One card, many channels: PAYBACK becomes a multi-channel marketing platform

Thanks to its personalised nature, PAYBACK has been a particularly effective and efficient form of customer marketing for over ten years, especially in the retail sector. With this expertise, the company has moved into digital marketing over the past few months to huge success. It is now due to make its debut at dmexco 2011 in Cologne where, as the European market leader in the couponing sector, it will showcase its services across all three relevant channels: offline, online and mobile. “For the first time, advertisers will have the opportunity to run precisely targeted and tailored integrated campaigns across all available channels. In addition, transparent success monitoring guarantees the best possible ROI. Retailers and consumer goods manufacturers who are committed to the needs of their customers wish to communicate with them at exactly the right time and place rather than bombard them with advertising spam. The PAYBACK multi-channel platform offers them the perfect solution for this”, says Thomas Heise, the company’s Head of Online Sales, PAYBACK Media and Financial Services.

Heise stresses that, while other marketing and couponing providers are only just starting to register customers and learn their needs, PAYBACK began this process a long time ago. In over ten years, as he points out, the company has built up an immensely strong foundation through its retail partners, and has now ideally positioned itself as a multi-channel platform using the digital and mobile channels. Some 50% of all German households have a PAYBACK card. The consumer expenditure of these households is up to 27% higher than households without PAYBACK cards. In other words, PAYBACK households demonstrate a significantly higher affinity for consumption.

With 20 million active customers, PAYBACK has a wider coverage than almost any other company in Germany. The existing 22,000 partner-company points of sale along with around 100 million postal mailings and 300 million e-mail newsletters currently distributed per year, will be digitally supported by the online sales platform payback.de featuring over 450 online shops, the new PAYBACK Deals area and an extremely successful app which already boasts 460,000 downloads. By the end of 2011, the number of coupons sent out by PAYBACK will have passed the billion mark.

PAYBACK is also represented in the world of social media, with 250,000 fans already on its Facebook fan page. The programme has recently begun offering its marketing services across all channels, not just to official partners, but also to the whole advertising industry including media agencies, and in addition is carrying out market research via an online panel with over 115,000 active panel members. This allows companies to ask PAYBACK customers targeted questions on their opinions and on products.

“Our strength is personalised communication. In future, performance-based campaigns will be part and parcel of contemporary integrated multi-channel communication. They are measurable, irrespective of the medium used. This requires targeted customer dialogue, however – but that’s an area where PAYBACK is already well ahead of the rest of the industry,” says Thomas Heise.

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