The following is a guest contributed post from David Florence, CEO of MobiSave.

Couponing has been modernized by the emergence of downloadable and mobile savings programs, but it’s still primarily a “spray and pray” operation. Despite the expansion of consumer touchpoints with newer options like load-to-card and phone-based savings apps, CPG marketers remain limited in their ability to tailor coupon offers to individual purchasing behaviors. Few tools have existed to help brands identify heavy category users and single them out with targeted coupons to encourage conversion.

In this still-largely one-size-fits-all world, three main stumbling blocks have stood between CPG brands and personalized couponing. All three are related to poor data availability.

Hurdle No. 1: Data Ownership

Digital-based coupon strategies are almost universally tied to retailers who hold the cards when it comes to sharing information. Whether it’s Petco trying to lure shoppers with email discounts, CVS issuing point-of-sale receipts offering product discounts based on the customer’s past purchases, or any number of retailer loyalty apps, that means the in-depth purchasing data needed to create and execute targeted coupon campaigns is not readily available to the CPG manufacturer. Nor is the shopper identity information required to reach target consumers.

Hurdle No. 2: Retailer-Specific Programs

Email, online and loyalty couponing programs are inevitably retailer-specific. So are most third-party mobile coupon apps, serving up offers that must be redeemed at certain retailers. As a result, any data that these sources may be willing to share with their brand partners is restricted to what each shopper purchases at a particular store. If a consumer patronizes multiple stores – as most do – there has been no way to assemble a complete purchasing profile containing the data necessary for accurate targeting.

Hurdle No. 3: Quantitative Data Limitations

While some retailers and third-party providers are able to provide market basket data, it is typically comprised of itemsets that illustrate relationships between purchases rather than providing competitive brand and shopper-specific insights. This has little value for CPG marketers interested in using coupon personalization to try to move the needle on household penetration. If Kellogg wants to bring new buyers of its Kashi granola into the fold, for example, the company needs to know who purchases other granola brands in order to zero in on those specific consumers.

All of these sticking points have prevented marketers from developing smart, one-on-one coupon campaigns that can serve up targeted offers to their most desirable prospects. But a new mobile savings model is changing the game.

This new variation on mobile couponing provides cash-back rebates rather than deducting discounts at the cash register. Consumers save their preferred manufacturer rebate offers within the app, snap a picture of their grocery store receipts with their phone or tablet cameras, and send the receipt image to the app to claim their rebates.

While some providers in this space still focus on retailer-specific discounts and manually examine receipts to identify items that qualify for rebates, others like MobiSave allow users to shop at any retailer and have developed technology that turns each receipt image into data for automated processing and near-instant rebate redemption.

And that’s the key. Since customer receipts give mobile rebate providers access to real-life market baskets, those with the right technology can slice and dice those receipts to equip CPG marketers with the information they need to build strategic, data-driven campaigns.

It’s a new tool in the CPG toolbox that can be especially valuable for crafting and implementing high-impact trial programs. Here are some of the advantages.

Benefit No. 1: True Coupon Personalization

With the market basket insights of the most advanced mobile rebate apps, CPG marketers can tailor coupon programs to the highest-value users in a given category, create different offers for users with different purchasing behaviors, and send those offers directly to target consumers – thanks to the app’s shopper identification abilities.

Benefit No. 2: Individual Shopping Histories

Customer receipts contain a motherlode of data on individual purchasing behavior for each shopping transaction. This makes it possible for mobile rebate apps to pinpoint users in any product category, trace their purchases over time, and leverage that data so that you can market directly to your best prospects through the app.

Benefit No. 3: Automated Market Basket Analysis

If you work with a provider that is capable of mining the data on customer receipts, you gain the ability to identify heavy and super-heavy category shoppers, what else they purchase, where they buy it, and more. If the provider is also retailer-agnostic (enabling users to redeem offers at any store), that information can be aggregated across all retailers to help optimize coupon campaigns.

Benefit No. 4: No Retailer Involvement

Brands can now bypass retailers and instead work directly with the app provider to create and execute coupon programs. This not only eliminates the complications of dealing with retailers on coupon initiatives, including lack of access to market basket details, but it also simplifies the process of managing campaigns involving multiple retailers by consolidating all program management and reporting under one umbrella.

Clearly, all digital-based coupon programs have traceability and rapid implementation advantages over traditional paper formats as well as the ability to reach consumers on the mobile devices where they now conduct most of their personal business, but they have failed to raise the stakes by enabling brands to laser-target coupons to their most likely customers. With this new advance, CPG marketers have an opportunity to focus their coupon efforts where they will deliver the highest returns. It’s a new chapter in precision marketing. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Florence is CEO of MobiSave. David has more than twenty five years of experience in direct and database marketing. David previously served as International President and CEO of global advertising agency Draft Inc. and most recently as Regional President of DraftFCB, where he managed more than 30 offices in 25 countries. He is one of the most respected experts in the field, serving on numerous industry awards panel including the EFFIE (most effective advertising) and the ECHO (best direct marketing campaign). His past account relationships include P&G, Beiersdorf, HP and Verizon.

The post Taking Coupon Personalization to a New Level appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The final numbers aren’t in yet, but numerous studies indicate that consumers now demand discounts and other promotions (free shipping, for instance) in order for retailers to snag a sale.

In other words, deep discounting might have boosted sales a bit, but they also bite deeply into actual profit.

“Retailers, which typically close their fiscal fourth quarter end of this month or early next month, are expected to see their critical holiday quarter profit decline 1.9 percent on average, according to Retail Metrics, a research firm that tracks Wall Street analysts’ estimates and provides retail industry research and data to institutional investors,” reports eMarketer. “While retail giant Wal-Mart’s expected profit decline (thanks to its technology and other investments) is the key culprit contributing to the sector’s decline, holiday discounting is also partly to blame.”

Retail Metrics president Ken Perkins even suggests that 53 major retailers — about half of the group his firm tracked — are expected to see lower fourth-quarter profit.

“Among the holiday winners, Perkins pointed to retailers including Amazon, beauty products seller Ulta, T.J. Maxx parent TJX, athletic gear retailer Lululemon and electronics chain Best Buy,” notes the report. “Still, he said the firm’s December store checks generally found disappointing in-store traffic and conversions.”

One big takeaway from the holiday? It’s hard to make an actual profit without an omnichannel strategy.

“Almost 70 percent of total holiday related spending occurred in stores with both a physical and online presence as consumers routinely favor shopping with retailers that have a physical location, according to an International Council of Shopping Center’s post-holiday shopper survey,” reports eMarketer. “Among millennials, for instance, the survey showed 77 percent of them said it’s important to buy online from stores that have a physical presence.”

The survey found that 91 percent of holiday shoppers made purchases at physical stores — about the same as holiday 2015.

The post Holiday Sales Healthy, But It Took Discounts, Promotions, and Omnichannel to Get There appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

According to a company announcement, retail is “becoming a highly connected experience, both brands and retailers desire to extend consumer engagement, to go beyond just creating awareness and delivering offers into the rich integration of loyalty, proximity, and mobility.”

For that reason, mobile coupons have evolved from being simply a means of driving consumers in-store, to being a core element of promoting and reinforcing brand loyalty, the company says.

Just how big are mobile coupons? Juniper Research says the number of coupons issued via mobile and online channels will grow by more than 60% over the next five years.

Mobile Coupon Factory offers mobile coupons in various formats including scratch promotional coupons, loyalty and store cards, wallet passes and stamp cards. These formats go well beyond traditional digital coupons as they include promotional mechanics, analytics, re-marketing tags and fully integrate with most marketing automation platforms, mobile wallets (Apple Pay, Google Wallet etc) and point of sale systems.

“One of the critical problems mobile Coupon Factory has solved is tracking of the coupon transmission, the customer interaction with the coupon and the in-store or online validation, allowing complete end-to-end analytics of the customer experience and the performance of all the marketing elements,” says David Burden, co-founder of iProximity.

The post iProximity Launches Global ‘Mobile Coupon Factory’ appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The conference spans August 29th – August 31st. Among the advertised speakers set for the conference are:

• Safwan Zaheer, Director, Accenture Digital
• Priya Dozier, Product Management Executive, FIS Global
• Michele Dupre, Group VP, Verizon Enterprise Solutions.
• Larry Berlin, First Analysis (moderator)

“We are very excited about this session in particular as it brings together three of the top thought leaders in next generation mobility, retail, commerce and payments, who are behind the evolution of today’s customer shopping experience,” said Marla Ellerman, Mobile Payments Conference executive director and publisher of Mobile Marketing & Technology.

To learn more about the conference or to register to attend, click here.

The post Talks to Focus on Impact of AI, Social Commerce and Bots on Mobile Shopping at the 2016 Mobile Payments Conference appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The following is a guest contributed post from Gillian Hughes, VP of Corporate Sales at Veoo.

 Whilst perusing the Life & Style pages of a national daily newspaper this past weekend, my guilty pleasure, I came across an interesting column entitled ‘What’s Hot, What’s Not.’ Contained within was a list of reader highlights from the past seven days, juxtaposed with a choice selection of reader pains, the most notable of which was ‘Loyalty card overload – why hasn’t someone invented a decent simple app yet to put them all in one place digitally?’

Good question, I thought. I have read countless articles voicing the cries of derision from exasperated consumers who are at their wits’ end with the thought of trying to cram yet more plastic loyalty cards into an already overstretched wallet; or, worse still, the paper coupons which always seem to be buried at the bottom of the oversized bag belonging to the consumer one space ahead of you in the supermarket queue.

The fact of the matter is that consumers want, and are beginning to demand, fully integrated loyalty and discount programs linked directly to their mobile devices. It just makes sense. With 80% of UK adults now owning a smartphone and the average user having 42 apps installed, 10 of which are used every single day, the digital revolution has encompassed almost every sinew of everyday business and consumer life. In fact, the exponential growth of mobile and the plethora of mobile apps that are revolutionizing the way in which consumers can pay for goods and services has led numerous industry insiders, such as ourselves at Veoo, to proclaim the almost imminent redundancy of the once seemly essential physical wallet. However, despite this development, many retailers and supermarkets are yet to shed the shackles of reluctance and traverse into the 21st century with a fully digital-first approach to loyalty cards.

Fundamentally, it’s about retailers understanding that the way in which consumers want to make purchases today has changed. The arrival of SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) technologies has set in motion a chain of events that has seen industries, formerly thought immune to digital upheaval, now needing to adapt their strategies to incorporate a digital-first approach. With the continued rise in prevalence of mobile devices, surely a smartphone-accessible loyalty program would expand the potential means by which a retailer could interact with customers and turn loyalty programs into a tangible driver of sales, whilst also enhancing the shopping experience. This again raises the question as to why so few retailers have adapted to offer more smartphone-based loyalty programs.

It’s fair to say that it’s not the entire retail industry that is totally blinkered to the idea of a digital future for loyalty schemes. In fact, it was Harvey Nichols that first recognised the rising power of digital and mobile at the expense of traditional plastic cards, when launching a loyalty scheme exclusively as a mobile app in 2015. Its head of digital marketing, Kerem Atasoy, was on record as saying that the launch was based on research that showed 80% of customers preferred a mobile app to a plastic card.

Moreover, a recent study I read from Juniper Research showed that more than 3 billion loyalty cards will operate as mobile-only or be integrated into mobile apps by 2020, up from 1.4 billion last year. The new research, ‘Mobile & Online Coupons: Redemption, Loyalty & Consumer Engagement 2015-2020,’ indicated that brands and retailers are becoming increasingly respondent to consumer demands for mobile integration.

However, the key solution that retailers now need to provide their customers with, in order to alleviate the pains I referred to at the outset of this piece, is a dedicated digital wallet for all loyalty cards to be stored within and that’s where Veoo’s Mobile Wallet comes into play.

Guaranteed to disrupt the mobile payments industry, the solution not only enables consumers to pay for items, but also enables customers to create mobile vouchers, offers, loyalty cards and event invitations that are stored in their mobile phone. The Mobile Wallet will also reshape the way brands interact with their customers, allowing notifications to be sent to anyone who has downloaded a voucher/ticket when they come within 100m of an applicable store, as well as facilitating push notifications, which can be sent directly to customers at their discretion.

The Veoo Mobile Wallet’s most endearing feature, and potentially biggest industry differentiator, however, may be the fact that consumers don’t need to download yet another app to take advantage of the solutions benefits. On the contrary, Veoo’s solution allows brands to leverage the mobile wallet that is already, by default, installed on every iOS and Android device. Consumers, therefore are not required to install anything, they simply save the voucher when it appears on their handset which then gets put into the smartphone’s default mobile wallet for easy redemption in-store.

Providing a mobile solution to the loyalty card conundrum will give a myriad of benefits. For the consumer, there is the increased convenience and simplicity of no longer having to carry physical cards, real time points and balance updates and location aware notifications. For the retailer, digital coupons will give improved targeting and personalization, leading to greater activity rates, thereby resolving a key failing of traditional schemes where the lack of relevant offers often resulted in a downturn in usage.

So consumers and retailers alike can rejoice, the age of the digital loyalty card is upon us.

The post Loyalty Card Overload – Veoo Has a Solution for That! appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The mobile couponing service gives manufacturers the ability to create redeemable digital coupons for a whole new audience—the 2 million NSA urban supermarket consumers.

Mobile coupons will be obtained from brands and redeemed through consumers’ mobile devices at checkout counters in neighborhood bodegas, grocery stores and supermarkets.

So what exactly is dCoupon?
dCoupon is a scalable mobile coupon management and redemption service designed to enable stores and brands of any size to embrace mobile couponing. Tagged by Scanbuy as a “disruptive technology,” dCoupon was created to address the best interests of brands, retailers and consumers.

“This is a historic agreement that will deliver immediate savings to our customers and expand technology to help our stores grow their business, while funding charitable efforts to serve different communities through NSA cares,” said National Supermarket Association President Rudy Fuertes. “The National Supermarket Association is thrilled to team with Scanbuy and we look forward to a great and long lasting partnership.”

The post NSA, Scanbuy Team Up for Innovative Mobile Couponing Service appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The new research, Mobile & Online Coupons: Redemption, Loyalty & Consumer Engagement 2015-2020, found that brands and retailers are increasingly responding to consumer demand for mobile integration, with many now offering customers the opportunity to store their loyalty cards within a dedicated digital wallet.

Crucially, the research argued that the improved targeting and personalisation made possible by digital coupons was leading to greater activity rates, thereby resolving a key failing of traditional schemes where the lack of relevant offers had resulted in a downturn in usage.

However, the report summary notes, the new research found wide variations amongst retailers and other reward card providers with regard to the extent of digital loyalty integration. In the UK, it observed that around 40% of Nectar Card holders had acquired the loyalty app by late-2015, but less than 4% of Tesco Clubcard holders. It found a similar disparity between US retailers Walgreens, where 61% of card holders had linked their card to an app, and Target which had only 27% of cardholders linked.

The complimentary whitepaper, ‘Coupons ~ Personalization Goes Hyper’, is available to download from the Juniper website together with further details of the full research and the attendant Interactive Forecast Excel (IFxl).

The post Juniper: Mobile Loyalty Cards to Reach 3 Billion by 2020 appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Of course, the targeting was good — an essential ingredient in enticing customers to act.

“In the case of convenience store coupons, the evening commuter period were found to be the most responsive time for mobile coupons,” according to Biz Report. “This finding highlights the importance of targeting coupons at the right time, and when the target audiences are in the right place.”

The info comes from Koupon Media’s new “State of the Mobile Coupon Industry” report. The report analyzes the growing use of mobile coupons, with special emphasis on redemption patterns for convenience stores.

In 2015, Koupon Media’s platform doubled in size reaching a lifetime 500 million mobile coupons delivered.

“Furthermore, average redemption rates continue to be 10x greater than traditional paper coupons,” reports the company. “The number of mobile coupon users in the U.S. continues to rise — from 61 million in 2013 to 104 million last year.”

Mobile coupons just may push out paper coupon clipping the way online media has affected print newspapers.

“The fact is mobile coupons are easier to use than paper or print-at-home coupons and more retailers accept them than ever before,” says Bill Ogle, CEO of Koupon Media. “It won’t be long before the mobile coupon outpaces paper coupons altogether.”

Consumers spend more and are more apt to adopt new technologies when offered a mobile coupon, contends Koupon Media

“Overall, 43 percent of mobile users have used a mobile coupon and 26 percent increase their basket size when using one. A personalized coupon motivates 39 percent to spend more and 60 percent would adopt mobile payments if offered coupons,” according to the report.

And what do those lickety-split mobile coupon users buy at the convenience store?

Koupon Media’s data shows it’s energy drinks (43 percent), soda (17 percent) and juice (15 percent). Free offers elicited — naturally — the highest redemption rate (15 percent).

The post Mobile Coupons Lead to Lickety-Split Action: 65 Percent Redeem Them in 5 Minutes appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

According to Mobile Marketing Magazine, McDonald’s managed to drive seven million downloads of its mobile coupon app in the first three months of its availability.

The app in question went live in September of 2015.

Company CEO Steve Easterbrook says that downloads are being fueled by customers wanting to redeem offers and coupons.

“For the first time, here at McDonald’s we have built in a trading increase, a sale, an incremental sale expectation based on our digital platform,” Easterbrook is quoted from McDonalds’ most recent earnings call. “It’s a little modest for 2016, but we’re actually contributing to the business growth. And being a platform, this is going to deliver for many years to come as we can kind of understand our consumer behavior and be more rewarding to them.”

The post McDonalds Sees Massive Success with Mobile Coupons appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

That’s one of the key finding straight out of “Uncovering Truths Of Millennial Spending,” a new report by Coupons.com Incorporated and research firm Bovitz, Inc.

To make the report happen, researchers surveyed 2,000 people in Millennial, Gen X and Boomer generations.
“Millennials are educated and realistic about their finances, ” said Seth Marlatt, Vice President of Analytics and Research at Coupons.com. “Almost 70 percent closely monitor their budgets. Millennials embrace the idea of frugality, considering themselves smart shoppers, and take pride in educating themselves how to get the best deals when they want them.”

That often means heading to the store instead of online. While Millennials often use technology to conduct research before shopping, when it comes to buying groceries, 81 percent said they prefer shopping in store. More than 70 percent said they prefer in store for household goods, beauty and personal care items.

For Millennials, however, it’s all about “me.”

“Over 70 percent of Millennials said they are very or somewhat interested in personalized offers. To get that, they are happy to provide information about themselves,” the report summary notes.

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