A case study of the collaboration between Admitad and Carinii

An affiliate program targeted at developing Carinii’s e-commerce store resulted in significant growth in sales and orders, confirmed by a high GMV index and increased average cart value. This case study shows how SME companies can use affiliate marketing to promote their brands and increase sales.

Client profile: Carinii

Carinii is an international footwear company targeted at bold, modern women willing to experiment with fashion. It was founded in 2005 and financed entirely with Polish capital. Its products are designed in cooperation with Italian stylists and manufactured in Poland.

In order to increase brand visibility in the highly-competitive fashion market, Carinii decided to introduce influencer marketing into its business strategy. To this day, the company still successfully collaborates with famous brand ambassadors such as Natalia Siwiec and Magda Pieczonka.

A tailor-made marketing strategy

Carinii had never worked with an affiliate marketing network before, so Admitad’s experts had a lot of freedom in creating an affiliate strategy for them. 

Work began with an initial meeting with Carinii, aimed at identifying the key problems that affiliate marketing could solve. This discussion resulted in the jointly-defined goals of improving website traffic statistics and increasing the share of e-commerce sales in the company’s revenue stream.

To achieve these goals, Admitad developed a holistic strategy that utilised multiple traffic sources to advertise Carinii’s new collections and special offers at different stages in the sales funnel. 

With a backdrop of global rising inflation, Admitad predicted success in using offers published on cashback sites, price comparison sites and promotional code aggregators. In addition, Carinii agreed to not exclude any publisher business models from Admitad’s strategy.

Targeting every stage in the sales funnel

Admitad experts began implementing a strategy of expanding Carinii’s brand awareness by working with media buyers. 

Media buyers are a source of traffic that are often excluded from partner marketing campaigns due to the high risk of keyword cannibalisation. Therefore, working with media buyers requires the creation of a specific list of restricted keywords that cannot be used when setting up a campaign.

Our strategy targeted three key stages in the marketing funnel. At the initial stage, publishers used generic keywords and non-brand-related phrases in ads distributed on Google. In the first month of cooperation, almost 30% of generated orders came from paid traffic from Google Ads. Over the course of the whole campaign, the most successful publisher achieved a CR of 4.6%.

Web browser extensions which allow users to save products to wish lists were responsible for executing the middle part of the funnel. Wish lists are widely used as an effective strategy to drive purchases in the beauty and apparel segments.

Finalising the sales took place with the help of promotional codes and cashback services. During the campaign, these publishers generated a 14% higher average cart value than all other traffic sources.

Results of cooperation

From May to November 2022, Carinii’s GMV index increased by 961%, the number of orders increased by 520% and the average basket size increased by 369%. With such rapid growth, online sales became a significant sales channel for the brand.