Couponing
New competitors in mobile couponing
Yelp offers coupons available through their mobile app. Yelp’s mission from the beginning has been to connect consumers with great local businesses. Members of the Yelp community have been and continue to be the driving force behind that mission. Historically, Yelp has provided value to 36 million monthly unique visitors by helping them find a great local business when they need a product or service. This new service looks to take advantage of the social couponing space that Groupon pioneered who recently announced almost a half billion in sales thus far.
TappLocal, emulates the rewards and location-based offers being integrated in existing LBS apps like Foursquare and Yelp, but does so independently to create a so-called “location-based ad-network” strictly for highly relevant LBS offers.
Here’s how it works: TappLocal uses their backend to create a geofence around certain partner venues. When a user crosses that boundary and happens to be using one of the partner apps, a deal indicator will pop-up in real-time. Clicking this area opens a larger area explaining exactly what the deal is. Simply click one more time to verify you wish to use the deal, show it to the store that it’s valid at, and the offer is validated and redeemed on-the-spot.
Taking things a bit further, TappLocal also includes what’s called “Flash Deals,” which is basically a way for local merchants to move certain items quickly. If a merchant has a product that’s expiring, or they simply want to drive immediate foot traffic through the door, they can trigger a “Flash Deal” which is then distributed throughout TappLocal’s localized network.
Mobile Marketing Gaining Ground Among Retailers
US retailers are actively pursuing the mobile channel to enhance customer engagement and loyalty: 73% have some type of mobile initiative in place and 20% of are in the process of evaluating the mobile channel, according to a survey from Forbes Insights, in association with Research In Motion (RIM).
Fully one-third of surveyed retail executives describe their early mobile efforts as either widely implemented (10%) or rapidly expanding (24%).
Nearly one-half of retailers (47%) say they want to capture “first-mover advantage” as their customers go mobile, whereas 23% say they are adopting mobile to keep up with their competitors and 20% are taking an incremental approach to the mobile channel.
Below, other findings from the study, Retail’s Mobility Imperative, which surveyed more than 300 executives at top US retailers.
Retailers are now at varying levels of sophistication in their mobile efforts. Fundamental tactics such as mobile ads (35%) and mobile websites (36%) are the most common, while other retailers are moving into more customer service-related applications (33%) and transaction-based tactics, such as mobile coupons (29%).
Mobile Coupon iPhone App Sees 50,000 Downloads In First Three Days
Kuffer Marketing GmbH recently announced that its iPhone mobile coupon app, dubbed “Gutscheinbuk” or “Voucher Book, was downloaded 50,000 times in the first three days after launch — or an average of once every 15 sec. In no time at all, the app rose to become one of the Top 5 apps for Germany in the Apple App Store.
To be fair, “Voucher Book” was already a wildly popular coupon-based Website in Germany that offered a simplistic approach to offering money-off coupons, but its mobile success is still worth mention. The site had been around for the past four years and currently boasts over 7,500 active coupons that are now available via its iPhone app.
The simplistic nature of the app both from a retailer’s point-of-view and the end-user is what’s helped catapult the app to the top. A retailer that uses Voucher Book can manage its own coupons using a variety of metrics –- selecting distinct offers to be sent at different times of day, or in different cities for example. As a user, you can simply open the app and select what kind of voucher you’re interested in and Voucher Book delivers anything that’s useable within a short distance of them.
Overall, the app’s success is a boon to mobile coupons in general, which are just now starting to catch on in a big way. Whether it’s a traditional method like Voucher Book or the “Groupon” model, mobile coupons are here to stay.
The success of the app points to a larger trend. Apps that seem to have the most success tend to be mobile extensions of user’s favorite websites, ostensibly making them a CRM channel.
Facebook has 150 million mobile users worldwide and that people accessing Facebook on mobile devices are twice as active as desktop users.
If people start using Facebook to check in from bars, restaurants, stores and other places via cell phones, that could drive up both the company’s mobile user base and activity among existing mobile users. That in turn could spur more retailers and other businesses to offer mobile coupons or set up mobile rewards programs in conjunction with a new Facebook location-sharing feature.
Mobile commerce growth by segment
Juniper Research produced a new study forecasting the rapidly increasing usage of mobile devices for tickets for all kinds of travel and entertainment plus sports events will be one of the main factors driving the growth of mobile commerce. Mobile ticketing transactions are forecast to exceed $100bn (based on gross transaction value) as soon as 2012: this is more than double the market in 2010.
The Mobile Commerce Sectors
The report provides the one stop solution for all players within the mobile commerce ecosystem. It pulls together each of the detailed reports within the mobile commerce stream: Mobile Payments for Digital and Physical goods, NFC Mobile Payments, Mobile Money Transfer & Remittances, Mobile Ticketing, Mobile Coupons and Mobile Banking.
Mobile Commerce Growth
This new report demonstrates the spectacular growth that we forecast across all the segments of mobile commerce. For each sector this report provides six year forecasts for transaction values in eight key regions of the world, as well as an analysis of a number of drivers and constraints, considering a number of business models issues as well as a discussion on operator churn and ARPU revealing that four of the segments (Ticketing, Money Transfers, Physical Goods and NFC) will more than double in transaction value over the next two years, whilst Digital Goods, Banking and Coupons will still post very healthy growth of 30% to 50% over the two years.
Importance of User Experience
Although growth looks strong, one of the vital recommendations included within the report is that commerce providers need to keep users top of mind when developing their applications. If the initial user experience is poor for mobile payment methods – either based on cost, security, reliability or ease of use – then customers will reject them. This up to the minute report provides the most recent evaluation at the mobile commerce market, including a look at current applications and services in each of these sectors, with content from the above reports refreshed and updated in the second quarter 2010.
Geo-fenced, geo-targeted mobile couponing, discounts and promotions have arrived
Fresh on the heels of yesterday’s launch of location-based mobile discounts app Shopkick, yet another geo-targeted mobile shopping service prepares its own take on mobile couponing and promotions. But don’t worry – you can breathe a sigh of relief – it’s not yet another iPhone app to download.
Instead, the new “ShopAlerts” service is actually a white-label platform that allows retailers and other businesses to send location-triggered mobile text messages to consumers who’ve opted in to receive them. Read Full article
