Cash back and voucher programs are an extremely popular way to encourage customers to shop in specific locations, and they are also a great way for online marketers to dip into the offline retail market. The problem with these types of services, however, is that they add in complexity to a purchase, which is very off-putting to many potential customers. Rather than just signing up for the voucher or cash back offer, and shopping, they typically have to print things off and remember to bring them into the store and display them at checkout.
In many cases, the voucher or cash back incentive is then processed later and not available for several days, weeks or even months. Even with these difficulties, however, this marketing model has still been quite successful.
Birdback has taken a big step in streamlining this process and improving the entire way companies can process these types of incentives. They have gotten $2.4 million in investments for their new card-linked marketing product. The investments came from Passion Capital as well as Luke Johnson, Playfair Capital, #1 seed and Quidco founder Paul nickel.
This money is intended to help Birdback launch their card-linked marketing option to publishers, retailers and financial institutions in the UK, France in Brazil. After the successful launch, the services will almost certainly be expanded to many other countries around the world.
The card-linked marketing strategy works by allowing customers to enter the card number that they will be using for the purchase. This activates the offer with whatever retailer they plan on visiting. Once they go into the retailer and make a purchase with that card, the incentive is processed in almost real time. The customer can then be notified by email, SMS or a retailer app about the status of their cash back or voucher offer.
This not only streamlines the process for the customers, but also for retailers and marketers, making it a much more attractive marketing strategy.
In addition to making it easier to offer these types of services, this will also help improve the tracking and analysis of data for marketers who are promoting these types of deals.
