CLO Marketing

Card-linked offers (also known as CLOs) are changing the way brands connect with customers – and for good reason. Think about the last time you used a paper coupon. Or worse, forgot one at home right when you reachedthe checkout. Traditional loyalty programmes often rely on memory and extra steps. But what if the reward was already waiting for you, without friction, tied directly to the one thing you never leave home without? That'sexactly what CLOs make possible.

Retail strategy often breaks down whenever we try to go around accurate data. Clicks are random, surveys are incomplete, and intent doesn’t always translate into action. What does? Card and POS transactions. They reveal what people actually buy, where, how often, and for how much — insights that sit at the core of effective retail media solutions. Personalisation built on that truth tends to pay. McKinsey has put numbers to it for years: done well, personalisation lifts revenue by roughly 5–15% and materially improves marketing ROI.

Card-linked offers look simple from the outside. A user opens their banking app, sees “5% back at Starbucks,” taps once, pays with their card, gets money back. That’s the visible 10%. The other 90% is rules, data cleaning, merchant mapping, card-network hooks, and measurement logic – the real backbone behind personalised retail campaigns.

You may have heard it: “Loyalty programs are old-school. CLOs are the new frontier.” Funny thing though: that framing misses the whole point. Because loyalty programs and card-linked offers (CLOs) aren’t really competitors. They’re more like two tools in the same toolbox. If used together, they cover what each alone cannot. When you treat them that way, you move from “Which one wins?” to “How do we win together?”

Customers don’t want more messages these days. They want fewer, but relevant nudges. When brands get that right, revenue moves. Multiple studies keep repeating the same thing: people expect personalisation and get annoyed when they don’t see it. Companies that do it well grow faster and convert better..