Check-ins, The New Loyalty Programs for Businesses

Mobile marketing has witnessed a rise in apps providing local check-ins deals for businesses. Speculations are surrounding the use of mobile in affiliation with shopping online and offline, or both to increase during this holiday. These apps have been designed to facilitate the shopping experience.

These apps work by establishing platforms where both users and businesses can engage. Users are offered deals for the amount time they trade within a business establishment.

The apps also feature social networking platforms, allowing users to find and interact with friends. They also allow users to search and locate business establishments utilising the same apps. They additionally inform users of business establishments located near their location, utilising the mobile device’s GPS. 
Currently, the most popular app providing these services within the industry is ‘Foursquare’.

The growth in Check-ins application is constant; however they are still nowhere near mainstream activities. Facebook’s decision to update their mobile application with the inclusion of a check-in feature illustrates the innovative significance of these applications within the industry.

Small businesses owners have been reported to have shown interest to these latest applications, but find the process a little too overwhelming.
Recently a new application has been reported to be able to find a solution of those small business owners. Named ‘PlacePop’, the application provides the similar feature to other check-ins apps like ‘Foursquare’ but in a different approach.

PlacePop, created Kent Lindstrom former CEO of Friendster, is still relatively new in the market but growing steadily. It has been reported to hold a huge difference to other check-ins application such as Foursquare, which is simplicity.

The originally concept for the application was similar to the other check-ins apps, to allow users to share their favourite retail outlets with friends. However the concept eventually changed and developed to a loyalty program for small businesses.

The new concept is aiming to eliminate “punch card” hand-outs for customers and allow business owners to create them virtually instead on PlacePop.com.

Loyalty programs works once a business owner signs up on the website, and create deals such as, offering freebies to returning customers. PlacePop will assist on keeping tracks of the returning customers as they check-ins on every visit. 
Once loyal customers are eligible for deals, PlacePop automatically contact the customers through messaging services letting them know how to redeem their reward.

One of PlacePop representative expresses their confidence in the application in stating that: “Place Pop isn’t about collecting badges, it’s not a game, it’s about loyalty rewards. Local deals, that’s what’s going to drive the space.”

At Pipon Search Solutions, we concur with their statement and find these apps to be revolutionary. They could be one of the innovative ventures to force both the real and virtual world together.

Tell us what you think of these apps?