What Makes a Great Mobile Coupon?

July 17, 2014 , , ,

Mobile couponing is blowing up, but many ecommerce businesses still haven’t captured the tremendous value that mobile coupons can provide. With the right strategy, a mobile coupon can give your sales a much needed boost and increase customer loyalty. Consider these tips to become the master of mobile deals!

Specificity Matters

A mobile coupon is not just a mobile coupon. It is also a fantastic opportunity to highlight a specific product or group of products. While storewide sales have their place, consider featuring specific items in your coupon so you have the opportunity to add descriptive language and make them appealing. You’ll find that customers often respond better to this type of curated approach.

Choose the Right Image

An image is an incredibly important part of your coupon. While it always pays to have sexy product images, coupons benefit greatly from soem extra attention. If you are tying your coupon to a specific event, consider adding a themed image of your product, or an image that features your product in use. Images do a great job of telling a story, and creative images will let your customers imagine what it would be like to own your item.

Concise, Descriptive Copy

The text that accompanies your image is absolutely crucial, particularly considering that your customers will actually see it right on their home screen when you send your coupon through push notifications. You’ll need to strike a good balance here, because too little information focusing on hard facts will make you sound robotic, while too much information will sound flowery and will get cut off. One sentence of informative, descriptive text will make a huge difference where your coupon is concerned.

Correct Timing

Different audiences respond to coupons best at different times, so it pays to experiment and find the sweet spot for your customers. When starting out, try to put yourself in the mindset of your customer. Does your target market work 9-5 hours? Do they have an academic schedule? When do they normally buy from you website? This information will help you get a good idea of the peak time to send mobile coupons. You can hone from there.

Value For Them, Value For You

Mobile coupons can provide a great way to move products, but you’ll need to confirm two things overall: is the coupon valuable enough to be interesting to your customers? Does the coupon also serve to meet your goals? It’s pretty rare that businesses create a coupon simply to liquidate inventory. You want to make sure that the coupon creates value for you. Don’t send a coupon unless you have a clear goal in mind, and then measure against that goal. Whether you want to push a specific product at an intro rate or want to garner return customer loyalty, measure. It is the only way you’ll determine the true value of your mobile coupon.

These items all demonstrate the qualities of a great mobile coupon, but specifics can be useful as well. What have you found to be effective in your mobile coupon strategy? What mobile coupons have you personally responded to?

Three Types of Push Notification (That Immediately Benefit Your Online Store)

April 30, 2014 , , , , ,

Push notifications are one of the most powerful tools in the mcommerce arsenal. They allow you to reach your customers directly, without relying on email or social channels. Usually the customers who have enabled push notifications for your app are well-placed to be highly responsive, meaning that each message will almost certainly receive direct interaction. The key if turning passive activity into sales.

These are three types of push notification that can get immediate benefit for your online store if used correctly:

 Product Announcement/Pre-Order

If you regularly release new products to your customers, you know that there is some inherent risk involved during the early stages. Will they be interested? Will they actually buy? It’s a bit of a gamble if you go in blind. Fortunately push notifications can alleviate these issues and make new releases more of a sure thing.

First, you can use messages to announce new products in advance, release details about those products, and build interest before the initial release. When the product is actually rolled out, your loyal fans will already be eager to buy! If you want to take it a step further, you can direct customers to a pre-order page from your message. This allows you to know exactly how many people will actually pay for a new product before it is even available.

Flash Sale

One of the most tried and true methods for moving inventory quickly in physical retail locations is through a flash sale (a sale of items normally lasting an extremely limited period of time or until the inventory runs out). Ecommerce sites traditionally have faced some challenges with this idea because of their reliance on passive communications such as email, which is often checked irregularly and by a small number of customers.

Push notifications make the concept of a flash sale a reality for ecommerce sites. It can be as simple as creating a “Flash Sale” category on your site and then sending a push notification letting customers know the game is on! Alternatively, you can get more complicated, such as having specific items go on flash sale regularly and then sending a new push message once one sale is done and the next begins. Push notifications give you the flexibility to reach out as often as you like and be more or less guaranteed views by a large number of your app users.

News Flash

The other two items in this article revolved around sales, because they are obviously the lifeblood of your online store. However, push notifications can also help in outreach efforts, particularly as regards important news or updates. The immediacy of push notifications allows you to get in front of your customers quickly so that they are kept up to date on relevant goings on for your store.

Push notifications are a powerful tool, and one of the best ways to use a mobile app in your marketing efforts. Let us know if you want any more tips on push notification marketing and more!