Growing interest in card-linked offers and expansion of Empyr’s publisher network are fueling user growth on Empyr’s O2O platform.

SAN DIEGO, Calif. (June 11, 2018) – Empyr, the largest and fastest-growing card-linked offers platform sees groundbreaking growth. In Q1 2018 alone, it hit nearly 2 million new users and shows no signs of slowing down. This growing community of users is responsible for a gross marketplace value of $640 million in annual spend at participating advertisers.  

Top tech companies are launching card-linked programs using Empyr, such as RetailMeNot, Stash and GasBuddy. Empyr’s publishers have a combined total of 316 million monthly active users, with 106 million linked cards. Empyr has attracted top national advertisers like Sunglass Hut, Clarks, and Park ‘N Fly, and currently has over 30,000 locations across the US where consumers can earn cash back.

Marketing is always about chasing that next dollar, which leads to a lot of pressure on professionals like you to prove ROI with your efforts. If you’re feeling the crunch, it might be time to reframe the way you talk about ROI.

One of the top ways to discuss returns while demonstrating value is to discuss the incremental revenue that your marketing can create. We like it because it speaks the language of most organizational leadership: money. Focusing on dollars instead of clicks allows you to address a wide range of solutions and needs, such as the online-to-offline impact of your marketing.

If that’s the conversation you’d like to have during your next campaign review, or when you’re asking for an increase in your budget, then keep reading.

We know that 90% of retail purchases in the U.S. still happen in brick-and-mortar stores, and projections keep this number at 82.5% as late as 2021. This is true even as digital retail giants like Amazon take over more and more of our shopping habits. For you, online revenue will pale in comparison to the people walking through your doors looking to buy - especially when you consider that $3.9 TRILLION dollars are still spent offline, compared to $294 billion online. So, your marketing efforts need to support that online-to-offline (O2O) transition. 

Your digital marketing initiatives should continue to push people into your stores for their shopping. If you’re not tracking that data or optimizing your campaigns for the O2O purchases, you could be missing out on plenty of opportunity.

What online ad led to the last ka-ching at the register in your stores? What about the 100 purchases before that? Cost-per-revenue (CPR^TM) marketing is designed to make those answers possible, and even simple.

Yesterday these questions would be difficult, if not impossible, to answer. There is little data that follows ad campaigns to physical locations, and even less that can tie this to a unique transaction. In the rare instances this type of online-to-offline connection did occur, it was an extremely manual process that rarely sent results back to marketing departments.

Proper attribution requires knowing the right ad and customer. Most companies run dozens to hundreds of ads across multiple platforms. Asking the customer to recall an ad at checkout and having clerks record this accurately is a massively manual process that is prone to significant human error. Or, customers could forget their coupons at home and leave the store without making a purchase at all.

Today, all the customer has to do is pay.

That’s the beauty of the CPR^TM marketing technology first developed by Empyr. It’s a new attribution model that does all the heavy lifting behind-the-scenes, so you generate sales without disruption or adding friction to the customer’s purchase process.

Proving return on ad spend (ROAS) in digital marketing can feel like an uphill battle. As a digital marketer or advertiser, you likely face daily pressure from higher-ups to show that your efforts are garnering returns. The widespread belief is that calculating ROAS from online advertising to in-store sales is a costly exercise to get a “best guess.” Empyr is here to defeat this myth and give you the tools to prove ROAS from digital ad spend to in-store revenue.

Last week, we launched CPR™, a cost-per-revenue marketing platform that redefines online-to-offline (O2O) performance marketing. With 100% attribution of in-store sales generated from online ads, CPR takes the guesswork out of calculating advertising ROI.

How Does CPR Work?

CPR stands for Cost-Per-Revenue and that means an advertiser only pays for in-store revenue that is generated by the ads. With CPR, advertisers never pay for the clicks and impressions. The key ingredient here, and why it’s possible, is card-linked technology. Through card-linked technology, Empyr’s CPR platform can track real-time debit and credit card transactions (i.e., sales) without any POS integration or staff involvement.

Let’s assume I’m the director of marketing for an automotive maintenance business and launch a CPR campaign with the goal to drive more consumers in my stores. Here is a step by step process:

The customer loyalty space has evolved over the last few years from predominantly coupon driven rewards to including card-linking offers (CLO) embraced by the online-to-offline (O2O) industry. Card-linked offers enable consumers to receive a discount or cash back automatically when they pay with a debit or credit card that has been linked to an offer. Increasingly large national brands and SMBs are adopting the card-linking approach to connect online offers with in-store purchases.

From Coupon Clipping to Card-Linking

Promo codes, paper and digital coupons have been moderately successful at increasing sales and average order value. They have been a tried vehicle for generating brand loyalty and improving overall revenue. However, the benefits of card-linking is that it’s completely hassle-free. Customers do not have to cut or print coupons. There is no need to load coupon apps to get the rewards and the consumer does not have to mail-in rebates. With card-linking you are still getting all of the incredible benefits of coupons but it’s an effortless process for the customer at checkout. Consumers just link their credit or debit card with a publisher that promotes the offer, and they get automatic cash back when they pay at the store without the retailer needing to jump through any integration hoops. Card-linking successfully answers consumer’s coupon concerns…

If you weren't paying close attention you may have missed that some of the largest websites and apps on the planet have launched or are working on card linked programs from Facebook to Uber to Microsoft. We here at Empyr power many of these programs and are happy to announce a handful of new partnerships. Before I announce them I'd like to take a moment to explain why card linked programs are hitting critical mass.

So why all the fuss around card linking? It comes down to a simple premise, websites and apps are constantly searching for the best way to monetize their user base without detracting from the great user experience they provide which got them the users in the first place. Card linked programs do exactly that, they help provide a new revenue stream and they provide a new frictionless benefit to users that make them more engaged and loyal.

Let me explain how it works. Websites and apps are using Empyr's API to give their users access to offline offers like 10% cash back at a restaurant. To get the offer consumers link up any credit or debit card to the website/app (using Empyr's API) and the consumer simply pays with that card. Instantly the consumer earns cash back or points and the website/app earns a commission on the sale, both paid by the merchant in return for the customer they received.

"One of the great ironies about the mobile revolution has been that while digital ad impressions are easy to track, using that data to determine mobile ads’ efficacy has proven a challenge. Many brand marketers are still left wondering how much retail lift the ads actually achieve — and as a result they are perhaps a little more conservative with their budgets than if they could see the direct relationship. A number of companies in the local space have spent the last couple of years working on this attribution problem, and some believe their efforts are starting to come to fruition."

The unfulfilled promises of online to offline have left us all a bit deflated. It seemed like such a perfect fit, everyone is online and 93% of commerce is still offline, just connect the two worlds and a massive O2O industry will be born! We've heard this message at every conference since Hootie and the Blowfish were actually popular. So why hasn't this taken off; what's the holdup?

In order to understand what has gone wrong you have to understand the three core elements that need to be done right in order to create a massive O2O industry.

1. The Offer - Something that motivates consumers to make a purchase at an offline business.
2. The Tracking - How the consumer redeems the offer and how the offline business tracks where it originated from.
3. The Monetization - How online companies make money by driving consumers to offline businesses.