Mobile couponing goes mainstream

Depending on the needs of the client, Cellfire mobile coupons include barcodes redeemable from the mobile phone or coupons loaded on to a loyalty card for grocery stores that then become consumers’ shopping list and savings card. Kihanya said the company was formed with the goal of taking the manufacturing coupons from the Sunday paper and bringing them into the digital realm, but the process has not been without its challenges.  

“The bottom line in the US is that most retailers use infrared scanners, which will not read a phone screen,” Kihanya said. “They look for a contrast, a black-and-white barcode, and phones absorb too much light. There are image scanners being deployed around the world where you look at a picture and process it at a pixel level.”  These, however, are still not commonplace. Cellfire supports both linear and 2D codes, but they are still in early days.

Optimization goes a long way in solving this barcode problem, as does moving away from laser scanners to image scanners and eventually near-field communications (NFC), according to Ronnie Forbes, chief technology officer of fellow mobile couponing vendor Mobiqa. The company owns a patented process for optimizing barcodes for delivery of coupons and tickets to all cell phones, regardless of form factor, and recently teamed up with Eagle Eye Solutions to create coupons that are redeemable through barcodes, SMS text codes and NFC. Mobiqa currently operates in the retail, airlines, cinema, live events and transportation industries - where the volume and the money are, Forbes said.

“The barcode is the perfect device to close the loop on a purchase,” he said. “Some solutions are text-based, sending a message with a unique number. That’s redeemed by keying the number in. That’s seen some success, but it’s much more difficult for consumers and retail operators to work with and understand. It’s hard to associate value with a number in a text, whereas psychologically people associate value with a barcode.”

The value for the brand is that whereas print or radio advertising campaigns are hard to measure, mobile is an absolute, Orr added. Brands know how many consumers received the coupon, how many did not work and how many fulfilled the coupon, not to mention solid demographics about the user, including their location. Carriers still hold the best data on their consumers. While they are remaining largely hands-off on mobile couponing today, it is a market they will have to pay more attention to going forward.

“The only thing in my personal experience that beats coupons is information,” said Per-Henning Almvang, vice president of sales and marketing at mobile marketing vendor never.no. “When we send out mobile marketing to a teenage cross-group of 15-to-24-year olds, we bundle marketing with a brand name. People stop seeing it as advertising when you start bundling it with information. Combining that with coupons takes it even further. That is where we have seen the lowest churn, where people combine a brand value with information that is essential to the group they are billing for.”