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 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.
As supply chain issues continue to derail hopes of a smooth 2022 for retailers, the year is already off to a shaky start.
However, it’s not all doom and gloom. Experts believe there’s a silver lining in the current retail climate, with many opportunities that savvy retailers and CPG brands can tap into this year.
Continued growth for super-speed deliveries:
With more delivery services launching in various cities, retailers’ adoption of these platforms is becoming increasingly widespread. Speed of delivery is the name of the game, with consumers tending to compromise the availability of specific products in favor of the speed they can be delivered straight to their door.
The shift towards premium products:
One market segment that gained popularity during the pandemic was the premium food and beverage category, including alcohol, frozen meals, DIY meal kits, and coffee. This growth is expected to continue post-pandemic due to changes in consumer behavior. While inflation has increased in recent months, there doesn’t yet seem to be any impact on consumer demand.
Overcoming labor shortages:
Many companies are feeling the labor shortage pinch, which is why many retailers and CPG brands are turning to process automation to reduce the workload of tasks that have been human-operated in both warehouses and customer-facing areas of the business. For example, many retailers are introducing self-checkout kiosks to replace checkout staff.
Expansion into food service:
The eCommerce boom in recent years has leveled the playing field and given retailers access to a new pool of potential corporate customers. Before now, winning contracts to supply fresh produce and meals to schools, businesses, and other institutions relied on bidding wars and relationship building. Now businesses want a user-friendly online portal with transparent pricing to order autonomously.
Increased focus on customer experience:
Experts predict that in 2022, there’ll be a consumer shift towards brands that alleviate their stress and provide products and experiences which spark joy. This could correlate to the purchase experience the customer goes through when completing a transaction or the physical products offered by the retailer. For example, many on-demand delivery companies have been offering “quarantine ready” packages, including things like a big fluffy bathrobe, Playstation games, a box of donuts, and some tissues, which can be on their doorstep within 30 minutes.
Eating at home is likely to continue:
Over the past two years, consumers have opted to dine at home, either by choice or as a requirement. This trend is expected to continue. This choice has been attributed to a greater focus on health, wellness, and self-care. However, this is not limited to meals being prepared at home but also food take-out and delivery from restaurants and fast food places. As a result, there will likely be an increase in ghost kitchens, robot chefs, and limited menus to help reduce wait times and costs.
Online grocery shopping is the new norm:
Unsurprisingly, there’s been a boom in the number of consumers who regularly do their grocery shopping online. According to research, the number of US consumers who do their supermarket shopping online has doubled in the past two years. It’sIt’s expected that this behavior will persist in the long term. The pandemic forced many businesses to make their online shopping experience smoother, which automatically removed some obstacles faced by consumers previously.
As with most things in business, perspective and creativity give you a winning edge. For businesses willing to adapt to a changing market, plenty of opportunities abound.
Mobeo is committed to improving brand loyalty and sales by helping retailers and CPG brands target, convert and retain local shoppers. So whether you’re attracting new customers or working on keeping the ones you have, Mobeo has a complete, customizable, and measurable solution to fit your needs.
Talk to us today about how we can help boost your digital footprint.
ACCORDING TO EXPERTS, the COVID19 pandemic has led to a massive disruption in the global supply chain, which shows no signs of easing anytime soon.
This supply chain crisis results from factors such as changes in consumer demand, shifts to online shopping due to lockdowns, factory closures, shipping delays, raw material shortages, to name a few.
With economists predicting that the current conditions won’t improve until 2023, here are a few ways that businesses can navigate supply chain issues in the new year.
Moving Excess Stock:
Geotargeted Ads: Having the ability to target potential customers according to their proximity to local stores could be a powerful way to let nearby patrons know that their favorite products are in stock.
Mobile Wallet Coupons: This allows businesses to create various promotions or coupons and send them directly to a customer’s mobile wallet in return, giving them a nudge or encouraging them to purchase from your store next time they’re looking to make a purchase. Once the coupon has been added to the customer’s wallet, the business can share updates about it through notifications.
Dealing With Limited Stock:
Take control of stock levels: Research shows that 43% of retailers believe better stock level visibility would help serve customers and increase the overall customer experience. You can implement an effective stocktake system to keep track of stock accurately.
Digital transformation: As many countries begin to move away from lockdowns and restrictions, bricks and mortar retailers are starting to recover; however, foot traffic is still not where it used to be pre-pandemic. Many businesses are benefiting from moving online to supplement income lost due to lower than average levels of in-store shopping.
Source locally: It could be a valuable exercise to source alternative products or components and materials locally instead of relying on existing shipping routes. This will vary for different businesses and depend on where they currently hold inventory and are presently sourced or manufactured. This will help companies determine their options and perhaps uncover even better solutions.
Network: Speak to other retailers who might be experiencing similar things to your business. Not only is it essential to have a strong support network around during challenging times but keeping your finger on the pulse and staying informed will help with decision making and forecasting. These networks may also be beneficial for sourcing new products or stock.
As supply-chain disruptions persist, volatility and uncertainty remain for the foreseeable future. However, retailers can grab the opportunity by the horns and address disruptions head-on. This will help in the short term and, if executed properly, could also help build resilience against future disruptions.
Mobeo’s suite of solutions can be customized to fit your individual business needs while driving traffic locally to your product or store. In addition, we offer the ability for businesses to create scalable, personalized digital offerings that are seamlessly added to shoppers’ mobile wallets, allowing for online-to-offline conversions in-store.
Talk to us today about how we can help boost your digital footprint.
The past two years have pushed retailers to their limits, with many unfortunately not surviving. This has also created a push towards switching to online shopping in an increasingly crowded marketplace. Reading and adapting to quick market conditions have often been the key to retailers surviving the crunch.
There’s a myriad of other elements impacting retails, such as the following:
Staffing issues due to COVID-19: With new variants emerging and rules constantly changing, it’s difficult for businesses to stay ahead of the curve. As infection rates continue to fluctuate, staff often need to be furloughed, creating problems for rostering and shift scheduling.
Expensive deep cleaning: The cost of cleaning is likely to have increased for most retailers, and they fight to keep their stores safe and hygienic to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and protect both staff and customers.
Less foot traffic: Due to lockdowns, stay-at-home orders, and general caution, people are choosing to spend less time in crowded retail locations like shopping malls or busy high streets. Instead, they’re opening for shopping online or limiting shopping to their necessities.
eCommerce: The pandemic and various lockdowns have pushed many businesses to migrate online to survive, creating an environment of intense competition as companies fight for their share of voice. This has also driven up the cost of marketing and ads in a crowded digital marketplace.
Marketing on a budget: Marketing has become a more significant challenge for retailers because of increased online competition and tighter budgets due to lower revenues. Many retailers rely on foot traffic, but there are fewer entry barriers when that’s removed. It puts everyone from independent retailers to major chains and franchises on an even keel.
Privacy changes: Facebook, Apple, and Google are making widespread changes to privacy policies that give consumers greater control over what information is shared with advertisers. This, of course, is a good thing for consumers but makes digital marketing more challenging and less accurate. This leads to increased ad spending with lower revenues.
Supply chain issues: Keeping an accurate gauge on sales and demand is crucial for planning stock orders and maintaining stock levels. This balancing act can be challenging because retailers have enough stock and don’t miss significant trends without over-purchasing too much inventory. Additionally, the timing of orders is essential as delivery times are constantly changing due to disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
With so many new and emerging challenges being faced by retailers going into 2022, it’s hard to see an end in sight. However, business owners should focus on customer loyalty, providing a delightful customer experience, and get creative with ways to connect with their audience.
It’s predicted that the next big thing in marketing for 2022 will be a focus on social selling, which is a great place for retailers to start targeting.
Social selling has many benefits for brick and mortar businesses, including helping you reach new audiences, boost your search rankings and online traffic, and help establish your business in your local community.
To support your local marketing efforts, Mobeo drives online traffic in-store with our suite of solutions, which can be customized to fit your individual business needs.
Talk to us today about how we can help boost your digital footprint.
