The Mobile Coupon – Talked about by everyone, used by no one

So why is so much hot air expended on these wonderful things? The main 
reason is because they should be an excellent way to deliver discounts 
to a highly targeted audience. Customers can either request them in 
response to an advert or be sent them as part of a customer loyalty 
program. Depending on the value and the objective of the campaign, 
they can be unique coupons that can only be used once or you can allow 
them to be forwarded on enabling them to ‘go viral’. Once distributed 
they can be comprehensively tracked. It’s possible to know who has 
redeemed a voucher, when and where. Far more information than is 
available with paper coupons. It’s even possible to send reminder 
messages to customers to tell them if their voucher is going to 
expire. You can also send time limited vouchers to drive people in-
store at quiet times, making the most of capacity.

So with all of this going for mobile vouchers, why aren’t more brands 
using them?

I believe that there are two reasons that crate a bit of a chicken and 
egg scenario.

Firstly, there is no easy solution for in-store redemption. Most of 
the available solutions require the installation of new hardware or 
substantial changes to EPOS systems, which creates a huge capex 
investment before the brand can run their £20,000 mobile campaign. And 
£20,000 is still a substantial mobile budget for most brands at the 
moment. Once that capex investment has been made the brand needs to 
train all of its staff, potentially on a national scale. Again, a huge 
undertaking for a short lived £20,000 campaign.

So, if that describes the chicken, what of the egg?

In two words, customer experience. As with any campaign, we have to 
think about how the customer will interact with the campaign. Let’s 
say they see an ad promoting the vouchers and text in so they can 
receive the voucher to their phone. They now go into their nearest 
store and try to redeem the voucher, they will be met with one of two 
responses.

1) “Mobile voucher? Sorry, I’ve never heard of it, I can’t accept it.” 
- Lack of staff training leads to a broken customer experience and a 
negative attitude to the brand.

2) “Mobile voucher? Yes we take those, you have to enter your code 
here, print off a paper voucher and then I can accept that.” – The 
customer gets their discount but it’s a disjointed experience 
combining mobile and paper vouchers unnecessarily.

We can all see that mobile vouchers should work but what will it take 
to make them work?

If a major, national, retailer were to get on board with an integrated 
solution it would open the market up to a whole range of brands being 
able to promote mobile vouchers to their customers, safe in the 
knowledge that they can be redeemed. So many of these brands have 
little or no control over their retail experience and don’t have the 
clout to push this type of thing. If Tesco were to implement this 
technology think of all the different brands that would suddenly be able 
to use mobile vouchers to drive sales. Not to mention the fact that 
Tesco could also benefit from combining the mobile vouchers with their 
own club card and other promotions. Suddenly customers can get 
discounts off food, cosmetics, clothing and, if the vouchers were 
extended to Tesco’s online shopping experience, a wealth of other 
consumer goods from children’s toys to garden funiture.

And mobile vouchering can be done on this scale, just look at Orange 
Wednesdays. That 2 for 1 promotion has been running for around 7 years 
now and has changed the nation’s cinema going habits. All it needs is 
vision and a commitment to deliver. I just hope that a national 
retailer has already seen this opportunity and is already working on 
it. I wholeheartedly believe in mobile vouchers, but we need to get the 
customer experience right or they’ll be yet another over-hyped mobile 
initiative, of which I think you’ll all agree we have had enough.