Can Coupons, Inc. Make Mobile Coupons a Household Habit?

July 15th, 2008

Mobile coupons are a great idea whose time just never seems to come. Compared to cutting little squares of paper out of the newspaper (if you even read a newspaper anymore) or printing out online coupons and remembering to bring them along, storing all those deals, discounts and special offers on your phone would be so much cooler and more convenient. If only you could find mobile coupons for your favorite brand names AND if you could be sure that the cashier would actually know what to do when you showed your phone screen at the store. So far, no one has mastered that particular check-out and egg challenge –there have not been enough mobile coupon customers to motivate big consumer brands to sponsor the mobile formats or to familiarize cashiers with how to redeem them.
So the recent announcement that Coupons, Inc and Yahoo! would jointly offer mobile coupons for national brands seemed like a breakthrough development. Coupons, Inc, the company behind the popular www.coupons.com web site, attracts over 7 million unique visitors each month, provides more than 90 percent of online printable coupon offers, and works with more than 800 top brands to distribute thousands of online coupon offers. Yahoo has a strong track record in mobile services and in June 2008 it claimed to be able to reach 600 million mobile users worldwide –a pretty good size target audience for mobile coupons.
To find out more about this new partnership, Codespotter interviewed Jeff Weitzman, Chief Marketing Officer at Coupons, Inc. Here are the highlights of that interview:

Q: Tell me why Coupons, Inc. got behind a mobile couponing program. Do you think the time for coupons on the phone has finally come?
A: There’s no question that mobile distribution has an important place in the future of couponing. In fact, Coupons, Inc. has had a platform for mobile coupons in SMS and WAP and mobile browser formats ready for a while. Because of our experience with online coupons, we feel we are the right company to make mobile couponing really efficient and attractive for the coupon issuers and merchants as well as for mobile consumers. Partnering with Yahoo! Mobile brings a large group of mobile consumers and advertisers into the launch of a really national mobile couponing solution. We think this is the right combination to create a full scale program that can grow quickly and meet the needs of national brands.

Q: What have are the special challenges of managing a mobile coupon campaign compared to online and print format coupons?
A: All the issues we addressed with online coupons apply to mobile, along with some new challenges. The industry as a whole has to agree on the technical standards and the security and audit processes for mobile coupons. I have been participating in the Digital Coupon Task force of the Coupon Professional Association Processing to work out some of these issues. Since mobile coupons are new in most markets, redemption processes and efficiency is a critical factor in venues like supermarkets and large retail stores. We have to look at where the coupon is likely to be redeemed and address redemption issues on a program-to-program basis for now.

Q: Will there be a direct link to the coupons.com web site or will your launch with Yahoo! be a separate mobile-only offer?
A: We expect to provide integration with coupons.com and will look at combined coupon delivery options –for example, with some campaigns and consumers, it maybe work best to have the first interaction on the mobile phone and then deliver a printable coupon via e-mail. The distribution method has to make things easy for the consumer. We will also deliver coupons to the handset with appropriate partners.

Q: Do you have any specific mobile launch dates and brand offers that you can mention?
A: We are already working with a number of national brands for mobile campaigns. I can’t give you any specifics right now.

–MJ

Entry Filed under: Services via Text