Mobile Coupons put you in the driver's seat

There's no question that offering discounts and special offers leads to an increase in business. And from a business owner's standpoint, there are a number of ways to promote your discounts and special offers. The most traditional means is through print advertising. But print advertising is costly and not very effective. First there is the problem with low open rates. The truth is most people don't even bother opening up what some consider junk mail. What about newspaper ads? These days most printed newspapers contain more ads than content. With print adertising you cast a wide net in hopes of attracting a few qualified leads.

Another opportunity for promoting discounts is through sites like Groupon and Living Social. The problem here is that there is a limit to how many times your product or service can be featured. These sites don't want to bombard their subscribers with a constant stream of unsolicted offers, so they limit the number of offers to just one or two a day. That means your opportunities to promote on these sites is limited.

Another popular method of offering discounts is through e-mail marketing. This is a much better couponing tactic than the other methods descibed above, but promotional e-mails also have a declining open rate. Half the time people delete those e-mails without even looking at them. And while people can receive and read e-mails on their mobile phones, the content is not formatted for a phone, which makes reading your e-mail offers more difficult on a cell phone.

So why are mobile coupons better? Mobile coupons offer the same targeting as e-mail, but have an almost 97% open rate. People want to receive discounts on their mobile phones. And when the campaign is setup properly, you can track coupon redemption rates, giving you valuable insight into which offers people respond to the most. And like e-mail marketing, you can send mobile coupons out whenever you want as often as you want.

Before you can start sending out mobile coupons, you have to have a list of mobile phone numbers. There are many different ways to build this list. Every business is different, and how you get people to opt in to your mobile marketing list will be different, but what is important is that there is a very defined opt in process. This means that people who voluntarily give you their mobile phone numbers know and expect that by doing so they are giving you permission to market to them. So don't blow it and send out text messages that don't include a special offer. Otherwise your mobile list will shrink as fast as it takes someone to opt out of your list.

Once you have a sizeable list of a few hundred targeted customers, you can start your mobile campaign. If you have only one product or service, you may want to limit your use of SMS text messaging to no more than two or three times a month. If you have multiple products or services, or you're willing to have multiple offers, you could easily send out as many as four to eight offers a month. In most instances, you don't want to send out the same offer to the same individual more than once a week.

You also have some flexibility in the type of offers you send out. A restaurant owner, for example, might send out an offer for buy one get one free. The customer simply shows the waitress the text message containg the offer. The waitress, or manager, notes how many people responded to the offer. If you want even more control, you can include unique coupon codes.

Mobile marketing is so new that very few businesses are using it. People are interested in anything that is new or considered trendy. Mobile coupons fits the bill. Numerous surveys have indicated that people want to receive special offers by phone. What they don't want is to be hounded. So you have to strike the right balance between message, offer, and frequency.

At some point in the distant future mobile coupons may reach a saturation point. Everyone will be offering them. Everyone will be vying for your phone number. But the one good thing with mobile is the ease at which you can opt in and out of a list. As a mobile phone user, I don't want to receive ten text messages a day from businesses promoting lousy offers like get $2 off or a free soda. If I'm not hounded by the same business, if it's a business or product that I use regularly, and if there is real value in the offer, my mobile phone is open for business.

If you're a savvy business owner and recognize an opportunity to jump ahead of your competition, then mobile marketing may be just what you're looking for. You could spend the next three to six months trying to figure it out on your own, or you can hire a company like mine Click Here Online Marketing to setup and mange your mobile campaigns for you. We offer a full range of St. Louis mobile marketing services, everything from list management, mobile website development, to POS signage.

Please visit our website ClickHereOnlineMarketing.com for more information.