Mobile loyalty gets hot metrics injection from Tetherball update

We’ve covered Tetherball a few times in the past, as they’ve been doing interesting work intersecting the fields of mobile loyalty, coupons, SMS and NFC. Now the company has announced the release of the updated Mobiquitous 2.0 platform, which adds a layer of comprehensive metrics and reporting on top of that for marketers.

What does Tetherball do?

Tetherball uses SMS, NFC (or a combination of both) to run loyalty campaigns. We’ve reported on two examples from the company in the last few months. In June and July, Tetherball reported two similar campaigns for American food chains Dairy Queen and Qdoba. Both initiated the loyalty scheme via SMS. After that you could use either the NFC scanners in the restaurants, or use SMS, to store your coupons and loyalty points on your phone.

Mobiquitous:

Mobiquitous is the name of the analytics software that runs alongside the Tetherball loyalty program. It offers a pretty comprehensive real-time analytics service that allows marketers to see the exact success of a loyalty campaign as it runs - and they can examine a specific campaign, a geographic area, or just a particular time of day.

What we think?

The overlap between loyalty campaigns and mobile phones really is a no-brainer. It just works. The inclusion of NFC is an interesting gamble on the part of Tetherball. Having a contactless aspect turns your phone into the ULTIMATE coupon engine - but it all depends on how many locations out there have the appropriate scanning devices. Huge companies like Visa are making them more common and popular, but until they become ubiquitous the uptake on services like Tetherball will be low-ish.