How To Turn Email Into A Buying Channel

About 5 billion email offers are sent out in the U.S. each day. But what if those who receive them could purchase an item or pay a bill in two simple clicks, all within the email itself? When PYMNTS.com caught up with @Pay CEO John Killoran, he described a solution that links the payments world with the multi-billion dollar email marketing industry. Killoran, who founded the company in 2011 and has been developing technology applications since 1995, said @Pay helps transforms email marketing for merchants, giving them a robust piece of technology that sets itself apart from a mobile app, drives their conversion rates and sales and enhances their customers’ overall mobile shopping experience.

Here’s more.

You are in a unique position to describe the company that you run, so please introduce us to @Pay.

JK: Sure. We’ve invented a whole new technology for email, something that’s never really existed before. We’ve turned email into a buying channel with @Pay buttons, which can go into an email and transform it into a means of transacting a payment. When a consumer clicks one of the buttons, out pops a reply email, and if he or she agrees to the terms and conditions of that email, all he or she has to do is click “send” and the transaction is complete.

It is no secret that consumers are spending more money online than ever before. We have also seen the emergence of the omnichannel customer. What makes the email point of sale a better checkout experience than the many other options available?

JK: To me, if you’re trying to sell things in the world, you want to make it easy for your customer. The great thing about transacting through an email is for one, just about everyone has an email address – there are billions out there. It’s a connecting point to customers, and most importantly it can be used to reach them on their mobile phones.

I have a friend who is an avid cigarette smoker who says that the smartphone is like the new cigarette. Back in the 50s and 60s, there was a saying: “You’re never alone if you have a cigarette.” Now it’s that way with our iPhones and Androids. If you look in any train station, airport, coffee shop, restaurant, everyone is sitting there staring at their smartphone. So what’s great about the email checkout is that people can transact from that device. It’s different than app and web buying. With an app, a merchant needs to create it and a customer needs to download and keep it on their phone. One of the interesting facts about apps is that the average app lasts about 66 days on a person’s smartphone before they delete it.

Mobile buying to date has been a tremendous failure. About 97 percent of all transactions on the mobile device are abandoned – there are too many clicks, passwords, and product details to enter on such a small device. The beautiful thing about buying from email with the @Pay technology is that first of all, you don’t need a password because you’re authenticated, in part, through email. Second, it’s really two simple clicks. If customers see an item they like, they simply click a button, out pops an email, they hit send, and they’ve bought it.

Billions of dollars have been spent to get digital wallets to succeed, but to a large extent they have been a significant failure. The reason they’re failing is that they do not make it easy for the customer – it’s much easier for them to just pull out their credit card and swipe it in the store as opposed to using digital wallets. With email checkout, we make it super simple for the customer and the merchant. Merchants don’t have to create apps – rather, they keep sending the emails that they are currently sending, except now with the @Pay technology.

There are 5 billion email offers delivered per day in the USA. Do you have any data that compare conversion rates that take place inside of the email instead of sending the consumer to a website?

JK: Absolutely. That’s really an amazing number – 5 billion in just the U.S., or something like 20 per person every day. Email marketing is an enormous, multi-billion dollar industry. What @Pay does is it brings the email and payments industry into connection. What I realized is that these two have never been connected before. What we’ve seen is that in the email world, they’re looking for conversions. They get a really small rate now, about 1-2 percent. With the customers that we have, we’ve seen dramatic improvement. One of our customers, for example, saw a 35 percent conversion rate. To me, that makes a lot of sense – if it’s simple, people will use it. That’s just one of the conversion numbers; some others have been larger and some have been smaller, but we’ve seen a significant increase in the rates overall.

You have recently launched the @Pay for Resellers to resell @Pay through marketing and payment resellers, and that makes you processor agnostic. How can this tool help retailers?

JK: For one, it makes it super easy for retailers to use @Pay. We released this, by the way, at the April ETA show in Las Vegas, and a number of payments companies came on board. We realized at @Pay that we’ve created this technology, but there’s an existing infrastructure out there – I like to call it the payments catacombs. It’s very complex, widespread, and you can easily get lost in it.

We realize that to work with these ISOs and payments companies, we needed to set it up so that they can easily turn around and sign the seller agreement with us, and then resell us to their existing merchants. Every merchant could use this two-click checkout, and we have to work through distribution channels. The payments channel is a very natural thing for us, and what’s also great is that since these companies have already worked out the merchant account and gateway information, we can easily bring them on. We look at email now as a new POS – people are selling terminals and card-not-present services to merchants, and now they’re selling the email checkout so that customers can more easily buy things. And it’s not just buying things – this is also ideal for utility companies in paying bills. They send someone a button in an email, the person clicks it twice, and it’s paid. It’s so much less hassle than going to a website or pulling out the checkbook and finding a stamp and an envelope.

Finally, based on your experience, what are the biggest challenges facing the emerging mobile payments industry today and how is @Pay prepared to address these challenges?

JK: The biggest trouble facing the mobile market is that people aren’t really using smartphones to buy. I was at a conference where an executive from First Data said that less than one percent of all payments are flowing through the smartphone. That’s just because no one has made it easy – no one had really figured it out.

@Pay, however, has figured it out. We also like to joke that email used to be fun when it first came out. Since then, it’s become a workhorse. At @Pay, one of our bylines is “We make email fun again.” Thirty percent of the time people are looking at their smartphones, they’re looking at an email. We really think that we can allow people to start buying easily and actively from their mobile phones, the place where they’re spending a lot of their time.

John Killoran
President and CEO of @Pay

John has been developing and creating innovative technology applications since 1995. In 2005, he started a technology and environmental, Health and Safety consulting firm named Clover Leaf Solutions, Inc. Clover Leaf Solutions has grown to a 80+ person firm and provides innovative technology and services to large clients within the Department’s of Defense and Energy, along with large fortune 100 companies such as Walmart, Alcoa, and Dupont. John co-founded @Pay in May of 2011 after inventing the “Two-Click Email Payment”. He has over 16 years experience in developing innovative solutions using unique and popular programming languages, databases, and mobile devices.

Listen to the full podcast here.