Mobile Coupons

There has been lot of activity and ( hype ) in the mobile coupon space. It may be good to understand what is a mobile coupon at the first place. 'Coupon' is a marketing terminology.

According to Wikipedia..

In marketing a coupon is a ticket or document that can be exchanged for a financial discount or rebate when purchasing a product. Customarily, coupons are issued by manufacturers of consumer packaged goods or by retailers, to be used in retail stores as a part of sales promotions. They are often widely distributed through mail, magazines, newspapers, the Internet, and mobile devices such as cell phones.

Before Mobile Coupons, Internet based coupons were in vogue. Internet coupons typically provide for reduced cost or free shipping, a specific dollar or percentage discount, or some other offer to encourage consumers to purchase specific products or to purchase from specific retailers.

Mobile Coupon is a coupon that leverages the mobile channel for delivery/redemption. There has been a recent interest in this space because of possibly the following reasons:

• Mobile industry has exploded;
• Mobile data services are on the rise;
• Mobile as a marketing channel is getting increasingly popular and has better statistics in all forms of click rates
• In US, the paper coupons are estimated to be 300 Billion every year. Mobile as a channel surely can replace a certain % of this.
  
• Paper coupons are expensive and the results are not as good as the Mobile channel
  

Here's a breakdown of what percentage of U.S. consumers get their coupons from each medium, according to Scarborough Research:

• Sunday newspaper: 51 percent
• In store: 35 percent
• Direct mail: 31 percent
• Loyalty programs: 21 percent
• Circulars: 20 percent
• Weekday newspaper: 17 percent
• Product packaging: 16 percent
• Magazines: 15 percent
• Email/text messages: 8 percent
• Websites: 7 percent

Please note that in India, these figures might be much different.

The process that is involved in launching Mobile Coupons would be :

Begin to have a database of Opt-in users ( Opt-in users are the ones who are willing to receive mobile marketing message / coupon their mobiles ; It is like a email subscription in the desktop world ! )

Analyse the profiles of users

Design marketing campaign ( delivery means, timing, content, Awareness etc )

Launch

Analyse the results ( Reports of CXX statistics ).( There are so many statistics CPM, CPE, CPO, CPA, CPL CTR, CTV etc ). This subject can be a seperate post in itself. The thing to note is most of these statistics are used by companies in a manner that can benefit them :-)


Without digressing too much, below are the defintions :

• CPM (Cost Per Mille), also called "Cost Per Thousand (CPT), is where advertisers pay for exposure of their message to a specific audience. "Per mille" means per thousand impressions, or loads of an advertisement. However, some impressions may not be counted, such as a reload or internal user action. The M in the acronym is the Roman numeral for one thousand.

• CPV (Cost Per Visitor) or (Cost per View in the case of Pop Ups and Unders) is where advertisers pay for the delivery of a Targeted Visitor to the advertisers website.

• CPC (Cost Per Click) is also known as Pay per click (PPC). Advertisers pay each time a user clicks on their listing and is redirected to their website. They do not actually pay for the listing, but only when the listing is clicked on. This system allows advertising specialists to refine searches and gain information about their market. Under the Pay per click pricing system, advertisers pay for the right to be listed under a series of target rich words that direct relevant traffic to their website, and pay only when someone clicks on their listing which links directly to their website. CPC differs from CPV in that each click is paid for regardless of whether the user makes it to the target site.

• CPA (Cost Per Action) or (Cost Per Acquisition) advertising is performance based and is common in the affiliate marketing sector of the business. In this payment scheme, the publisher takes all the risk of running the ad, and the advertiser pays only for the amount of users who complete a transaction, such as a purchase or sign-up. This is the best type of rate to pay for banner advertisements and the worst type of rate to charge.
  • Similarly, CPL (Cost Per Lead) advertising is identical to CPA advertising and is based on the user completing a form, registering for a newsletter or some other action that the merchant feels will lead to a sale.
  • Also common, CPO (Cost Per Order) advertising is based on each time an order is transacted.
  • CPE (Cost Per Engagement) is a form of Cost Per Action pricing first introduced in March 2008. Differing from cost-per-impression or cost-per-click models, a CPE model means advertising impressions are free and advertisers pay only when a user engages with their specific ad unit. Engagement is defined as a user interacting with an ad in any number of ways.^[3]

• Cost per conversion Describes the cost of acquiring a customer, typically calculated by dividing the total cost of an ad campaign by the number of conversions. The definition of "Conversion" varies depending on the situation: it is sometimes considered to be a lead, a sale, or a purchase.