Mobile Couponing Case Study

Mobile Couponing with bar codeAn American consumer packaged goods company asked MSA for a solution to enhance coupon redemption among consumers.

 

The Challenge

An American consumer packaged goods company who had been a long-term client of MSA’s Direct Marketing Platform (DMP) solution asked MSA to add mobile couponing capabilities to their program so as to enhance coupon redemptions among consumers.  Up until then, their program focused mainly on sending paper coupons via traditional mailers.

The Solution

MSA expanded and added several key elements to its DMP to allow for mobile couponing:

  1. Expanded its DMP IT infrastructure to include web hosting services to allow for mobile coupon websites, as well as various service and support APIs via Amazon Web Services ®.
  2. Developed from scratch a geo-based mobile coupon app compatible with both iPhone® and Android®  smartphones. Geocoding allows for the identification and exact location of nearby coupon-accepting retail stores.
  3. With both a mobile coupon website and a geo-based mobile coupon app, consumers had two ways to initiate coupon access and usage:
    • Consumers were sent emails with a link to access the Client’s custom mobile coupon website. They then accessed the website anytime via their smartphone’s web browser, and logged-in with their email-ID and password.
    • For the mobile coupon app, consumers downloaded the Client’s custom mobile coupon app to their smartphone. They then accessed the app anytime, and logged-in with their PIN number.
  4. With either mobile couponing usage option, consumers were able to redeem offers by displaying digital coupons containing barcodes from their smartphones at checkout.

The final key element was an upgrade to MSA’s proprietary NaviGATE™ technology to handle all of the interactions between various APIs and DMP servers that enabled mobile couponing functions, such as displaying nearby stores, viewing and selecting digital coupon offers, displaying coupon barcodes and submission of redemptions.

 The Result

Within the first 5 months of launching this new digital couponing program nationwide, over 13,000 consumers had redeemed 113,000 digital coupons offered by the Client, exceeding their expectations.  This came out to every consumer redeeming about 9 digital coupons on average over the period, almost 2 digital coupons per month.  Importantly, nearly half of these consumers (46%) had never redeemed one of the Client’s traditional paper coupons before.  As for demographics, 65% of the mobile coupon redeemers were under age 50, while 25% were under age 35.

For more information on this MSA solution, please contact Kevin Mason (kmason@msa.com), Vice President.

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