Rakuten Marketing Announces Partnership With RevTrax, Bridging Online and In-Store Shopping

Rakuten Marketing and RevTrax have partnered to help bridge the gap between online and in-store shopping.

Rakuten Marketing is pleased to announce a partnership with RevTrax, the leading personalized digital promotions company. The partnership, announced Monday, will help brands “increase sales by deploying secure and highly targeted digital coupons to consumers,” making the shopping experience more personalized and helping bridge the gap between online and in-store shopping.

David Salon, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Rakuten Marketing, answered a couple questions about the partnership.

Rakuten Marketing: What is the nature of the partnership between RevTrax and Rakuten Marketing?

David Salon: The partnership with RevTrax represents a new channel for our network that ties online user behavior to offline activity. What’s unique about the RevTrax platform is it not only acts as an attribution tool for the interplay between the online and offline experience, but it actually drives customers from an online event to a physical location where they are incentivized to make a purchase.

How does this play into the marketing space in 2018?

As trends continue to point away from traditional brick and mortar shopping and towards e-commerce, this partnership will enable brands to blend their marketing efforts between traditional retail and digital, while capturing important data and insights about user behavior. RevTrax has the capability to target new customers, via data integrations, allowing brands to focus on offline incrementality, ultimately leveraging the affiliate network to drive a new customer into a retail store to purchase.

How does this impact advertisers and publishers in the affiliate network?

What’s particularly compelling about this partnership is that has applications to both sides of our network, in that it provides actionable value to both advertisers and publishers. Publishers within our network can surface offline offers on their sites without changing how they interact with the network ensuring that our brands will not be limited in the distribution of these offline offers as it can be made available to the network at large. Additionally, the absence of any intensive required work on the part of network participants to get setup means that it’s a channel that can easily be brought to scale.

What will this mean for the consumer experience?

The consumer experience with RevTrax is relatively seamless. The user is exposed to the offer in a similar manner to other affiliate offers and is presented with the option to download the offer directly to their mobile wallet to be redeemed in store, or if they prefer a more traditional experience, they can also print the offer out and redeem it in-store. The full support of mobile wallets in tandem with device optimization makes for a smooth consumer experience across mobile as well.