I was alerted recently to MixMobi, which is a new technology platform offer to retailers who want to create their own coupons and offers. Why’s it interesting? Well for several reasons. It ticks a lot of boxes for success in mobile marketing.
The mobile channel offers merchants the opportunity to differentiate from their competition. In the mobile coupons market there’s been much attention paid by developers, retailers and not to mention analysts such as ourselves to the impact of Apps. Of course, it’s not just the Apps - it’s smart phones, the growth of the mobile web and underpinning everything the ever growing availability of high speed mobile broadband connections. But Apps are revolutionising the mobile experience and coupons and retail are no different.
Back to MixMobi though. A point that I’ve made elsewhere, however, is that for mobile coupons to go mainstream, they have to be made accessible more widely than on smart phones because of the relatively small (albeit growing quickly) proportion that smart phones represent of all the more than 4 billion mobiles that are out there now. Smart phones are definitely the end of the market where we will see innovative services too - don’t get me wrong.
The MixMobi platform uses a number of channels including SMS and bar codes as well as email, and integrates with social networking sites as well. I think that platforms such as this will help to develop the mobile coupon to become mainstream going forward. After all, one of the most important advantages of mobile coupons is that campaigns can be personalised to suit the preferences of the individual mobile phone owner and so have a greater chance of response than vanilla “everyone gets everything” marketing.
Tags: apps, MixMobi, Mobile Commerce, mobile coupons, smart phone
[...] Howard Wilcox, Juniper Research “I was alerted recently to MixMobi, which is a new technology platform offer to retailers who [...]