Paris-based, online only, luxury leather bag and accessories merchant, founded by two brothers Jean and Guillaume Monnier in 2010. Their goal: to create the ultimate online destination dedicated exclusively to accessories.

Historically, luxury retailers have been slow to embrace the power of the affiliate marketing channel. Concerns about devaluing the brand with discount codes and other offers meant that brands rarely reached their affiliate and partnerships potential.

When Silverbean took over MONNIER Frères’ affiliate programme, our objective was to increase new customer acquisition, while supporting brand awareness and maintaining exclusivity in a premium marketplace.

The primary challenge was to promote the brand and incentivise purchase without compromising on the brand’s high-end value. Their core audience aren’t traditionally offer-incentivised either, so we developed a global affiliate strategy to dispel this myth that the affiliate channel is discount-led. 

Our goals were:

• To achieve YoY growth in revenue
• To educate new audiences on the brand and drive quality traffic to the site 
• To improve the number of click-active and order-active content & Weibo affiliates on the programme
• To engage and recruit key affiliates to support the brand’s luxury positioning.

Lesser cashback focus

We carried out an audit of existing affiliates to ensure only a small level of high-quality voucher code and cashback affiliates were active per key territory. Delivering small-scale campaigns with voucher and cashback sites ensured MONNIER Frères harnessed the large audience these sites offer access to, while maintaining a level of brand protection. We consistently monitored the brand’s presence on sites to ensure brand guidelines were upheld, and the brand’s luxury appeal was never compromised.

Product-level promotion

Additionally, we collaborated with MONNIER Frères product copy teams to ensure optimised Google Shopping product feeds were activated on the programmes, which meant products could be implemented on popular fashion search platforms to drive purchase.

Global approach

Team Silverbean had previously worked with MONNIER Frères on a successful campaign in the UK, which targeted wealthy Chinese families and students through the Weibo app. It was a natural next step to replicate the campaign – and its successes – globally. We targeted and signed up a number of influential Weibo affiliates with access to the Chinese Weibo community across the UK, France, Germany and US. We then engaged these new partners by implementing Weibo “stretch and save” promotions that protected the brand’s high-end offering while increasing order value.

Blogger outreach

We took a strategic approach to blogger and influencer networks to attain heightened exposure each month. This, in turn, would incentivise luxury influencers to promote the brand to their audiences. For example, in Germany, we leveraged our relationship with PR agency, cover-pr.de, which specialises in male and female influencer management. Through the agency, we engaged with and gifted key bloggers and influencers in the German affiliate space, and these partners then promoted and shared gifted products on their platforms.

Alongside this, we maximised relationships with key bloggers using rewardStyle, a monetisation platform for fashion, beauty and lifestyle influencers. We used the platform to dissect weekly reports to pinpoint new affiliates to reach out to, or to highlight key influencers to engage with.  We onboarded affiliates with a relevant audience, for example women with a higher disposable income who would be receptive to buying luxury products.

Content and Loyalty affiliates

Along with influencers, we partnered with content and loyalty affiliates to educate and drive awareness of MONNIER Frères to relevant audiences. This drove high-quality traffic to the brand’s site, which we analysed based on such metrics as bounce rate and page duration on Google Analytics.

MONNIER Frères wanted to grow revenue from the affiliate channel by taking the programme global. The luxury retailer required stringent brand protection, previously not an easy feat when it comes to affiliates. Our content-led approach and new partnerships, particularly in China, resulted in a 23% revenue increase and a 52% boost in new users.

“The team is innovative and they always think outside the box in terms of how they can drive growth to our affiliate programme.”

Pamela Clapp, Marketing Director