Mobile technology and messaging company Veoo may have revolutionised loyalty schemes, couponing and mobile retail in store with the roll out of a solution that allows retailers to deliver offers to customers’ mobile wallets – and then update them on the fly.
Sounds unremarkable, but in practice it means that retailers can now combine loyalty cards and offers, personalise and update offers and, more importantly, trigger push messages about the offers when a customer nears or is in a store.
And by using Apple Wallet and, soon, Android Pay’s wallet, it helps shoppers organise and retain offers between visits to stores.
The interesting thing about Veoo’s offering is that it can pretty much permanently reside in the customer’s wallet and so can be a combination of both loyalty card, unique to them, and the offers that loyalty cards usually garner.
As you walk past a store that you have an offer from it can tell you, or once you are in a store, say a supermarket, it will remind you to redeem your offers.
“What is really sexy,” explains Gillian Hughes, Veoo’s VP of Corporate Sales,is that the retailer can update the offers, amend the offers and change the offers on the fly. So once one offer is used, you can just update it in the users wallet and start the process again. In theory you could personalize it or segment it – it all depends on how the retailer’s CRM system works.”
The solution is a platform run by Veoo on which the retailer can create its own loyalty cards and offers and manage them either on a SaaS basis or can contract it out to Veoo.
“All we do is spit out an URL that the retailer can then distribute how they want through SMS, email, through ads, browsers, in-app, push messaging or through redeeming a code,” says Hughes.
The user then taps on the URL in whatever format it arrives in, auto previews it and allows them to instantly save the corresponding offer to their mobile wallet. Once saved by consumers, this branded offer becomes a dynamic and persistent presence in the mobile wallet and is infinitely updateable.
As mobile wallet adoption continues to rise, ‘mobilised’ offers and coupons give brands and retailers the opportunity to grow their mobile customer relationships. Mobile wallets also add a new dynamic to existing mobile strategies, and offer marketers a powerful tool to drive and track in-store traffic and incremental sales.
Veoo has developed this solution using technology from US mobile marketing leader, Vibes, which has partnered exclusively in Europe with Veoo. Vibes has seen the solution already achieve considerable success in the US, where it is being successfully used today by brands such as Honda, Chipotle, Gap and Old Navy to improve engagement with mobile users.
Matthew Winters, CEO of Veoo, adds: “The Veoo Mobile Wallet solution not only provides a more streamlined and simplified way for consumers to organise offers and loyalty cards, ensuring that they never have to worry about forgetting to bring physical versions of this content in-store ever again, but it also provides marketers with trackable, updatable and location-aware content that is standardised by Apple and Google. These mobile wallets were built to help brands drive in-store visits, redemptions and ROI, and statistics suggest that the vast majority of customers say their opinion of a brand would improve if given opportunities to save offers and loyalty cards to Apple Wallet and Android Pay.”
Winters continues: “Brands looking to maximise the mobile wallet potential need to ensure that they partner with an organisation that has both the technology and expertise. At Veoo, our goal is to help marketers unlock new revenue by arming them with the solutions they need to succeed in mobile marketing and the mobile wallet is central to that. We are in dialogue with some of the UK’s leading brands and we welcome dialogue with any retailer who thinks the Veoo Mobile Wallet solution would be a good fit for them.”