How Mobile – To – Store SMS / Text Messaging Works To Drive In Store Sales

Posted on 18 June 2009 by Patrick Flanagan No Comments

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SMS (Short Message Service or otherwise known more commonly as ‘Text’ or ‘Texting’) is the most pervasive digital data application in the world with 2.4 billion active users, or 74% of all mobile phone subscribers sending and receiving text messages on their phones.  In the US alone, in 2008 there was about 75 billion message sent per month.  These sort of numbers should make any marketer pay attention.

Here at ShopLocal we have been live for about year with SMS messaging in a variety of applications. One of the unique aspects of how ShopLocal has applied texting technology is for on-demand, ad-hoc alerting and messaging.  Instead of trying to “subscribe” a user to a series of ongoing message, ShopLocal uses text message as a way of moving content from a user’s computer to their more portable mobile device.  So users that choose to engage this SMS feature on any ShopLocal site are NOT signing up for a never-ending stream of messages, but rather just one (1) single message to help the user take some information they have identified as useful with them.

The core value proposition is simple then.  If a user knows where your store is and/or knows an item they want to purchase, the more sticky and portable this information can be the better.  Since the goal of the SmartCircular sites is to drive shoppers that are researching online into a physical store location to make a purchase, this type of shopper tool should increase the ‘conversion’ rate of these type of consumers.

By using text or SMS messages, there are loads of benefits not available to any other medium such as:

• Ubiquitous format across carriers and mobile devices
• Highest deliverability rate of any pushed based medium
• Messages are sent as the action happens which creates instant user gratification
• 95%+ of all US mobile subscribers are supported which includes all the major carriers such as Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, US Cellular, AMP’d, Alltel, etc, etc, etc (all due to picking the right underlying mobile platform partner – 4INFO)

With text or SMS messages, there are a few constraints to be aware of (so as to tell a balanced story):

• Only 160 total characters can be inserted into any one (1) outbound SMS message. This is an inherent limitation of this type of media
• Can’t track opens like you can with email. You can track sent and click thrus but open rates are not available
• Privacy and permission are managed at the highest tolerances. The mobile carriers often remind anyone that is sending message across their walled networks that unlike email where
• To prevent SPAM, no more than 5 unique messages can be sent to any given user within a 24 hour period
• This service is only available in the US.  Sorry Canada…

The two main use cases that ShopLocal currently supports with mobile text (SMS) messaging are:

1. Send A Store Location Of Interest To Your Mobile Phone (just one)
2. Send A Specific Item Of Interest To Your Mobile Phone (just one)

Here is an example of what a typical screen flow would look like for the 'Send A Store' to a mobile phone or device. The user is prompted to enter their 10-digit mobile phone number, agree to a terms and conditions (mandated by the mobile carriers) and then hits a "SEND" button to fire off the SMS text message. Note the red arrow. This is the link on the page that triggers this mobile messaging feature.

Once a user hits the "SEND" button, the SmartCiruclar site displays this confirmation message on screen assuming all the error checking conditions are meet.

Finally, here is an example of what type of SMS text message would actually be sent to a user's mobile phone or device. In this case, the store address, phone number and hours of operation would be included.

Here is a partial list of some of the retailer that have chosen to deploy this type of mobile messaging – just click to see and use live examples of this mobile feature:

• The Home Depot Online Weekly Ad Site
  • From the initial entry page, this feature is in the left hand nav and labeled ‘Send Location To Mobile Phone’
• Office Depot Online Advertised Specials (weekly ad) Site
  • From the initial entry page, this feature is in the left hand nav and labeled ‘Send To Phone’
• Toys”R”Us Store Ads (weekly ad) Site
  • From the initial entry page, this feature is in the top nav and labeled ‘Forward To Mobile’

iPhone + SmartCircular = Native Mobile Application

Posted on 7 April 2009 by Patrick Flanagan No Comments

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Does ShopLocal have a native iPhone app that displays in-store circular content? Sure do. Done.  The initial beta launch is already underway (just in case you want to participate, please just leave a comment below) and getting really great reviews from clients, partners and analysts. The ShopLocal team is iterating really quickly through new designs and features and is really looking to pushing this native mobile application out into the marketplace via the official distribution channel that the Apple iTunes App Store provides (and yes, we are dreading the long wait time of getting it approved).

This is the initial home or entry screen that appears once the app loads up and uses the user location data that the device provides

There is so much to cover on this topic, but a few of the most important highlights of how this mobile application differs from all the crowd of other mobile app developers include:

• Multiple device support – The iPhone / iPod Touch platform are great, but there are other viable mobile devices out there such as Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Nokia and (coming soon the Palm Pre)  If widening your distribution is important without increasing your time to market or costs, then the ShopLocal approach is the only way to go.  Build one great device agnostic application and port it out across multiple SmartPhone platforms. So to recap, the major benefits of this build strategy are:
  • Consistency between mobile applications – add a feature or kill a bug only once.  Not multiple times
  • Substantially lower up front development cost – since 90% of the application from platform to platform use the same code base, it is way cheaper as re-use is the name of the game
  • Faster time to market – Time is money. Money is time.  Even if a client was to just start with the iPhone platform and at a later date decide to “port out’ their mobile app to a new buzz worthy platform, it would be very quick to deploy to core / existing app to the new mobile device

A high level feature guide of what the current beta version of the SmartCircular Mobile Application contains would be:

• Browse by…
  • Brand
  • Category
  • Most popular deals (Wisdom of the Crowds based)
  • Circular page
• View item details
• Shopping list
• View nearby store locations with store details such as phone number and hours of operation
• Change your location
• View store location within a Google map (right within the application)

Below is a go-to-market pitch presentation that does a nice job of walking through the opportunity and the ShopLocal solution.  It really is amazing at how the iPhone is paving a way for a whole new breed of digital on-the-go applications.

PART ONE (1): Market Overview

PART TWO (2): ShopLocal Native Mobile Application