A new company by the name of Yub (‘buy’ spelled backwards) has launched “the world's first offline affiliate network”. Yub, based in Moutain View, California, was formed by executives from TrialPay, a big player in the advertising and monetization business, and aims to enable bricks and mortar merchants to “harness the power of the online affiliate model to drive in-store purchases on a massive scale”.
Yub claims to be the first company that can “effortlessly track consumers from online clicks through to offline purchases, directly linking digital marketing spend to offline revenue”. It has already signed up two top-25 US restaurant chains and two top-50 US retailers to convert netizens into traceable offline sales. Yub has secured $12 million in backing to launch yesterday. The money was raised from investors including Greylock Partners and Visa.
The WSJ talked to one of Yub’s co-founders, Alex Rampell, who described the idea behind Yub. Rampell said that tracking purchases made in physical stores which have their roots in online activity is a big opportunity, though not such an easy task. However he began to build the tech to do this at TrialPay last year. Discussing how the idea crystallized he said “We thought -Wouldn’t it be great if we can send customers to Quizno’s or to Starbucks?” Hinting at an example promotion he added “If you want to get the New York Times for free, will you go shop at Starbucks? Sure.”
How does the Yub online-to-offline tracking work? The firm describes the process quite concisely in the launch press release;
“As consumers discover the ad or promotion for in-store purchases, they are prompted to activate the offer by registering a credit card. When the consumer uses the same credit card for the in-store purchase, Yub tracks the purchase through its TrueRealTime transactional tracking platform and the consumer instantaneously receives their reward. With these card-linked offers, consumers have no coupons to print, no mobile apps to download and no hassle to deal with. Yub provides a complete analytics suite so businesses can now track the performance of affiliate campaigns and measure ROI based on actual in-store sales.”
Here’s another example of a Yub cross-promotion at work from the WSJ; a mobile customer who is nearing his data allowance limit for the month receives a text saying that buying something at a nearby fast-food chain will top up his account by several megabytes. Using the linked card to buy his ‘burger’ the mobile company then tops up his data allowance.
Free cake!
The management at Yub want to stress that the affiliate system doesn’t store your credit card’s expiration date, CVV code or billing zip code but just uses the long number for its associations with retailers.
Yub claims some healthy statistics for the usefulness of its affiliate network. In testing “90 percent of new customers indicated that they did not plan on shopping at the merchant before seeing the digital offer.” Also people tend to spend more through these promotions and customer loyalty is seen to also enjoy a boost.
