AMF Puts a New Spin on Tracking Digital Coupons

If you’re a typical retailer, your marketing spend is shifting online, whether to search, display ads, email or other channels. But if you have brick-and-mortar outlets, studies show that most of your sales are probably still occurring within those walls, not on the Internet. How do you make the cross-channel connection and ensure that your online marketing is doing the best possible job of driving customers through your doors?

Richmond VA-based AMF Bowling Centers has been working with marketing technology firm RevTrax for more than a year now to get greater insight into how well its digital marketing efforts, and specifically its couponing, are converting into sales. That’s particularly important right now, since the warm days of summer are traditionally a low-volume time for most centers—a trend AMF has been countering with its "AMF Bowling Summer Unplugged" campaign, launched on Memorial Day and offering free bowling for kids 16 or under with a registration.

At the moment, AMF is also sending coupons out to mobile phones. Those are not currently being tracked on the Optics platform, due to a pre-existing arrangement with a mobile carrier. “They’re providing us with a basic reporting function, but we’re not yet doing the matchbacks on mobile that we can do with our email coupons,” Wreden says. “However, that’s something we may look to RevTrax for in the future.”

The economics of mass-media marketing never worked well for AMF, which operates some 290-plus bowling centers around the nation. “That relates to volume, budgets and presence in very high-volume markets—we’ve just never been able to afford to do it well,” says AMF marketing vice president Merrell Wreden. The company gradually evolved its main marketing channel from direct mail to email, but found it was challenged to get reliable, timely analytics from those promotions. That predicament led to two key decisions about a year ago. One was to grow AMF’s house email list from 500,000 names to 2 million within a year.

“At the same time, we said that if we’re going to do that, we’d better get more serious about understanding who’s responding to what,” Wreden says.

Working with RevTrax’s Optics 3.0 coupon analytics platform, AMF is able to assign a unique coupon code for every email that carries an offer, then match those back to redemptions to figure out which offers had the greatest traction. AMF emails some portion of its list twice a week, and from January through May of this year sent out some 37 million emails, each with a discrete, trackable online coupon code. (The company has also hit its 2-million-address mark.)

AMF is then able to send transactional redemption data back to RevTrax and get a comprehensive view of what coupon offers have worked. “Our former email provider just couldn’t keep up with that data flow,” Wreden says.

The RevTrax platform also permits links to other marketing channels, so that clients can see how their promotion is performing in search marketing, for example, and optimize keyword spending or message creative to get the most bang for the buck. AMF also links its coupon offers to an affiliate marketing program to check that performance.

For the most reliable analysis, it’s important to “keep the promotion in the channel”, says RevTrax COO Seth Sarelson. For that reason, the company’s new 3.0 version includes a suite of coupon security features. And since email these days is often read away from the desktop, the 3.0 version also detects devices and optimizes the reading experience, so email marketers like AMF can get a more accurate picture of where their message is going.

Next in lane for AMF: using redemption data to start segmenting the customer base and building and timing offers based on those insights. “With 2 million names in the database, we may have 25% of our customers who’ve never responded to an offer,” says Wreden. “Yet right now we’re talking to those people the same way we talk to customers who may have responded five or six times.”

It’s not a matter of finding loyalists but of reaching out most effectively to occasional users. “We know who our loyal customers are,” Wreden says. “They’re league bowlers. But that’s a dwindling segment. We want to look at who’s not yet responding and see what we can do to activate them. And if we can’t, then let’s get them out of the database. I don’t want to mail to 500,000 people every week if I’m not going to get anything out of it.”