Redeeming Qualities

Retailers know the Internet’s power to draw customers into their stores, so many cast coupons into cyberspace, hoping for the clicks and redemptions that generate sales.

Nearly all of these merchants would like to use their marketing dollars more efficiently, and a new technology helps guide retailers in their choice of online promotions and offers real-time feedback for a more focused marketing spend.

RevTrax, an online couponing and cross-analytics platform, is helping bricks-and-mortar retailers make the most of their Internet marketing efforts. Its platform aids in planning online promotions, tracking program implementation, designing the consumer online experience and testing the offer, and it uses real-time reporting to fine-tune the program in progress. RevTrax’s “round-trip tracking” allows merchants to connect paid searches, e-mail marketing, social media, display ads, mobile media and affiliate programs to actual dollars in the register.

The New York City-based company was founded two years ago by three tech guys who had worked in online analytics and marketing measurement: CEO Jonathan Treiber; COO and head of client services Seth Sarelson; and CTO Greg Hansen.

Tax-time tracking
Jackson Hewitt Tax Service has more than 6,000 franchised and company-owned locations across the country, including 1,800 offices inside Walmart stores. “Given that we operate our online marketing program during a very compressed tax season of about 100 days, daily access to redemption information of online coupons by media partners is necessary to maximize the program results,” says Jackson Hewitt vice president of corporate relations and alliances David Kraut.

In 2009, Jackson Hewitt tested RevTrax’s coupon and tracking technology “to reach consumers via online affiliate partners,” he says. “We had really good success last year and have expanded the paid search program this year.”

One of the key benefits Jackson Hewitt realized is “the ability to engage with media properties on a pay-per-performance basis rather than pay-per-click,” Kraut says. “We worked through RevTrax to compensate their partners based on the number of tax returns that particular media property generated for us.” Each paid search ad drove consumers to a landing page to print a Jackson Hewitt coupon, which RevTrax then tracked at a keyword level.

That keyword is passed to the URL and associated with a Jackson Hewitt promo code. “This is a great example of being able to do keyword-level tracking for paid search with a client who is working with promo codes as opposed to working with bar codes,” Sarelson says.

Promotion tracking at Jackson Hewitt begins when the customer presents a coupon to a tax preparer. “On a daily basis, we report all coupon codes to RevTrax and the number of redemptions for that day, but no personal information,” Kraut says. “They report back the name of the media partner who generated that sale for us. Jackson Hewitt tracks all the way through the conversion file so that we can see how many times a particular ad or component is viewed, printed and redeemed.”

The tax preparation company started its Internet marketing with display ads and text links that led to consumer discount websites like Coupon Cactus and Coupon Cabin. “If the consumer clicked on an ad, an affiliate partner took the consumer to a RevTrax page with a unique coupon code,” Kraut says.

Consumers can print the Jackson Hewitt coupon, send the offer to their smartphone or navigate the standard features on the Jackson Hewitt website. “There has been a big focus on consumer usability and the appeal of giving consumers choices,” Sarelson says. “We’ve seen a lot of success with this.”

RevTrax provides Jackson Hewitt with “the scale to manage a program and the technology to follow 100 affiliate” partners, Kraut says. Although the tax preparation company has a small marketing team, Jackson Hewitt is able to offer consumer discounts to a broad base of customers via the Internet. Receiving daily feedback allows Jackson Hewitt to “tweak” its offering to the consumer, which is essential given its compressed marketing window each year.

During its test of the RevTrax tracking technology, Jackson Hewitt found that about 40 percent of ad clicks resulted in a printed coupon, and 22 percent of printed coupons resulted in a sale. “Our partner 31 Media’s average cost of paid search to drive each consumer in-store and make a sale was under $5,” Sarelson says. “The only incremental cost to Jackson Hewitt was a fee to RevTrax for managing the technology.”

That limited pilot convinced Jackson Hewitt to significantly expand its coupon bank for 2010. “Based on results we saw last year, we started planning right after the 2008 tax season,” Kraut says, and “went from a test last year to a full-blown program this year.”