Location-based mobile marketing provider Placecast has unveiled a new self-serve option of its popular “ShopAlerts” platform.
We’ve covered Placecast’s ShopAlerts service quite a bit on MMW, and it’s gained significant traction since its introduction. The service has garnered big-name clients like The North Face and AT&T who want to leverage the latest concepts in location-based marketing. With the new self-serve version, merchants can now create, deliver and track redemption of mobile promotions via a simple Web-based portal.
ShopAlerts uses a technology known as geofencing to automatically trigger alerts when opted-in users come within a pre-determined radius of a particular location. So a retail store, for example, could target customers that come within a block or two of their location with a special coupon to help drive foot traffic. The self-serve version allows merchants to upload and manage store locations and information, create geofences and promotions on the fly, track coupons and redemption codes and access analytics on participants, geofences and ROI. Users can also change messages in real-time.
The company says the ShopAlerts platform can reach 268 million phones across the four main carriers — AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon and Sprint. Though the new version of the platform is dubbed “self-serve,” the company says it’s not actually directly available to small business, but rather larger vertical companies like mobile operators, yellow-page providers, retailers, financial institutions or deal services who can then work with SMBs to deploy for merchants. We’ve embedded a short demo overview of the ShopAlerts platform below . . .
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3bEV9og3HA[/youtube]