Consumers want to save money on everything from groceries to home goods. Most people are even on the lookout for a discount at their favorite restaurant!
But as we all know, the world is quickly shifting to online shopping in a technological world. The newspaper coupon-clipping, a money-saving strategy that shoppers have used for years, must follow the transition. And while some clients still enjoy a good scavenger hunt for a paper coupon, there is an increasing opportunity for mobile coupons in the marketplace. So, how do companies use mobile coupons to build their brand through digital shopping?
Digital Coupon vs Mobile Wallet Coupon
First, what is a digital coupon? A digital coupon is a discount or offer found online and provides a modern alternative to traditional paper coupons.
Next, let’s look at the mobile wallet. This is simply a digital version of the physical wallet someone carries in a pocket or purse. This is where mobile wallet coupons are stored. Mobile wallets, available on users’ smartphones, safely store secure information such as credit cards, debit cards, membership ids, and loyalty cards. In addition, event tickets, boarding passes, and promotions are accessible from the mobile wallet.
So, here is the difference. Not all digital coupons are mobile wallet coupons. Instead, the digital coupon is a promotional offer or discount provided by a company, often discovered on the retail website or used on products within their store.
The mobile wallet coupon is growing in popularity because it is easy for consumers to use. For the business owner, mobile coupon campaigns prove effective in marketing while being affordable for the company. This trend is not going anywhere as technology expands and improves shoppers’ experience.
Simple for the Consumer is a Marketing Dream
With most of the population carrying a smartphone these days, mobile coupons are easily accessible and can add value to every consumer’s shopping experience. Customers are teaching themselves to use mobile coupons because it is an easy way to save money. For example, a consumer who is a reward member at their local grocery store can quickly access the rewards, promotions, and coupons from their mobile wallet to redeem savings. Studies show that digital coupon redemption volume is steadily rising among consumers of all ages. The youngest users follow brands and trends, while the older generations seek value and savings. With mobile wallet coupons, retailers can reach all demographics and provide a wide range of digitally available value to customers while building their brand.
The pre-installed mobile wallet app on digital devices allows a company to send promotions effortlessly to a specific clientele. Marketing through mobile wallet apps enables brands to target customers with personalized products and offers. Push notifications offer a quick location-based reminder directly to the customer’s device. And mobile coupons can be saved, shared, or even redeemed immediately.
For example, when passing by the store, a consumer receives a notification on their phone about a BOGO offer. The shopper can stop, shop, save and even share the fantastic promotion with family and friends. This simple alert brings the customer into the store to make a purchase.
The Effective and Affordable Marketing Strategy
For the marketing strategist, mobile coupon campaigns are very effective in the growing and changing digital marketplace. A mobile coupon strategy effectively attracts new customers, promotes products, and increases loyalty to the brand.
How does this happen?
The mobile coupon campaign attracts new customers by highlighting its brand through an attractive offer. Studies show coupons influence over 80% of consumers to try new products and encourage shoppers to make a purchase faster than they would without a coupon. Digital coupons are also effective in keeping products on shoppers’ lists, leading to a high redemption rate. So, whether the goal is to reach a new customer or promote a new product, the mobile coupon is a tangible reminder to the consumer to make the purchase. And the coupon will not only increase brand awareness but also encourage and increase brand loyalty. Overall, the mobile coupon campaign successfully creates more interest and traffic and increases consumer spending.
Ready to get started?
The mobile coupon campaign is an opportunity for any business to increase revenue and get a strong return on advertising. Of course, affordability is an essential piece of this marketing strategy. Consider this, major tech companies like Apple include a pre-loaded wallet app, and to date, there are over 1 billion iPhones active worldwide. Google Pay offers a free mobile app in the Google play store. Google Pay has over 150 million active users across 40 countries every month. Consumer devices are equipped for mobile wallet marketing to billions of people. The opportunities to market through mobile coupons are endless. This includes the freedom to create a personalized campaign that genuinely highlights your brand using location-based services and push notifications to reach your audience. A well-executed mobile campaign will provide your company with measurable data such as consumer traffic, client spending, and increased overall revenue. As you can see, there is an opportunity for any brand, big or small, to achieve success using a mobile coupon strategy.
If you want to explore how your brand can increase business traffic with a mobile coupon marketing strategy, reach out to us at Mobeo. We offer a complete solution to be customized mobile marketing that is measurable and personalized to fit your needs.
As the name suggests, online to offline (O2O) marketing is the process of running online marketing campaigns designed to drive in-store foot traffic and offline sales.
The outcome is more targeted marketing and greater brand affinity by humanizing the sale at the point of purchase.
How does O2O marketing work?
There are four stages of the O2O process:
Online discovery: 81% of shoppers do their product research and discovery online, so O2O marketing focuses on gaining exposure across top-searched channels to gather user data. These channels include:
SEO and content creation – driving SEO for keywords with high search volume within the target audience by creating high-quality content.
Email marketing – Inviting potential customers to subscribe for new products or sales alerts.
Location and preferred store data – As part of the email opt-in process, collect consumer zip codes, which can be correlated with their nearest store to be segmented and targeted accurately.
Offline purchase: You can start driving them in-store for product launches, trials, or special promotions now that you’ve got an audience.
Post-purchase feedback: Collecting customer feedback after they’ve made a purchase will help strengthen relationships, grow product launch sales and gather better insights about customer preferences. This feedback can be from product reviews or purchase drivers/intent. Feedback can be collected via an email campaign to consumers within a specific timeframe from the sale event, QR codes on packaging, or purchase receipts sent via email.
Amplification and advocacy: This stage is about building community and encouraging word-of-mouth. This can be achieved through marketing activities like brand ambassador programs or influencer campaigns and social media campaigns asking people to tag friends that might be interested in the product. However, the most crucial factor for generating word-of-mouth and customer advocacy is building a product that your audience loves.
Why should CPG brands take O2O marketing seriously?
It’s hard to deny that O2O marketing provides an edge to CPG brands over eCommerce-only competitors. It offers the consumer the benefit of enabling their usual online research and discovery habits without disruption but adds “service with a smile” and injects a human element into the otherwise sterile eCommerce experience.
Research has shown that delivering an in-store experience helps to address customers’ emotional needs and reinforces brand affinity.
While measuring the post-COVID retail environment, there’s a noticeable shift from “O2O” to an “O+O” philosophy. CPG brands who integrate this school of thought into their marketing efforts will reap the rewards. Online marketing and eCommerce have been ingrained into every shopper journey, which means there’s renewed focus on delivering a better in-store experience.”
A brand’s online and offline marketing activities need to work perfectly to deliver a seamless, consistent customer experience to make the in-store visit a positive one.
If you’re ready to explore innovative ways of delivering a seamless purchase experience to your customers, contact Mobeo today.
As we covered in “Shopper Marketing Part 1:”, Shopper Marketing is the process of ensuring consumers are correctly engaged at every stage throughout the path to purchase, from awareness to consideration to conversion.
This article will explore what you can do to set up a shopper marketing strategy and what you can expect to achieve.
How to create a Shopper Marketing strategy:
Brands that implement a shopper marketing strategy correctly possess a competitive edge because compiling a plan requires a deeper understanding of the consumer path-to-purchase from a holistic perspective rather than individual components.
As a starting point for formulating your shopper marketing strategy, ask yourself these four essential questions:
What does your brand represent, and does that resonate with your target audience?
What is necessary for your target audience?
What are your goals beyond making sales?
What is your budget?
The answers to these questions should represent the heart and soul of your strategy, which can then wrap around each stage of your buyer’s journey:
Awareness Stage – Focus on brand recognition and storytelling to ensure you resonate with your target audience.
Consideration Stage – Deliver value and properly incentivize consumers to encourage them to purchase your products ahead of competitors’.
Conversion Stage – Delight with a positive customer experience and focus on building long-term relationships with your customers.
Retention Stage – Provide an easy way to connect and keep your customers coming back.
Now that you’ve formulated your objectives for each stage of the buyer’s journey, it’s time to think about how you should execute it. For example, what marketing activities will you implement to ensure brand recognition? How do you want to incentivize customers? What channels will you use to communicate this to your target audience?
You can use the traditional marketing principle of the “4 P’s” to map out your plan for executing the shopper marketing strategy:
Price: discounts, bundled offers, price communication, and coupon
Place: eCommerce stores, bricks and mortar stores, visual merchandising, store layout
Product: Featured products, packaging, catalogs
Promotion: promotion communications, advertising channels, communicating brand and products to consumers
What can be achieved with a Shopper Marketing Strategy?
By using a shopper marketing strategy as the lens for looking at the entire buyer journey as one, businesses can expect to:
Increase brand affinity by delivering more consistent marketing messages
Drive sales by looking at the entire path to purchase instead of individual stages
Improves long-term relationships with customers
Focuses on long-term gains rather than short-term objectives, which creates more consistency
Creates opportunity for data-driven decision making by looking at the entire lifecycle and proper data attribution
A deeper understanding of customer segments and preferences by looking at their behaviors across a broader range of activities rather than in isolation
Provide more personalized customer experiences by tracking progress through the path to purchase.
Want to implement a shopper marketing strategy for your business? Please speak to us about how Mobeo delivers value at every customer journey stage.
‘Shopper marketing’ can be thought of as the intersection between consumer psychology, customer experience, and experiential marketing. These three elements combine to convert shoppers into buyers and build the brand’s equity within the retail environment while fostering long-term relationships with consumers.
Their customer’s path-to-purchase will establish each retailer’s shopper marketing strategy. For example, whether the purchase is being made for themself or someone else, the purchase research process, and which channels the customer prefers to make the purchase, such as in-store or online.
Shopper marketing builds its strategy on top of the unique path-to-purchase to create synergies and consistency in the messages presented to consumers throughout their journey to purchase.
A good case study for this is how many retailers have adopted emailing receipts instead of printing them. By doing so, it opts the customer into their email funnel.
Think about this – if a customer goes into the electronics department of a store and purchases a student edition of Microsoft Office and then provides their email address for the receipt to be sent to them, the store can now attribute that email address to someone who is likely a student. Then when it comes time for the “back to school” campaigns to roll out, that person will likely receive an email with various deals and promotions for other tools or products they might need and can drive them in-store (since it knows where they’ve made previous purchases from) or online with coupon codes.
What’s new about Shopper Marketing?
Shopper marketing tactics have been popular since the 80s, but forty years ago, they only took place in brick-and-mortar stores. With eCommerce and social media, shopper marketing has evolved to include these new sales channels.
The growth of the online space has paved the way for communicating and incentivizing customers, which plays a role in shopper marketing. For example, the ability to run loyalty programs or coupon promotions at the click of a button while seamlessly measuring conversions.
On being highly measurable, data analytics and business intelligence have come a long way. Having access to these insights has given retailers greater clarity around their customer’s purchase trends and habits, which can make informed business decisions to provide the best possible shopping experience.
What does the future hold for Shopper Marketing?
One pitfall of shopper marketing that many retailers fall for is the lack of personalization in their marketing communications. This is often because they’re often purchasing data from third-party vendors and applying it to their business, which is like trying to jam a square peg into a triangular hole – it just won’t fit. The future of shopper marketing is utilizing technology to customize the shopping experience better to suit personal preferences. In a hyper-competitive retail world, the winners will be the early adopters of technologies designed to influence purchase decisions.
If you want to stay ahead of the technological curve, speak to us today about how Mobeo drives revenue growth through personalized customer experiences.
You’ve probably heard of the “metaverse” by now, but it can be defined as the intersection of physical and virtual realms if you haven’t. It’s a virtual world where users can interact, play and experience things as they would in the real world. Mark Zuckerberg described it as “a virtual reality construct intended to supplant the internet, merge virtual life with real life and create endless new playgrounds for everyone.”
While most will be forgiven for thinking of video games when someone mentions the term “virtual reality,” it’s quickly evolving into much more than that.
For example, in the not too distant future, you’ll be able to power up your virtual reality goggles and visit your favorite clothing store to try on the latest fashion, browse the aisles of your grocery store or even be present for a therapist appointment, all from the comfort of your own home. In addition, any purchases made in the metaverse will ship to your chosen address.
The metaverse will help bridge the gap between the online and offline worlds and make global commerce more accessible for consumers.
Of course, this represents a massive opportunity for the early adopters to ‘set up shop’ in the metaverse. They would be able to carve out their market share ahead of the vast majority, but because the metaverse is still in its infancy, these businesses will be able to shape and mold the metaverse to their advantage.
However, it should be noted that deciding to become part of the metaverse is a big commitment. Businesses that choose to do so will need to invest time and money into new marketing strategies, digital transformation, and immersive experiences for their meta-consumers. In addition, brands need to allocate time to immerse themselves in the platform, learning the “culture” of the metaverse and how people engage within it.
Another consideration is the opportunity for brands to use the metaverse to reach new audiences and revitalize outdated brand perceptions. For example, older brands who have struggled to garner interest from younger generations or aren’t considered “ahead of the times” have the chance to overcome these challenges if they establish themselves authentically within the metaverse.
Within the metaverse, brands can let their creative side run wild. Because the confines of reality do not limit it, the options for how to stand out are almost endless when attracting the attention of their desired audience.
But how can you use the metaverse to deliver a unique shopping experience to your consumers? The list of ideas is likely to grow in the coming months, but to get your brain ticking, you could use the metaverse to set up a virtual showroom, offer unique or limited-edition collectibles, provide exclusive perks and promotions or even run virtual workshops.
If you want to start exploring how your brand can get in on the metaverse’s hype, reach out to us at Mobeo to see how we can turn your vision into reality.
