As smartphone use continues to soar, the landscape for promotions and offers is shifting. Despite the push to digitize coupons and phase out printed materials, mobile coupon redemption rates remain surprisingly low. According to a 2015 report by CodeBroker, a shopper-marketing platform, redemption rates for coupons delivered via email sit at just 2.7%.
Rather than returning to printed coupons or direct mailers, marketers are getting savvier in the way they distribute mobile coupons to increase redemption rates and optimize the ROI of their campaigns. Here are seven strategies that marketers should consider.
All great points. I think merchants should take advantage of many of the ideas you mention above. The problem though is that merchants don’t deliver enough of those types of offers/deals to incentivize their customers. I definitely get that they have a budget they need to work around and they can’t give everybody a deal. But for those loyal customers, I feel as if they aren’t incentivized or “surprised” (as you mentioned) enough.
A couple business partners and I just launched a mobile coupon company named SimpleSavr. We’re actually trying to improve mobile redemption by piggybacking off of print to hit two birds (traditional audience and mobile audience) with one stone. Even though some may claim that print coupons are going away, they’re no going away any time soon (there were 300B distributed last year). The problem as you mentioned is the low redemption rate of print coupons (on average 1%). Mobile coupons however drive a 10x higher redemption rate than print (I believe Borrell Associates analyzed this a few years ago).
We just launched, so hoping that we can drive some increased foot traffic for merchants by improving coupon redemption rate via mobile.
Stephanie what do you do to convince customers to give good offers and deals?