MOBILE COUPONS: Finally Ready To Pick Up.
Mobile Coupons
A Mobile Coupon is an electronic ticket solicited and/or delivered by mobile phone that can be exchanged for a financial discount or rebate when purchasing a product or service.
Customarily, coupons are issued by manufacturers of consumer-pack-aged goods or by retailers, to be used in retail stores as part of sales promotions. They can also be used to attract customers to entertainment attractions amusement parks, zoos, museums etc) and services (beauty shops, spas etc). They are often distributed through SMS, MMS, Bluetooth and other mobile means. The customer redeems the coupon at store or online. In some cases the retailer could forward it to a clearinghouse, or directly to the issuer, for reimbursement.
TYPES OF COUPONS
There are many types of coupons, including the following:
1) Pounds-off, pence-off, penny-off, cents-off, or dollar-off
2) Free
3) Buy-one-get-one-free
4) Multiple-purchase. The consumer is required to buy more than one of a given product.
5) Time-release. Coupons with different expiration dates are distributed together to encourage repeat buyers.
6) Self-destruct. Coupons are printed to overlap and consumers choose one deal or another.
7) Crossruff. The consumer gets a coupon for one product, often related, when purchasing another.
Sweepstakes-entry or personalized. The coupon can be redeemed only at specific locations, such as a chain of stores.
9) Universal coupon. Manufacturer distributes a high value coupon go on multiple products within the manufacturer’s product lines.
ADVATAGES OF COUPONS
1) Drive traffic to stores/ events/ entertainment attractions/services.
2) Add value to a purchase
3) Direct discount to the consumer
4) Targeting possibilities
5) Leverage the distribution
Smartphone owners are more interested in receiving coupons on their handsets than getting other kinds of mobile come-ons, according to figures released by Compete. It’s just the latest evidence that while mobile advertising as a whole is slowly gaining traction, mobile coupons may be about to take off in a big way.
Compete found that grocery coupons were the most attractive of 10 types of mobile marketing ploys, with 36 percent of U.S. Smartphone owners saying there were interested in receiving the discount offers on their handsets. Twenty-nine percent said they wanted to scan barcodes with their phones, while 15 percent were interested in receiving text message ads.
Mobile coupons have been around for the better part of a decade but have failed to really take off thanks to a lack of widespread retail support and a user experience that is often intolerable.
The market is positioned to pick up some serious momentum in the next few years, though, according to Juniper Research, which expects it to exceed 300 million people worldwide by 2014. That forecast might look modest if Target’s campaign gets legs and other nationwide retailers follow suit.
According to 2010 Juniper Research study, mobile retail opportunities in coupons, smart posters and advertising will together create a market worth more than $12 billion by 2014, up from $4.1 billion in 2009. Forrester Research also predicts that in 2014, interactive marketing will approach $55 billion, representing 21% of all marketing purchases.
Many existing marketing solutions, such as coupons, incentives, and advertisements, are now working in mobile, delivering a functional and profitable experience. For the consumer, mobility delivers the added benefit of portable savings and information…
In Japan and Korea, mobile coupons are already integrated into their shopping culture as is mobile banking and the mobile device as a virtual wallet with over 50 million users. However in the UK, Europe and America, mobile couponing has yet to take off.
In the US, for example, only 24% of mobile subscribers who had taken part in a marketing campaign redeemed the mobile coupons they were sent. Juniper Research however predicts that by 2013, we will account for 20% of all mobile coupons redeemed by 200 million subscribers.
Juniper says it’s partly due to the lack of infrastructure but it’s also due to how retailers are approaching the mobile channel. In a recent survey by the Aberdeen Group only 24% of all retail organisations currently utilise a cross-channel customer loyalty platform.
For the retailer, instead of building models of large scale demographics by age, industry or gender, the goal is changing to use demographics as initial templates to build individual profiles which reflect the true needs of the person or business interacting with your marketing. This is known as personalization in the mobile space.
The report found that retailers were already starting to utilize the additional benefits of the mobile channel to provide advertising on the phone and the provision of money off coupons but that location aware technologies would play a key part and suggested that companies such as Google and IBM were already seeking to exploit location based knowledge to enable retailers to provide relevant offers to shoppers in-store.
Mobile Coupons
