Pay By Touch personalises in-store marketing
Pay By Touch has announced the availability of its SmartShop service, which combines the company's biometric technology with data-driven marketing services to provide a truly personalised marketing system for retail store environments.
SmartShop gives shoppers customised offers on the products they buy most whenever they enter the store, before they do their shopping and make their purchase decisions. The system also provides merchants and consumer packaged goods companies (CPGs) a good return on investment (ROI) by enabling them to deliver the right offer to the right shopper at the right time, whether in-store or online. Research shows that 70% of buying decisions are made in the store, and that less than 1% of grocery store coupons are redeemed.
The aim of SmartShop is to turn each shopper into a qualified marketing lead, and provide them with excellent value while also benefiting merchants and manufacturers. According to Pay By Touch, the system provides shoppers with personally relevant offers and saves them hours of sorting through mass media and clipping coupons.
How it works When shoppers enter the retail store, they simply scan their finger at the SmartShop kiosk to get personalised offers based on their purchase history.
Shoppers receive an 8.5" x 11" print-out, containing 12 - 16 customised offers for the products they buy most. Armed with these offers, they head into the store to do their shopping.
When they come to the check-out, shoppers scan their finger again and the system automatically redeems the offers they've chosen to take advantage of. The paper print-out does not need to be presented or scanned, and no printed coupons are needed; the system's database keeps a record of the offers made to each shopper on the way into the store.
First trial at Green Hills One of American's most innovative grocers, Green Hills Market of Syracuse, New York, was the first to test the SmartShop service. "The SmartShop service has been extremely popular, and shopper participation is already impacting 50% of store revenue," said Gary Hawkins, CEO of Hawkins Strategic and proprietor of Green Hills Market. "We have seen offer redemption rates exceeding 20%. Of the customers enrolled in SmartShop, who also shopped last year during the same period, their shopping visits have increased by 10% per week."
Most importantly, Hawkins noted, SmartShop is already driving a significant increase in revenue in a time of new market competition from big box stores: "It has given us the tools to compete more effectively and not only retain customers but attract new customers."
Merchant support SmartShop also provides merchants with customer-based metrics and data that helps to improve the efficiency of their marketing efforts. It provides a web-based management system for algorithmic campaign creation and real-time targeting, and its targeting engine learns from each shopping trip to generate the next set of rewards. The system also provides analytics to make reporting and account settlement easier and more accurate.
Development Pay By Touch has been developing and acquiring personalised marketing technologies since early 2005 when it acquired loyalty technology providers 7th Street Software and Convena, and card-based loyalty system developer Capture Resource. The final building block for SmartShop came with the company's recent acquisition of technology partner S&H Solutions (in December 2006).
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