It’s been a long time coming, but this is going to be the year QR codes start to find their place in America. Don’t get me wrong, these things have been all over New York City for a few years now. But with all the smart phones on the market they are now being seen everywhere.

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Ah yes, Christmas has arrived once again. This is the time of year when friends and family gather together to reminisce of another year gone by. People are out shopping for that special gift for their kids or significant other or hanging out with friends sipping a glass of eggnog. But there is usually one person who gets left out. “Who is that,” you ask? Your clients, customers, vendors, and most everyone else who has been vital to the success of your business over the past year. These people are so easy to forget because most of us don’t have a personal / special relationship with them. But if your business is going to have long term success you better start giving back to the people that give to you all year.

Let’s go over a few things that a small business could do to show their customers some appreciation over the Holiday Season

• The very easiest thing to do is send them a Holiday card. You can go online to Vista Print www.vistaprint.com and get some great looking cards customized with your brand at a reasonable rate. They also have other promotional items and their prices are very competitive.
• Depending on the size of your customer list, you could have a holiday get together at a local restaurant or pub. If this is something you choose to do, it would be best to talk to the manager of the establishment and see if there is possibly a discount for hosting a holiday party there.  Tell them that the percentage of discount they give, you will donate that amount to a local charity on their behalf. This is a Win-Win for everyone involved.
• Give to your client’s favorite charity. You may know that your client is passionate about a certain cause such as saving the animals, supporting cancer research, or the United Way.  Not only will your client appreciate the gesture, but you will feel great about supporting a good cause as well.  Again, depending on how large your customer base is, this could get costly. But remember every client does not have to get the same gift.

These are just a few ideas; you can get as creative as you want. The main thing to remember is giving is always better than receiving. And that’s the way life is supposed to be.

Next month we will talk a little about what you can do throughout the year to maintain customer loyalty.

Hey the millionaires are getting younger, thanks to the web

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I would like to share Jeffrey Gitomers latest video in his Ezine with you. He hits the nail on the head as far as Social Media.

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There are plenty of start up companies that are giving the SMB’s all the tools they need to communicate with their customers. One of my particular favorites is MixMobi. They have developed a platform that allows merchants to create coupons that can be delivered to mobile phones and Social Networking sites  via SMS  or copy and paste code. You can also track the effectiveness of each campaign.  They continue to update the ability of the site, so I expect even more great things from them in 2011.

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As a LBS consultant seeking to fortify my position as a thought leader in the area of checkins and Mobile Proof Of Presence (MPOP), I scan daily blog posts, articles, tweets, newsletters, and emails for real, live examples of companies harnessing the potential of MPOP to drive sales lift.

Many experts (myself included) have opinions about how impactful the phenomenon of “brands delivering personalized marketing messages to opt-in consumers at the exact time and place they are most-able to act upon these messages” will be. My use of the word “phenomenon” here tips my hand, but specific examples that can be seen as validating use cases are generally still hard to find.

Checkin Platforms Have Paved The Way

While the potential has been in-place for some time, it has only been in the last 6 months that the stage has finally been set for cases of  lift to be demonstrated. By “lift”, I mean proven, incremental sales tied to opt-in location-based marketing campaigns delivered via mobile platforms that leverage the fact that a consumer willingly notified the offer-serving platform they were in physical proximity to the point of sale. We have Fourquare, Gowalla and other “checkin” platforms to thank for this shift, as their success has accelerated consumer and brand awareness (and calmed the hand-wringing “privacy alarm” naysayers).

Mr. Gillen researches payment initiatives and visited with McDonald’s in Japan, to discuss mobile technology. He starts off by saying, “..The focus of our discussion was McDonald’s use of mobile technology for sales lift purposes — i.e., as a channel to distribute coupons and special offers, to entice customers into McDonald’s restaurants.”

He is already speaking my language. “Sales lift” is another way of saying incremental purchases and his immediate shift to the importance of using mobile to drive more customers through the retail door struck me. Too many view the “mobile web” as a smaller version of the web and miss the obvious real world implications of being able to walk around, while online, with a device that knows where you are. Coupons are old news but linking Near Field Communication (NFC) as the “mobile technology” behind redemption by a specific customer and, thus, proving that customer was in a specific store at a specific time is not.

He goes on to describe the program in detail by saying, “Customers (now about 18 million of them) register as members of McDonald’s “Toku” promotional program.  On a weekly basis (in time for the weekend), McDonald’s sends program members a mobile e-mail, with a list of coupons and promotions available that week.  Customers then have two choices.  One is to use their mobile browser to open mobile coupons, which are shown to McDonald’s cashiers (a promotional code is clearly visible).  The other, if customers have already downloaded the McDonald’s app (which 8 million have already done), is to download the coupons to their contactless mobile wallet.”

Wow. An opt-in program. Time sensitive offers delivered to a mobile device. Two ways to redeem the coupons. One of them involves mobile NFC payment tied to a downloadable opt-in branded app that serves as a “contactless mobile wallet”. Hmmm.

McDonald’s Mobile Coupons

Red is just getting warmed up. Remember this is not a pilot or a concept, this is  happening. He goes on to say, “Either way, the customer gains the benefit of the coupon.  However, with the contactless version, there is a special advantage.  Namely, McDonald’s is able to close the loop between coupon distribution and redemption.  By associating redemption patterns with a customer’s “Toku” membership ID number, McDonald’s begins to develop intelligence about that customer’s preferences.  Based on this, McDonald’s is able to configure and send out highly personalized promotions (by menu item, specific restaurant, time of day/week, etc.) to the customer’s mobile phone, which the customer is more likely to redeem. This increasingly tightening marketing loop cannot be achieved with plastic membership cards, nor with mobile browser-based coupons.”

So, the NFC redemption system learns as it goes and is able to generate increasingly personalized time/place/item offers based on real behavior within the application. This is the “walk-by-and-get-an-offer Starbucks Cliche” so often flogged in LBS circles, but it’s real and it’s live now and, apparently, used by 8 million opt-in consumers in Japan, in conjunction with a distinctly American brand that is hardly a fringe player in the quickserve landscape.

The finale is contained in the last paragraph, “Once customers tap their contactless coupons, the data is leveraged to immediately send orders back to the kitchen..This just goes to show that contactless is not just about payments.  In fact, it often isn’t about payments at all..”

NFC Contactless Payment and Redemption

Red’s point is that, even though NFC is most-often associated with cash-free payment (for example in mass transit ticketing), the real power of this model is that the system is using the personalized, tracked coupon redemption patterns to learn from the consumer’s behavior in order to both prove increased store visits and sales (lift) and increase efficiency via the speed of the resulting transaction.

I have covered why this is so important for brands to understand in previous posts, but suffice it to say I am excited to finally see the first real examples of companies leveraging the power of tracked, cutting edge mobile LBS technology, while also respecting and harnessing the power of consumer preference.

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Wilson Kerr (@WLLK) is the Founder of Boston-based LBS consulting firm Location Based Strategy, LLC.

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