Interview with Youri Saint-Louis, Head of Acquisition at Shine
About Shine
More than a bank, Shine is a true co-pilot for managing businesses daily. Shine’s goal is to simplify financial and administrative management for freelancers and SMEs, offering an all-in-one, centralized tool: accounting, invoicing, insurance, expense management, and high-quality, human support with 24/7 customer service.
Youri, can you tell us about your role at Shine and its challenges?
As Head of Acquisition, I coordinate all performance channels to generate new active clients. This involves regularly analyzing business metrics to ensure the long-term viability of our marketing actions and managing our media budget (SEA, SMA, Programmatic, Display, Affiliation, etc.).
This requires:
- A good understanding of the product and its features to highlight it to our target audience in the most suitable formats.
- Close monitoring to identify and test innovative levers in the competitive financial services sector and define new strategic goals to meet Shine’s profitability and growth objectives.
Beyond performance, we also have significant brand awareness goals that we implement with the Branding team. This allows us to optimize the synergy between online and offline channels (TV, Radio, etc.).
What acquisition goals does the affiliation lever help you achieve?
We have successfully generated a network of competitive affiliates via Affilae, working closely with them to meet our growth challenges, specifically increasing our base of active clients. Our model is based on a win-win vision: compensation based on the quality of leads generated. This strategy allows us to foresee favorable growth prospects in the coming months.
Can you tell us more about the share of affiliation in your media mix?
Affiliation saw good growth in 2022 and shows promising evolution for 2023. We constantly keep our partners informed about Shine’s product developments to highlight us qualitatively through product content and ensure we meet their audience’s expectations.
How did your affiliate program evolve in 2022 vs. the post-COVID period (2020/2021)?
Our affiliation lever evolved significantly in 2022. We decided to make the lever much more acquisition-oriented, revising our program modalities and opening our marketplace to interested publishers. This ensures the relevance and quality of our partners. The volume of affiliates in the program increases favorably month by month. Partner sourcing is effective with Affilae, and we are moving in the right direction.
We no longer work solely with a network of top affiliates or comparison sites but also with affinity sites capable of generating a steady volume of qualified leads. This approach is beneficial from both profitability and visibility perspectives.
What levers emerged in 2022 in terms of investment and profitability?
Operating in a highly competitive financial services market with significant investments in key paid channels like search and social networks, we constantly seek complementary and profitable levers to remain agile. Emailing emerged as a channel offering great opportunities. SEO article generation has been central to our strategy in 2022 and continues to be, requiring significant time investment but proving profitable.
Thank you, Youri, for answering our questions. We are delighted to collaborate with you and the Shine team!
