Point Inside Announces Personalization Tool for In-Store Marketing
The new service leverages historical shopping information to allow retailers to serve shoppers more relevant deals on their phones. It is an extension of the company’s StoreMode platform, which upgrades the usefulness of retailers’ branded apps with features like indoor mapping, product location, and store-specific searches.
9 Killer Location Features for Retailer Mobile Apps
Retail apps have a reputation for being bulky and unnecessary, and for taking up space on consumers’ phones without delivering enough benefit. Going forward, the key for retailers looking to gain traction with their branded mobile apps will be integration with more location-based components.
10 Ways Retailers Can Create Awareness of In-Store Mobile Channels
Consumers increasingly prefer to communicate with businesses through their smartphones rather than face-to-face, even while they’re shopping in-store. Retailers have reacted to this shift by investing in beacons and mobile apps. But many are finding that use of these technologies is low because consumers don’t realize they exist. To understand how merchants should go about building these relationships and creating awareness of their mobile channels, we spoke with seven industry experts.
Street Fight Daily: Groupon Will Cut 1,100 Jobs, LivingSocial is Planning a Comeback
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Groupon to Cut 1,100 Jobs, Pull Out of 7 Countries (Chicago Tribune)… The Resurrection of LivingSocial (DCInno)… The Commoditization of Ad Tech — How the Cross-Device Landscape is Going to Get Worse Before It Gets Better (Medium)…
Did Apple Just Solve Deep Linking?
One of the coolest things to come out Apple’s September product event was 3D Touch, which lets users indicate levels of intent based on how hard they press apps and links. Beyond the gadgetry of 3D Touch, one thing hasn’t been said: This is essentially deep linking, an area that will be a key battleground in local. 3D Touch could preempt the deep linking dilemma by peeking deep within other apps — a lighter and more elegant solution I’m calling “deep previewing.”
Street Fight Daily: Village Voice Nears Strike, eBay Kills Small Business Product
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…. Village Voice employees set strike deadline after negotiations break down (Poynter)… eBay Confirms Shutdown of Small-Business E-Commerce Software Products (Recode)… An Upper Limit For Apps? New Data Suggests Consumers Only Use Around Two Dozen Apps Per Month (TechCrunch)…
Why Are These 5 Apps Tracking Your Location?
Data privacy has become a particularly prickly issue in the mobile marketing space. As brands shift more and more of their marketing budgets to mobile initiatives, many want to emulate the behavioral targeting of a data-rich desktop environment on the cookie-less mobile medium. A number of mobile apps have started collecting user location information despite the fact that it’s not particularly relevant to their function. Here are a few that might surprise you…
6 Strategies for Promoting New Mobile Apps
Businesses large and small are increasingly relying on branded apps to promote their products and engage customers on their mobile devices. To find out what marketers, publishers, and brands should do to promote these apps, we turned to the experts. Here are six tips that anyone can use to promote a new mobile app without spending millions in the process…
Local News Isn’t Local Enough for Meporter’s Andy Leff
Meporter, a citizen journalism platform for mobile phones that was launched in May, combines the check-in function of Foursquare with crowdsourcing and old-fashioned reporting. Using the app, journalists of all stripes can check in to a location or an event and then share their on-the-fly news report with the world at large…
Connecting the Local-Mobile Economy, One Step at a Time
Hyperlocal, mobile, on-demand contextual commerce enabled by buy buttons within mobile apps — that’s the new string of buzzwords making the rounds at industry conferences. The market reality: It’s going to take a while for this string to play out in the connected local economy. A key reason is that even as mobile disrupts search, most marketers and merchants can’t expect to get their own app on a majority of users’ home screens.