Location-based marketing and rewards continue to draw shoppers in-store. shopkick, the location-based shopping app that rewards shoppers simply for visiting stores, recently announced that its active user base has expanded to 750,000 users in five months. Shopkick users have scanned more than 3 million products at 250,000 locations nationwide, from partner brands Kraft Foods, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, and HP.
Launched in August 2010, shopkick has been downloaded 750,000 times, with at least 10% of users active in the app every day. Leading retailers including Best Buy, American Eagle Outfitters, Macy’s and The Sports Authority were among the first to join the shopkick community to offer customers the opportunity to be immediately acknowledged in-store via smart phones. Best Buy had integrated shopkick with its point of sale system to streamline the redemption of special in-store offers, and/or added bonuses for scanning barcodes of specific products. Since then, Target and Crate and Barrel and Wet Seal also have partnered with shopkick to deliver rewards to in-store customers.
CPG Companies Board The shopkick Train
Following the lead of retail companies, consumer product goods (CPG) firms are realizing the value shopkick offers. “We have always wanted to reward potential consumers for engaging with our products at grocery and mass merchandise stores,” said Ed Kaczmarek, Director of Innovation at Kraft Foods. “shopkick’s scan rewards do just that. We also increase consumer discovery across aisles with multiple Kraft Foods brands they would not have sought out otherwise, further deepening their interaction with our products. We feel shopkick is the clear mobile innovation leader and that is why we have partnered with them.”
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Kraft Foods brands including Velveeta, Oreo, Kool-Aid, Triscuits, Planters Nuts and others are among the popular products that have drawn shopkick shoppers around grocery aisles to scan and receive “kickbucks” rewards.
Kraft “kickbucks” are rewarded to shoppers when they scan partner brand products. Shoppers also can receive additional kickbucks, as well as exclusive discount offers, for walking into more than 1,100 partner retail locations, including select Target, Best Buy, Macy’s, American Eagle Outfitters, Sports Authority, Crate and Barrel, Wet Seal, and Simon Property Group mall properties.
What shopkick offers retailers and CPG companies is “tangible, high-value rewards to consumers while providing marketing insights to retailers and brands, from multiple points in the purchase cycle,” said shopkick Co-Founder and CEO, Cyriac Roeding. “What we’ve built in parallel is our brand-scanning rewards program, where anyone, anywhere can earn kickbucks by simply scanning partner products while shopping. Millions of times our users have done that.”
The shopkick application is combined with walk-in location technology, the shopkick Signal, which is an inaudible sound emitted from a patent-pending device located in each participating retail outlet. Signal works by verifying that the user is physically in the store, and then awards kickbucks. This level of reassurance is not possible with traditional location-based applications because they rely on GPS technology that has an error radius of 50-1,000 yards on mobile phones. And, because the Signal detection occurs on the user’s mobile device, the privacy of presence information is completely under the user’s control.
Kickbucks can be redeemed for in-store gift cards, song downloads, movie tickets, hotel vouchers, Facebook Credits to play games online, donations to 30 different causes and charities, and more.