Insequent is a company that wants your business to go mobile. And it wants to do it without using a mobile app. The company has just revealed new expansions to their mobile coupon engine – which uses SMS and the mobile web to deliver mobile coupons in one of the most trouble-free ways I’ve ever seen.
What’s the story?
In general, mobile coupons are based around mobile applications. There are numerous examples of this kind of service – including Shooger, Cellfire or Yowza!! – and it seems to be the most hassle free way of setting up a coupon service. You host the coupons on-line, and the customer can browse, download and store them through the application. No bother.
Insequent has gone a dramatically different route. They use keywords and shortcodes which link to mobile websites. They have a live example in order to explain this:
Carneros Bistro is a merchant that works with Insequent. It has purchased the CARNEROS keyword within the service. So any consumer that texts CARNEROS to Insequent’s shortcode (55411) will immediately recieve a text in return that contains a mobile web link. Clicking that link will bring you directly to a landing page containing the mobile coupon they want, along with any other info Carneros Bistro wants to put there (although the less complications there are surrounding the coupon, the better).
The service keeps track of how many coupons are requested, and which of them are redeemed. This allows for an interesting choice in pricing plan. When a merchant sets up an Insequent account, they can either choose to pay 10% of the retail value for each direct sale in which a coupon is used, or they can pay $20 per thousand coupons requested.
The exact same process is used for non-coupon based services, by the way. If you’ve got a mobile website and you want people to be able get the URL easily (because even with a decent mobile keyboard, entering URLs is pain in the bum), then the SMS keyword option is a pretty simple way to go about it.
What we think?
I can’t tell you how much I love this service. It is maybe one of the most hassle free coupon services I’ve ever read about, and I can see it working brilliantly on in-store advertising. Imagine you’re queuing for food (or anything), and there’s a little poster that just says “Text KEYWORD to 55411 for a money-off coupon”. You send your text, get your link and BAM! there’s your coupon. Easy as pie. It doesn’t need an application, or a smartphone. The overwhelming majority of phones in Western markets have some browsing capacity now, so the potential audience for this just immense.
Another service very similar to this was announced recently – powered by MePlease – which sends the actual coupon by return SMS. The two implementations are very similar. The only real difference is that Insequent adds a click, but removes the necessity for recieving an MMS. Depends on what you like, really.
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I wonder if retailers would be interested in advertising coupons for money off at the point of sales. What is the justification of giving a discount to a customer who is already making a purchase?
The combination of SMS and mobile web is a great way to reach a large user base, but it is important to remember not all mobile phones have these capabilities and by launching a campaign that relies on things like mobile broadband you are likely limiting your potential reach. At my company Globaltel Media, our customers have enjoyed great success in launching customized SMS-based marketing campaigns that work on ANY mobile phone in the U.S. By utilizing the real-time response rate tracking of our solutions, our customers have been able to better tailor their respective campaigns to drive increased results in the future.
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