Silverbean Our Work Case Studies Shepherds Friendly

Shepherds Friendly

The client

Shepherds Friendly is a mutual society, offering their customers an array of savings, investment and insurance products, including ISAs and life insurance plans.

Since being established in 1926, Shepherds Friendly is now a multi-million-pound operation, with over 66,000 members throughout the UK.

Our objectives

After a bad experience with a previous agency, Shepherds Friendly wanted a more stable, consistent and transparent Affiliate Program that allowed them to build solid, trusted relationships with their publishers.

They also wanted to increase the volume of conversions seen via the Affiliate Program and turn it into a more prominent, successful part of their business.

Our approach

Strategic

We suggested moving to the OMG affiliate network, which specialises in finance merchants. We then worked with Shepherds Friendly to come up with a commission structure that was attractive to affiliates but also worked within their margins.
On their previous network, cash-back affiliates had performed well, but as their competitors previously offered a lot more commission, this was an area we addressed straight away.

Tactics

Shepherds Friendly created co-branded landing pages and we worked with the cash-back affiliates to make sure the merchant pages were optimised accordingly.
To ensure that all activity on the Affiliate Program was as transparent as possible, we used a project management tool that was updated daily to allow Shepherds Friendly a full overview of what we were doing.
By implementing a commission structure that really used Shepherds Friendly margins to their maximum potential, we were able to really incentivise the cash-back sites in particular. This resulted in more premiums of a higher value, as the commission value was far more generous as the premiums increased.
Our campaign also established the Shepherds Friendly much further with the right type of affiliates, paving the way for future campaigns which will allow continued increases in sales and conversion.