When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, hotels and restaurants that weresome of Rastelli’s key customers shut their doors and kitchens. But
at the same time, consumers opened their pantries and freezers tostock up on the staples they needed to prepare meals at home.
As stay-at-home orders spread across the country in early 2020,consumers were hungry for a source of high-quality proteinsdelivered safely and reliably to their homes. COVID-19 had madegrocery shopping risky and had disrupted food supply chains, soeven consumers who did venture out were ﬁnding empty cases in
the meat aisle.
This situation created an immediate opportunity for Rastelli’s toaccelerate its direct-to-consumer business and meet an urgent
consumer need for quality, reliable, and safe food.
Rastelli’s knew that with the right partnerships, they could deliver
what consumers needed right away.

From meat and seafood to plant-based proteins, Rastelli’s supplies
premium proteins to ﬁne hotels, restaurants, institutions, and retailmarkets. They also operate their own retail locations, processing
facilities, warehouses, and distribution centers.

Working with its digital marketing agency, DMi Partners, Rastelli’s
reshaped its traditional afﬁliate program into a full-funnel network ofperformance-based partnerships to reach new audiences, build
awareness, and capture conversions.
To scale and diversify efﬁciently, they relied heavily on the Impact
Partnership Cloud.

●

●

●

Quickly ﬁnd new partners for Rastelli’s, communicate withconsistent automated messaging, and gather insights forcontinual optimization
Implement dynamic commissioning to reward all partners
fairly. This was especially vital to properly reward contentpartners who often often got cut out of commissioning due
to outdated crediting models
Deploy the multipronged, full-funnel strategy with three keyelements: relying on B2B partnerships, content and review
sites, and traditional afﬁliate partners.

© 2020 Impact Tech, Inc. All rights reserved.

The strategy consisted of three steps:

To meet consumer demand for high-quality, safely delivered
proteins, DMi approached partners like Sun Basket and Farmbox,
which were direct meal preparation and food delivery services withquality-minded audiences.
Rastelli’s had been a supplier to Sun Basket, for example, for severalyears. Now, there was an important opportunity for Sun Basket tohelp meet customer needs beyond the 3-4 meals it typicallysupplied weekly and make commissions on those extra sales. Sun
Basket included Rastelli’s products on its site and ran email
campaigns to recommend Rastellis.com to its customers. “Ourbutcher can be your butcher” was not a hard message to sell.

In the pandemic economy, consumers weren’t just buying online,
they were buying things like meat for the ﬁrst time online and thus
looking for guidance from trusted sources. So DMi began to nurture
CPA partnerships with respected media outlets like CNN and CBS
Interactive, which regularly produced content for “online meatdelivery” and “best meat subscription companies” to properly
reach consumers who were in the market for a product like Rastelli’s© 2020 Impact Tech, Inc. All rights reserved.

.
Finally, Rastelli’s partnered with select loyalty sites like Ebates andCartera to incentivize that ﬁnal click and close the sales loop.
With discretionary spending down, DMi knew that some consumers
would need added motivation to choose Rastelli’s and that cash
back and coupons would both provide welcome relief and also help
to close the conversion funnel.

Rastelli’s reconﬁgured partnership program delivered explosive
revenue growth:●Within a few hours of the ﬁrst B2B partner email campaign,
Rastelli’s was seeing direct sales at levels it had not seen inmonths; within a week, sales were skyrocketing.

●

B2B partnerships ultimately delivered 505% revenue growthQoQ●DMi secured 200+ commerce content placements with mass
media outlets●CNN commerce content alone drove 15% of revenue growthin Q2

92% of partnership-generated revenue for Rastellis.com is nowcontent-driven© 2020 Impact Tech, Inc. All rights reserved.

QoQ revenue growthcommerce content
placements

conversion lift from
afﬁliate partners

Loyalty and deal sites helped translate content-driven awarenessinto conversions. For example, revenue from eBates andRetailMeNot grew 459% and 797% QoQ, respectively, and helped
to increase conversion rates by more than 100%.

Thanks to enhanced media-driven brand awareness, Rastelli’s
conversions on its existing partner Cartera (a site where consumers
can spend mileage and other loyalty points on a wide array ofproducts), grew by 435% — a 24% increase in ROAS.

© 2020 Impact Tech, Inc. All rights reserved.