The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) has been busy lately. Just yesterday it announced a timely new initiative aimed at mobile privacy, and today announced new best practices and guidelines for mobile coupons.
Going beyond mobile coupons, the new guidelines provide “industry standard framework” for “mobile price promotions,” as the MMA calls it — which are defined as “electronic coupons or rebates that traverse the full redemption process without the requirement for conversion into a paper or other hard-copy format.”
The new document covers mobile price promotions using SMS, MMS, the mobile Web, NFC, mobile apps, Bluetooth and barcode scanning, and includes the following information:
- The five stages of mobile price promotions, such as the ways that consumers can discover and redeem coupons and rebates.
- General best practices and principles, including transparency, good taste, privacy, opt-in/opt-out and government laws, rules and regulations.
- Campaign-specific best practices and principles, such as those involving contests, food, pharmaceuticals and alcohol.
- Tips for designing coupons, using the word “free” and creating notices such as terms and conditions.
“Our recent study with Synovate shows that consumer interest in mobile coupons is high and growing, giving brands, merchants and marketers a powerful new opportunity to establish and maintain relationships with consumers,” said Greg Stuart, CEO of the MMA. “The MMA created ‘Guidelines and Best Practices in Mobile Price Promotions’ to give the ecosystem an industry-standard framework for capitalizing on that opportunity while protecting the consumer experience.”
