Marketing Vox - Mobile Coupons Get Social, QR-code Friendly

Email marketers have long been urged to enhance their formats with links social and mobile platforms to make them as useful to advertisers as possible. This lesson seems to have been absorbed by providers of another popular digital ad format: mobile coupons.

In recent days, a number vendors and retailers have introduced new features, or announced plans for new products, to make the mobile coupon more flexible, shareable and user friendly.

Sharing Via Facebook

Modiv Media has introduced Modiv Social, a product that lets shoppers aggregate coupons from any source and lets them share select mobile coupons via Facebook.  The shopper will see a “share” option on a coupon to identify that it can be shared via Facebook.

Once shared, people can grab the coupon and load it to their mobile coupon wallet.

A New Mobile Coupon Network

YOOSE, the hyper-local mobile ad network, and adsmobi, have announced plans to launch a new service called ‘Prime Location’. It will be a location-based service for mobile coupon campaigns.

Walgreens Relaunches Circular

Walgreens has relaunched its advertising circular, a Sunday staple read by more than 50 million U.S. consumers each week, with a digital offering that offers hundreds of additional items through Walgreens.com and its mobile applications. Online ads also allow for social sharing via Twitter and Facebook, the ability to create advanced shopping lists and more.

Walgreens also added QR codes, allowing mobile users to view deals directly from a smartphone.

The QR Code Question

Walgreens is taking a flyer on using QR code technology—numerous studies have shown that consumers are not embracing the technology as marketers might have hoped.

For example, 18% of mobile users surveyed in Q4 2011 reported having scanned a QR code in the past 90 days, according to a JiWire report released in February 2012.

Among mobile shopping activities, this was on par with the proportion who had redeemed a mobile coupon, though was less than the percentage who had redeemed an online (34%) or newspaper (22%) coupon.

The QR code usage rate represented 53% of the mobile users who knew that their mobile device had a QR scanner. In fact, 33% of users said they did not know if their device had a QR scanner.