What you need to know:

• Cashrewards added almost a million members in a year, doubling its base and growing active members by 51 per cent, after switching its advertising mix from 80/20 performance/brand to 65/35 brand and performance.
• Having targeted a 9 per cent increase in branded awareness, the points business achieved 14 per cent. It's now 23 per cent ahead of the main competitor in prompted awareness.
• Consideration to join Cashrewards increased 11 per cent over the same period, and cost per acquisition has since been cut by 41 per cent.
• A new, bolder creative position with GHO and campaign backed by Zenith media smarts kicked off in June 2022 and led to the best June results ever. The trend continued in following months with November, traditionally Cashrewards' best month, becoming its biggest month ever, up by 41 per cent.
• The brand's tech stack was enhanced this year with Braze customer engagement platform and mParticle CDP. The goal next year is to build customer engagement and better leverage first-party data.

Sometimes you know right away. Cashrewards CMO, Nicole Bardsley, didn't have to convince the board or leadership team at the giant points program it needed to invest heavily in brand to create market breakout that would see it start outperforming its competitors. She was hired because her experience with brands such as Westpac and Virgin Mobile meant she had already walked the walk they were currently talking.

Australia's largest cash back program, Cashreward now has over 2 million members and in the last year delivered more than $4 billion in gross merchandise value back to its 2000+ retail partners. Since the middle of 2022, it has been on a mission to scale, built on a new brand platform and radical change in its marketing strategy. 

Eighteen months on, it would be tempting to see success as an inevitable outcome of a winning strategy. But there's knowing and there's doing. Even with the explicit support of leadership, there's a moment of truth when theory turns into action and outcomes turn into numbers in a spreadsheet.

For Bardsley and the marketing team at Cashrewards, that moment, thankfully, came quickly. Having flipped spend from an 80/20 performance/brand mix to something more like 65 per cent brand, with a new creative strategy in place and a campaign kicking off mid-2022, the marketing team knew it was backing a winner by the end of the first month.

"The last two years have been really high growth and the desire was to grow from a scale point of view. The business very much had a performance marketing focus, with 80 per cent of marketing investment put into performance channels," Bardsley says.

While there had been some investment in awareness to drive brand consideration, it was very small scale.

"All of the media was planned in-house at that time and we still operated a hybrid model. But when I came on board, we identified we needed a partner that could help us plan our media strategically, then partner with us to help achieve the growth we needed. So we went out and pitched the media piece, and Zenith came in and won the business."

The parties set about a radical transformation of media spend, with a shift away from the historical reliance on performance.

Brand platform

Cashrewards also changed its approach to creative. GHO did the creative work and assisted with brand strategy, says Bardsley.

The brand platform is 'Everyday moments of joy'', and centres around identifying those moments of 'yay' when customers achieve everyday value. Bardsley stresses the campaign was a collaborative effort.

"We have multiple campaigns happening every week, all throughout the year. We have an in-house creative team as well. So there was a collaboration between the in-house team as well as the agency," she says.

Like any good creative exercise, there were also arguments worth having. Bardsley tells Mi3 the first iteration of creative didn't hit the mark.

"The original concepts presented were probably more safe and more expected. Along with our head of brand, I felt we couldn't afford to be safe. We really needed to punch above our weight, get noticed, and stand up. We just felt given the ambition, we couldn't afford to play it safe, we needed to do something that was going to standout.

"So there was that back and forth in the creative process to challenge the concept and get it to a point where we ended up with a girl riding a dog through the clouds."

The campaign kicked off in June 2022. The incoming tide of growth powered by the gravity of the new campaign and strategy lifted performance across subsequent months. Bardsley cites immediate gains in performance year-on-year, with an initial 40 per cent uplift at the end of the first month proving consistent throughout the year.

"Typically, November is the biggest month of the year for us, then December. Then in June, we broke records. That became our best month ever," she continues. "Because we were deepening engagement, July was not far behind. Then August, and then September."

Last November was the biggest month the business has ever had, ending up 41 per cent of ahead of plan. "We just saw it working immediately," Bardsley says.

An interesting side note. While November obviously benefits from the Black Friday sales, Singles Days, the Chinese shopping festival popularised by Alibaba and more recently JD.com is also carving a strong niche in Australia according to Cashrewards experience.

We asked Bardsley to compare its impact with Black Friday and Boxing Day by placing it on a 10 point scale. She told Mi-3, "Black Friday is our 10/10, Boxing Day is 9/10 and then I’d say Singles Day is more of a 7/10 overall… Singles Day is all about luxury shopping. Compared to average, Singles Day sees people shopping 5.5x more across luxury brands, spending 8.8x more, and having an average order value 1.6x more than average.”

Another early flag of success was improved spontaneous awareness. "People just spontaneously mentioned Cashrewards is the number one cashback platform - that increase gave us really good knowledge that brand saliency is working," she says.

Ultimately, brand tracking confirmed what the brand and agency teams already suspected from the numbers pouring in. Per Bardsley: "In our brand health tracking, we also tested the creative and we found those that had seen the brand campaign were more than twice as likely to be aware of us and more than two-and-a-half times as likely to consider joining. So we were seeing creative have an impact on consideration, as well what was coming in through the media analytics."

Business outcomes

In just over 12 months, Cashrewards' prompted awareness has gone up by 14 points, 5 points higher than its target.

"We are also 23 points ahead of our main competitor in prompted awareness - originally they were pretty close," Bardsley says. "Consideration to join Cashrewards has gone up by 11 points over that same period. We've also seen it translate through to business growth. Our member base has grown 41 per cent for the financial year period from October through to September."

Another measure of effectiveness is how active those members are each month. "That has grown by over 51 per cent. So we've deepened engagement with existing members as well as increased the overall size of the member base as well," Bardsley says.

"We are all about acquiring new members and acquiring really good quality members who want to transact. To get that 51 per cent growth in active members is the more important metric "

Campaigns are never set and forgotten, even when they are overachieving. Zenith national head of strategy and planning, Sarah Heitkamp says it adjusted media strategy as teams moved into the crucial October and November period.

"We identified we probably needed a bit more influence to help us nudge people through and to educate. So we adjusted that as we saw it," she says.

However, even knowing what they know now, Heitkamp wouldn't have changed too much about the campaign.

"To the point around exceeding targets, obviously, with the strategy we had, and with what we anticipated and didn't anticipate, we felt comfortable. With performance, we can measure that week-on-week to see whether we are tracking ok. With brand, it wasn't as obvious. But we usually have metrics in place that give us an indication until the next value brand health result comes in," she says.

How many people are searching for Cashrewards as a branded term is an example. Brand uplift studies done with YouTube in June and July 2023 show people exposed to the awareness campaign on YouTube were 56 per cent more likely to go on and search for Cashrewards.

"We could see throughout the campaign period there was traction and it was going in the right direction. We used that as a proxy. Could we have forecast it was 5 per cent over the target and also brought CPA down by 41 per cent? Probably not," Heitkamp says.

It's also partly an outcome of 12 months of optimisation, and the natural shifting and tweaking that goes on in a campaign of this nature, Heitkamp adds.

Per Bardsley: "Part of the challenge, even within the marketing team was around the way the budgets have been structured The brand team had their budget, and the performance team had their budget. In the brief to Zenith, we just said, 'here's the budget'

"There was almost a leadership challenge for me and convincing the team to let go of your little patch, let's play this holistically and come up with a more optimal mix," she said.  "I also have the benefit that our head of growth marketing in the team and leads up performance marketing space, he's one of the biggest advocates for brand, because in his previous life working in media agencies, he's seen the benefit that awareness media helps drive your cost per acquisition, in search and in display, and other performance channels."

Braze, mParticle lead a martech refresh

There have been other important changes as Cashrewards plans for the next 12 months, including a tech stack refresh.

"What we're focusing on now is much more about the the overall customer journey that the member goes on, and embedding education on that journey," Bardsley says.

The education piece is key to ensuring customers understand what they've signed up for and to recognise the value, she says. "Sometimes the amount you get back on your first purchase might not be that significant. But by the time you get to third or fourth shop, you're really invested in the value proposition, you understand it."

To help improve the customer journey, Cashrewards has on-boarded what Bardsley characterises as sophisticated martech including Braze as its customer engagement platform, and mParticle as its customer data platform.

Braze for instance, which replaced the legacy Leanplum email platform, delivers a step up in capabilities. "We can send push notifications to anyone who's got the app downloaded on their phone. They have these great content cards, which enable us in our app environment, and even on our web environment to serve up relevant timely messaging to our members," Bardsley says.

Cashrewards has also been investing in a personalisation engine internally. "Our team have been building that with merchant recommendations. So we are getting much more sophisticated in terms of that member experience," she says.

"My marketing team now have the right tools. Historically they had some tools, but they weren't great. We [now] have the ability to use our first-party data and create audiences we can send to, or we can send to other platforms to optimise our campaigns."

On the media front, Heitkamp says Zenith taking a more sophisticated approach to first-party data will be an important priority.

"It's about how we bring that through in media, and how we become smarter around targeting high-value members or potential members,  identifying them early enough to know if it's really worth spending our media budget on this audience segment rather than just driving wider awareness," she says.

"For the next iteration and probably the next 12 months, [we are] really working on a strong test-and-learn agenda... This is definitely a bit of a shift from where we are now. There is much more of a focus on quality orientated around audiences. So I think testing our way into that will be the next phase."

Looking ahead, Bardsley has a further tech refresh planned around audience targeting and segmentation.

"We want to focus on how we deliver the right quality of customer that's going to go on and transact multiple times. While we've been really about volume and getting awareness, and getting to a level of penetration in the market, that makes us a significant player and something to be taken seriously, now, it's about how do we deepen engagement with existing members," she says.

Intangibles 

Successful campaigns do something beyond simply delivering KPIs, they build confidence and belief. Mi3 asked Bardsley about the impact work has had on the perception of marketing among the leadership and within the team itself. First up, she says it has changed the perception of marketing as a growth driver.

"That that has definitely shifted and the [perception of] the power of marketing to actually drive and deliver growth," she says.

Anecdotally, it has changed perceptions of the company in the eyes of merchant partners. "We have a client services team who interface with all of our brand partners and merchants. Historically, that relationship was a bit tense. But Black Friday last year was a real catalyst for that change because they were working on securing the best offers from the merchants, the team are working on getting them out to our members and campaigns and it helped break down some of those barriers. Being able to celebrate together has been a positive change as well," says Bardsley.

Of course, industry recognition - the team has been nominated for various awards - feeds confidence. Then there's visibility of the numbers across the wider organisation.

"My head of growth at my monthly town halls does a 'performance uplift'. He's very clever on PowerPoint, with rockets taking off and everything. That's become a feature - they're probably more focused on the numbers they've never been focused on before, like 'how are we tracking?' and 'what have we achieved?'"

"It's definitely had a really positive impact."

Clarification: Note: After publication, and after checking its figures, Cashrewards came back to clarify the brand performance split is 65/35, not 70/30 as first indicated to Mi3. We have updated the story accordingly.