At Mobivity, we’ve been working hard to pioneer data driven technologies that bring personalized, targeted marketing solutions to the offline, brick and mortar marketplace.
In the online world, consumers experience display advertising, such as banner ads or social media posts, and direct marketing, such as email, that is personalized and relevant to their interests and past purchase behavior. This is made possible because the online market has full visibility of the consumer’s shopping cart throughout the entire point of purchase. Despite the growing success of e-commerce, only 7% of total commerce in the U.S. occurs online according to the U.S Census Bureau.
So what about the other 93%? The answer comes in the form of our SmartReceipt technology; which, combined with mobile marketing channels, has cracked the code on achieving the same shopping cart visibility for offline brick and mortar that was previously only afforded to e-commerce brands. This means that the great majority of U.S. retailers now have access to the same personalized, targeted marketing that e-commerce giants like Amazon have been privy to.
The core of our proprietary solution is leveraging our patented SmartReceipt technology which plugs our cloud infrastructure into the stream of purchase data flowing through a merchant’s cash register. Once implemented, we are able to setup our SmartSuite data platform where we ca soun utilize real-time purchase data to help merchants better understand their business and improve performance. In mid-2015, we released a solution called SmartSMS, our first application to leverage SmartReceipt. We quickly attracted Subway as an early adopter of the solution, and following a trial launch in the Summer of 2015, rolled out SmartSMS nationally to all of Subway’s more than 27,000 U.S. locations.
SmartSMS utilizes SMS text messaging as a communications channel for targeted awareness and sends message offers to consumers while leveraging purchase data to measure and target those messages much in the same way an e-commerce operator, like Amazon, uses online shopping cart data. In addition to SmartSMS, we’re also capable of controlling the printed receipt to produce targeted, graphical messages, including coupon offers, on the front of the receipt consumers receive following a purchase.
One case study we performed with a major national brand showed that consumers participating in a SmartSMS program increased their spend by over 100%. By leveraging purchase data, combined with targeted mobile messages to consumers, we were able to more than double the amount of money those consumers spent. This translates to millions of dollars in incremental revenue for the brand, and an ROI of several multiples when comparing revenue gains to the cost of licensing our technology.
This example also highlights another important aspect of our technology and business model. Because we’re plugged into our customer’s sales data, we’re able to immediately measure efficacy and confirm the value of our solution. At Mobivity, we know how important personalized, targeted messaging is to all retailers, not just e-commerce.