For the fourth year in a row we participated in ATC’s Bowl Off and this year was just as enjoyable as ever.  After a heated bowl-off between Digby staff, in which we competed for the best score in order to join the Digby Official Team, Jason, Bryan, Mike, Dave, and Sheila prevailed as our top bowlers.

Decked out in official, classic Digby bowling shirts our team was departmentally diverse.  Dave represented our exec staff as our CEO & Founder, Bryan and Jason represented sales, Sheila is our team writer, and Mike is one of our very own developers.

All in all the team was rather equally matched but the most notable moment was when Sheila rolled two strikes in the tenth frame, finishing with a score of 138…beating everyone in that round but Dave.

Today I forgot my wallet. The trouble with being a woman is that it is fantastic to own more than one purse—for any occasion—and this leads to a lot of switching items from various purses. I’ve credited myself for being talented at this musical chairs-esque game, but today, for the first time, I forgot my wallet.

Walking into work, without a packed lunch in hand, realizing my wallet was left behind, I considered the possible options. I could starve. I could drive the forty-minute round trip back home to pick it up during lunch, leaving me with twenty minutes to find and eat lunch. I could go somewhere that uses Square.

Unsurprisingly, the last option is the most appealing. My debit card is saved in Square, and I’ve become very fond of the app, having used it weekly at Houndstooth, my favorite coffee shop in town. All I have to do is walk into their store and say my name at the register. No pulling out credit cards, trying to find correct cash, or even removing my cell phone from my pocket. I just walk in and say my name. And not only is the device convenient, it has lead me to get to know the staff even better. Talk about a local place.

The only trouble is that Houndstooth is near my apartment. Also a forty-minute drive. And while Square is becoming infinitely more popular in Austin, it is mostly used by food trucks, an appealing spot for lunch, but not when the sky is looking ominous and rain threatens to put a damper on a quick, outdoor lunch.

So what’s a girl to do?

It is days like these we need a really excellent mobile wallet. Not a convenient mobile payment system like Square, not a clever card saving device like Lemon, but a really, honest to goodness mobile wallet. One whose security is trusted. One that saves every last loyalty card and gift card. One that leverages the amazing, convenient location-based knowledge that Square does, allowing my card to pull up when I need it most. The question is, who is going to make it first?

Google Wallet is, as far as I can tell, leading the pack. Storing all of your cards in one place, securely, the Google Wallet requires near-field communication (NFC) and an android phone. These two caveats are unfortunately rather cumbersome hindrances. As an iPhone owner, the Google Wallet is evasive as Google Maps was during the release of iPhone 5 and while NFC is an interesting technology it is a major investment for a company to undertake and as a result, has seen little traction.

Isis is the leader in advertising. They seem to have a large ad on every other bus in the city and their commercials are frequent on cable. Also relying on NFC, and an android phone, Isis fails to have the name recognition that Google does. It, like Square, also depends on companies consciously making a decision to offer it as a payment option, making it more rare.

Lastly, Apple has taken first steps towards a mobile payment system, without making the leap to mobile payments. Passbook’s location sensitivity and loyalty emphasis makes it easy to use and especially appealing for retailers. While not technically a mobile wallet, Passbook seems to be a first place for consumers to get used to payment technology, before actually making a mobile payment.

So after one year of being the year for mobile payments, it seems the market has little to offer.  I look forward to watching the mobile payment race unfold and to one day, forgetting my wallet at home, not feeling like I’m missing anything at all.

Today we are excited to announce a strategic partnership with SapientNitro, a division of Sapient, the world’s leading integrated marketing and technology services firm.  This mobile marketing partnership will allow retailers and brands to benefit from the combination of SapientNitro’s brand communications, digital engagement, and omni-channel commerce offerings and Digby’s Localpoint Mobile Platform, a powerful location-based marketing system enabling real-time mobile engagement of consumers around brick and mortar locations.

We are also pleased to announce that Cabela’s–who previously selected Localpoint in a multi-year agreement to power its location-marketing engagement strategy–is utilizing SapientNitro’s Localpoint managed services including:

• Location-marketing strategy development
• Management of Cabela’s store and other target locations with the Localpoint patented location detection and management technology
• Development of location-sensitive campaigns through Cabela’s branded mobile app
• Deep analytics and consumer behavior insights via Localpoint Analytics.

Michael Leonard, Vice President of Mobile Marketing, SapientNitro commented on the state of retail, “This past holiday season marked a fundamental shift in how consumers personally connect with brands across all experiences. The Localpoint Mobile Platform allows us to help transform the retail landscape by creating an experience for the always-on-the-go shopper. This partnership with Digby provides an opportunity to elevate the mobile and retail industry.”

David Sikora, President & CEO of Digby is looking forward to working with the agency, “We are excited about this strategic alliance with SapientNitro, a company recognized and respected on the global stage—not only in the retail industry, but across many verticals, such as consumer goods, restaurant and hospitality, where Localpoint is a natural fit. We look forward to bringing this combined managed service offering to market, making location-based marketing much more accessible and successful for marketers and brands.”

To learn more about our new partnership, please check out our press release on the subject.

Earlier this week we were proud to be involved in BestFit’s webinar on Michaels’s mobile strategy.  Digby’s Eric Newman, VP of Product & Marketing joined Bazaarvoice, ShopLocal and Appcelerator to discuss best practices in mobile marketing, commerce and engagement.

Paula Puleo, CMO Micahels Stores shared how Micahels’s mobile goals have been customer-centric and interestingly enough, have not included mobile commerce.  After surveying their customers and learning that shoppers were interested in finding and redeeming coupons, learning about weekly deals and earning loyalty rewards, they developed a groundbreaking mobile strategy.  Among their goals:

• Discover which customers are in Michaels’ stores
• Drive in store visits and sales
• Increase customer engagement and loyalty
• Track mobile to in-store purchases

Eric Newman, in speaking on behalf of Digby, focused on the benefit context through location brings to a brand’s omni-channel strategy.  Through mobile, brands can discover a wealth of information on the physical world to deliver targeted engagement to brands’ customers, allowing them to send the right message to the right person at the right place and time.

To learn more about Michaels’s mobile strategy and hear more from Bazaarvoice, ShopLocal, Appcelerator, Eric and Paula, you can catch the webinar on demand on BestFit’s website.

Today we are excited to announce that our customer the University Co-op was chosen as one of Internet Retailer’s Top 10 Best Mobile Retailers for 2013!

UT Co-op’s smartphone app, powered by Localpoint, is rich with content and shopping and includes RSS feeds of Austin’s campus, the University of Texas sports blog, and even a listing of Longhorn games.  “It hopes shoppers’ responses to that content might tug on their emotions enough to buy a T-shirt,” as Internet Retailer puts it

Brian Jewell, University Co-op’s Vice President of Marketing (who has written for the Mobile Retail Blog on occasion) commented on the app upon winning the award.  “It is important to have relevant and changing content.  The RSS feeds we have for news is constantly updated with the ever-changing headlines of the day, and our app users love the cams, which allow them to pull up a live shot of a Co-op event.  Having all these features in one app creates a one-stop user experience for our customers.”

To learn more about the award, feel free to check out the press release on the subject.  In the meantime, a big hearty congratulations from the team at Digby!

As we started mobile website feature and project planning for Black Friday this year, we noticed a trend in customers wanting to have finer grained and more timely control over their product catalog information.  This included being able to change various attributes of a product, as well as being able to make a set of products visible/hidden based on customer defined conditions.

As a little bit of background – Digby’s systems ingest product catalog data feeds provided by customers to represent the set of items that will be accessible within the mobile website.  Typically those feeds are processed once a day, but they can be processed up to 4 times days.  The limiting factor for many of our customers is that the product catalog data feed is generated by a 3^rd party and/or system that is scheduled to run once a day.  This means that if changes need to be made to products, it can take up to a day for them to take effect and be visible on the mobile website.

Clearly this is suboptimal for a variety of reasons, but two of the most important ones are:

1. When product data needs to be fixed/updated quickly
2.  If there is a compelling event when new products need to be made available/unavailable.

Digby recently released a customer facing console that allows customers to make both types of changes, whenever the customer desires, where the changes take effect in near real-time.  The console contains two types of functionality, one which is called the Product Modification Tool and the other is called the Hot Markets Tool.

The goal of the Product Modification Tool (PMT) is to allow customers to make changes to a product’s title, description, price and visibility.  Think of it as an “oops” utility, where errors that were passed in the product catalog data feed can be rectified.  As an example, imagine a lawn mower that is priced for $3.99 on the customer’s mobile website, but actually costs $399.00.  This type of error needs to be changed as soon as it is discovered to prevent the customer’s users from being confused and worse, angry that the great deal they thought they were getting doesn’t actually exist.  By using the PMT, the corrections can be made instantly by the customer.  In addition, the customer can choose to simply remove the product from the mobile website altogether.

The goal of the Hot Markets Tool (HMT) is to allow customers to define sets of products that will be made available in between product data feed processing cycles.  As an example, when two sporting teams are playing in a championship game – the customer may have new products (e.g. championship T-shirts) that represent team A as the winner and also have similar products that represent team B as the winner.  The customer doesn’t want to have either of those sets of products be visible until the winner is determined.  Once the winner is determined, then the set of products for the winning team should be visible and available for purchase.  While the customer will update the product catalog data feed to add the set of products for the winning team, they want to ensure that the products are available immediately.  By using the HMT, the set of products can be made visible at a time of the customer’s choosing.

As Director of Technology at Digby Paresh Suthar helps brands with mobile website and iPhone/Android solutions, with focus on a commerce and promotions.

Photo Credit: Orvis

Coca-Cola Freestyle Webinar: Location Marketing for Brands & Channels

 
Today at Digby we are extremely excited to announce a webinar with Coca-Cola.

Scott Cuppari, Coca-Cola Freestyle’s Senior Marketing Manager, will share his experiences using location-based marketing as a strategy to drive traffic and influence consumer behavior at quick-serve restaurants in the Coca-Cola channel.  Stop by to pick up best practices, marketing strategy and expert tips.

The webinar will take place December 11^th, 2012 at 2:00 p.m. ET.

To register, please head to the Retail TouchPoints website.

Our CEO & Founder David Sikora was recently interviewed by Debbie Hauss, Editor-in-Chief at Retail TouchPoints. The two discussed the evolution of mobile from a device that promoted commerce on-the-go to a customer’s personal companion through the in-store shopping process. Sikora also shared his thoughts on mobile point-of-sale and the need for mobile wallets. Should your office not be video friendly, we thought we would share Sikora’s thoughts in text version. These are the higlights.

Mobile is the multi-channel glue.

When you dial back three or four years ago, everyone was wondering if people would actually buy things from mobile devices. Believe it or not, it wasn’t clear. Since then, however, the mobile commerce business has greatly accelerated and has entered its maturation phase.

Now, multi-channel retailers are looking at mobile engagement in-stores the same way. As they see customers entering their stores “Showrooming,” they’re realizing that mobile is a revenge for bricks and mortar, which have huge investments in infrastructure and allows shoppers to touch products and receive instant gratification. Retailers need to figure out how to better use mobile to influence the customer experience in their stores. Fortunately, what we’re realizing, is that mobile is evolving into the multi-channel glue that brings together all the different channels.

Through mobile, we have the capability to provide retailers with the knowledge of when their best customers have just arrived in their stores and the ability to connect with those customers on a very personal level. Instead of sending a broadcast message to everyone in a store, retailers can send a specific offer to a customer based on their shopping patterns, behaviors, and buying history. With emerging location based technologies, there are a lot of interesting things we can start delivering to retailers.

Who owns mobile?

When you think about the evolution of mobile, it began as an extension to the eCommerce store. As a result, whoever owned eCommerce owned mobile. Now, as mobile has bridged into the in-store experience, there is an evolution on who owns mobile. More and more, we’re seeing it move into the marketing domain and in some cases it is even moving into in-store operations.

Even now, 80-90% of retailers’ total revenues still comes from their brick and mortar stores. As mobile effects the in-store purchasing process, it carries much more weight for retailers than eCommerce. As a result, we don’t see mobile settling in eCommerce. We see it extracting itself much higher, even at the Chief Marketing Officer level. Since mobile delivers on an experience that spans every way retailers engage with their customers, it’s much more strategic.

There is no pain in credit cards.

There is so much hype around mobile payments and the big challenge right now is that you don’t see consumers raising their hands and saying, “I’m in so much pain. These credit cards? They don’t work for me anymore.” So for us and our customers, one of the biggest challenges in mobile payments is settling on a use case that is evolutionary and doesn’t blow everything up.

You’ll find more and more that retailers are taking cash registers out of their stores and allowing mobile check-out, but these things take time. We don’t see the credit card going away in the near term. Maybe the device will be used as a way to make payments somewhere down the line but consumers must embrace it and there just isn’t a lot of pain there right now.

Rich app for the loyal, mobile web for the masses.

It is incumbent on the brand and retailer to deliver really good experiences to their consumers and deliver on offers and new kinds of engagement. We see the brand’s rich application for iPhone or Android as their new loyalty card. Brands should encourage their best customers to download their applications and they should add as many business processes that are useful to their loyal shoppers as they are able.

“We are very proud to have been awarded a W3 Award for Digby Localpoint,” said David Sikora, Founder and CEO of Digby. “It has been a pleasure to watch Localpoint evolve since its vision two years ago to a product that is sure to change the way retailers leverage location to more effectively market to their shoppers in and around stores.”

By providing retailers the opportunity for location-based marketing, engagement and intelligence and brick and mortar stores and other physical world locations, Localpoint helps brands strengthen their relationships with loyal customers.

• Just-in-time marketing: Localpoint Outreach delivers the right message to loyal customers at the right time and place in the physical world, increasing qualified foot traffic to a brand’s brick and mortar stores.
• Proactive in-store engagement: Localpoint Venue triggers timely, personalized mobile offers, announcements and customer service during a shopper’s store visit.
• Insight into the physical world: Localpoint Analytics gathers intelligence for a brand’s brick and mortar stores, allowing retailers to understand shopper’s patterns, mobile campaign conversion and store engagement. By leveraging this unique data, brands can improve operational planning, merchandising and marketing across key geographic markets.
• Holistic view of loyal shoppers: Digby Localpoint reaches customers at the critical intersection between their cross-channel history and current location & behavior, providing brands with the first-time opportunity to proactively market to consumers in a way that is relevant and personal while shopping in brick and mortar locations.

Passbook, Apple’s latest built-in application, is designed to allow consumers one place to hold all their relevant loyalty cards, purchased tickets, boarding passes and coupons.  As Passbook adoption grows, it will increase consumer comfort and adoption of the use of location in brands’ marketing strategies.  This opens the door to a deeper set of engagement and service-oriented use cases along the location-based marketing spectrum.

Digby fully supports the Passbook model in the current implementation of Localpoint.  Since passes cannot be pushed to Passbook without the consumer’s explicit permission for each downloaded pass, Digby Localpoint can help brands encourage consumers to download offers into Passbook.  Localpoint can deliver rich offer content by sending app-powered push notifications that include a link that the user can retrieve with a simple tap and add into their Passbook for later use.

Beyond the tactical, Passbook’s location-based capabilities are market validating.  As consumers explore the value of location in mobile through Passbook, that adoption opens the door for retailers and brands to leverage deeper use cases around location-based marketing beyond Passbook.  This includes using Digby Localpoint to push broader, relevant proactive promotions to drive traffic to stores, engage consumers at a store location and enable 1:1, cross-channel engagement models for consumers as they move from online research to in-store shopping during their purchase cycle.

If you’re interested in learning more about strategies for leveraging Passbook, check out our latest post on The Mobile Retail Blog: “Passbook 101: The Details, the Challenges, and the Proactive Brand Strategies.”