Performance Pays at Jackson Hewitt
With 6,000 stores around the nation, Jackson Hewitt Tax Service is the second largest tax preparer in the U.S. Until this year, the company did not offer a Web-based self-service option for filers but relied on driving customers into its storefronts, roughly a quarter of which are located in big-box retailers.
And using the Web to market in-store tax prep was proving to be a challenge. Jackson Hewitt had basically been favoring broadcast, direct mail and print marketing over online.
TAX-PREP REBATES
So for the 2009 tax season the company’s store division paired up with cross-channel couponing platform RevTrax and customer acquisition firm 31 Media to drive in-store sales using coupons, search marketing and affiliate marketing. Last year Jackson Hewitt ran search and display ads that clicked through to landing pages offering a printable coupon for $25 off tax prep, redeemable in stores.
The coupons were also deployed across 100 affiliate Web sites that use the RevTrax platform. They could also be sent to a mobile phone and redeemed from the device screen.
The coupon ads were performance-based, so that Jackson Hewitt paid only when a visitor redeemed the offer. That was a decisive factor for the company.
MONEY TALKS
“Given a finite budget, the ability to try this campaign and know that we weren’t really putting any Jackson Hewitt capital at risk was very appealing to us,” says David Kraut, vice president of corporate alliances for Jackson Hewitt. The search ad campaign RevTrax set up for the company last year also charged for performance rather than simply for clicks.
Jackson Hewitt approved the affiliates and the creative copy that would be deployed on their sites; RevTrax supplied the tech and the scalability that made the numbers work.
RevTrax CEO Jonathan Treiber says his company aims to give brick-and-mortar marketers and CPG brands that are sold in stores the same security and trackability that e-commerce merchants get from online promotions. “With a background in Web analytics, we thought brick-and-mortar needed the same insight as to which e-mail address an offer was sent and who redeemed it,” Treiber says.
