Mobile coupons have become a powerful way for businesses to reach potential customers.
Just how effective is mobile couponing? While email campaigns traditionally have redemption rates of 2-4% on average, mobile campaigns tend to see redemption rates of 8-10% on average. With some campaigns even seeing redemption rates as high as 16% [Code Breaker]. According to eMarketer, 8 out of ten adult mobile coupon users in the U.S. will redeem a mobile coupon via their mobile device in 2015. They expect that number to rise to 9 out of ten by 2017.
You should considered adding mobile coupons to your iPhone app or Android app development project. Today, many retailers are seeing the benefits of implementing a mobile coupon strategy. Remember that while your customers may forget to grab your mailer, they won’t forget their smartphone.
A successful mobile couponing strategy depends on several factors. What is the value of your offer? Have you created a sense of urgency to use this offer? etc. The quality of how you run your program can go a long ways determining the success, as strategies such as creating a sense of urgency can improve redemption rates significantly.
Remember you shouldn’t just blast out mobile coupons to everyone. To be successful, you need to make sure your coupons are targeted to the users interests. Leveraging your customers data and combining it with location data from users’ phones can create highly effective campaigns. Deliver a relevant offer when they’re near a store and redemption rates go up significantly. With mobile geo-targeting you can target an offer to your customers when they are within a three-mile or other radius of your store. This method has proven quite effective in bringing in customers.
Over the past few years we have several advances in the way mobile marketing campaigns are carried out. Look for the next wave to bring even increased precision to mobile couponing as beacons can deliver coupons to customer phones based on their location within your store. Is a customer by the fragrance counter in a department store? Imagine how effective a well created Lancôme coupon could be at this moment. Meanwhile another customer that is in housewares is getting a Cuisinart coupon at that same moment. Being able to improve the targeting of your program to the exact location of your store that a client is in drives redemption rates to even higher levels that mobile is already experiencing.
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A vastly underused tool by businesses today is location-based mobile marketing. If you don’t know what this means specifically, it means ads or messages are delivered to your app users based on that person’s location (determined by the GPS in their smartphone).
These days people depend on their mobile devices for information regarding their purchase decisions. So clearly having the ability to display your message in the context of the app user’s location can be a very effective marketing tool. Before you start your next mobile app development project make sure you consider how you can include these powerful tools.
Geo-fencing
When you set up what is known as a geo-fence based on a specific proximity of your retail store, every time one of your app user’s enters that geo-fence, they can receive a push notification from you with a promotion to a product or service at your store. This is particularly effective if they can see your store (72% of consumers say they will respond to calls-to-action in messages they receive when in sight of the retailer – MDG Advertising).
iBeacons
A rapidly emerging new way to leverage location-based information is through Apple’s iBeacon. The iBeacon relies on Bluetooth low-energy technology to transmit when someone’s iPhone that is has your app installed comes within range. With a retails store, a perfect application of this would be to send a specific promotion directly to the customer’s smart phone with information about the product he or she is by.
So how does it work?
Mobile apps require that the device’s location services be turned on for them to function. Since privacy is always a concern, you should offer your users the option to opt-out of location-based services. To avoid having your users opt-out, you should make the benefits clear to your app users. Additionally, by presenting interesting and relevant promotions you will keep their interest. This can be a win-win strategy for you and your customer if executed properly. Blasting your users with unrelated offers will turn them off quickly.
Location-based marketing is not where near the end of exploring its full potential. Location-based marketing creates a massive opportunity to gain sales and market share over competitors that are not taking advantage of it. Many mobile users happy to opt-in to a mutually beneficial relationship, one where businesses respect their interests and time and deliver relevant content at the right time and place.
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Location based marketing has been a rapidly growing area for retailers and other businesses with a physical location.
One of the most exciting areas within the location based marketing umbrella right now has to do with beacons. Beacons are a low-cost, pinpointed location-based technology that uses low energy Bluetooth to communicate with beacon enabled mobile devices. Beacons offer a sizable step forward when it comes to a retailers ability to target an individual consumer at just the right moment. Brands have greater opportunity than ever before to extend their message past shelf and point-of-sale displays and deliver a personalized message to shoppers.
To utilize beacons you will need to integrate their use with a mobile app. The beacon simply triggers functions within your mobile applications. You will need to carefully plan how to integrate beacon use into your mobile app development and discuss the program with your iPhone app developer or Android app developer. Since beacons can be used to deliver personalized, relevant content at just the right moment, a solid beacon program can be a tremendous way to increase the utility and engagement with your mobile application.
Make sure your beacon triggered activities and messaging are relevant and will improve the user experience and not seen as intrusive or irrelevant or users will disable them or worse, delete your app. This is why data collection is so important today, as messaging can be personalized in order to increase relevance. Take the personalized delivery of content and add in precise contextual location based information of a customer in a retail store and you will have a highly effective messaging program.
Are beacons effective?
In a study conducted last year by inMarket, they found that interactions with advertised products improved 19X for users who received messages from beacons. Additionally their research found that apps were used in-store 16.5X as much for users who received message from beacons and that those customers were 6.4X more likely to keep a businesses app on their smart phone. Clearly these users are more engaged and likely to remain so.
Photo: Kārlis Dambrāns (Flikr) http://bit.ly/1D0oGK0