In a move some observers say might represent the future of loyalty and mobile payments, loyalty marketer Maritz Real-Time and smart card technology firm Vivotech Inc. have formed a strategic partnership to provide immediate retail promotions to customer mobile phones equipped with Near Field Communication technology.
The partnership combines Vivotech’s NFC mobile-commerce and Maritz Real-Time Customer Engagement platforms. The service enables retailers and payment providers to send purchase incentives and coupons directly to their customers’ mobile phones via “transactional marketing” that includes e-mail, text messaging and NFC components, says Thad Peterson, Maritz Real-Time managing director.
“What we’re looking at here is being able to change customer behavior much closer to the transaction and where things happen in the stores,” he says.
The effort involves a combination of having engaging communications with the customer and customer loyalty to a particular store, Peterson says. “The nexus of customer engagement and transactional marketing allows to deliver individually targeted messages through our platform,” he says.
Peterson cites as an example a 20-something female consumer who is a frequent buyer of clothing but who rarely shops at a specific specialty retail store. “Once we’ve identified the customer, we can send her a coupon to be redeemed in the store related to what she likes based on past purchases at the store, or we can make sure that if she has loyalty points at the store that she knows how many she has and when she can use them,” he says.
To access the system in a store, customers can tap their NFC-enabled phone to a displayed NFC device to identify that they are there shopping, and the system sends them an incentive or discount. The customer then can tap the phone again at checkout to receive the discount, explains Mohammad Khan, president of Vivotech, which is providing the NFC wallet function for the customer-engagement platform. “This is the 2.0 version of loyalty marketing,” says Khan.
The location-based system also can target customers with coupons, communications about sales or events, or other kinds of offers in text messages when they walk in the door or when they are checking out. And it can provide incentives to use loyalty points to pay for items, Peterson explains.
The system also can send messages as customers walk out of stores to give them an incentive to come back another day for an offer. “We can manage the dialogue between the customer and the retailer up to and after the transaction,” says Peterson.
Card issuers and acquirers may offer this type of service to their retail clients, and Maritz is working on selling it to its card and acquirer partners, Peterson says. The companies have not yet announced clients for the product, but the market is ready for such a service, he contends.
“There’s a convergence happening [with mobile-phone use and retailing], and we’re betting on it,” Peterson says. “Retailers clearly understand that they cannot not know who their customer is and be competitive; they need to communicate and engage customers across channels.”
Mobile devices do more than what the market initially thought they could, so expectations and capabilities are converging to enable retailers to use cross-channel marketing to get consumers to shop, Peterson says. “It’s happening pretty darn quickly, and any major player in the mobile-payment market is putting a bet down that NFC is going to be a pretty good fit for those applications,” he says.
Vivotech’s Zapa NFC loyalty system, which has been in place in the United Kingdom and Ireland for two years, has had good results, Khan says. He would not provide numbers but says transactions and ticket values have gone up at the retailers who use the system. “We’ve had positive results for consumers, merchants and banks,” he says.
Mintel Comperemedia in late 2010 held a webinar on loyalty marketing that highlighted the need and demand for such services (
What do you think about this? Send us your feedback.
