In an effort to capitalize on the growing trend of location-based marketing, Crate and Barrel will offer walk-in rewards and special deals to U.S. in-store shoppers via the shopkick mobile application. Walk-in rewards from Crate and Barrel are now available in 39 states, in addition to Washington, DC and Puerto Rico, since its initial trial in August 2010.
Location-based marketing continues to be a hot topic of customer engagement discussion. In February 2011, Retail TouchPoints reported that Whole Foods would leverage “check-in” technology from Digby to offer a more relevant in-store shopping experience via store visit-based marketing, quick response (QR) code scanning and in-store product research.
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While location-based marketing initially may have caused skepticism among retailers concerned about pushing messaging to consumers, research shows that consumers are open to leveraging this technology. According to the JiWire Mobile Audience Insights Report Q4 2010, 53% of mobile users surveyed said location-based sales, promotions and coupons would attract them to a nearby retail store the most, and that 26% of all users research a product then buy it nearby via location-based shopping services.
Crate and Barrel marked its nationwide rollout by offering quintuple walk-in kickbucks rewards on Friday, May 6 and Saturday, May 7. Simultaneously, the retailer kicked off a new one-day Crazy Deal program, offering savings on a single product. In addition, Crate and Barrel is planning to feature two-week exclusive shopkick offers, and continue to highlight other sale items and promotions within the application. The national rollout comes less than five months after Crate and Barrel initially launched its shopkick trial.
Nearly 1,500 large stores across multiple retailers and 160 of the country’s largest malls have fully deployed shopkick’s technology. More than 250,000 other stores across America reward shoppers for scanning products from brands including HP, Intel, Kraft Foods, Procter & Gamble and Unilever.
One of the accelerants for shopkick’s growth is its demographic. The most recent user survey shows that 55% of users are female, 49% are 25-39 years old and 92% are between 18 and 65 years old. Shopkick also found that 5-10% of the application’s users are active on a daily basis, 20% on a weekly basis and 40% on a monthly basis.
“It seems like we just launched, and in that time shopkick has been growing like a weed: with more than 1.4 million users, it’s the largest location-based shopping app now,” said Cyriac Roeding, Co-Founder and CEO of shopkick. “That adoption helped us get to this national distribution a year earlier than we had hoped. For retailers, our technology proves we drive foot traffic, basket size and repeat visits…”
How shopkick Works
The shopkick app, combined with walk-in location technology called the shopkick Signal — an inaudible sound emitted from a patent-pending device located in each participating retailer — verifies a user is in-store, and then rewards them for visiting in the form of a currency called kickbucks. By verifying presence in-store, shopkick helps assure that the marketing dollars invested in the program are being spent to directly reward customers who are visiting a store. Other location-based applications rely on GPS technology alone.
Kickbucks can be collected at all partner stores and redeemed for in-store gift card rewards, song downloads, movie tickets and hotel vouchers, Facebook Credits to purchase Facebook Deals or play games online or donations to 30 different causes and charities. Because the detection occurs on the user’s mobile device, the privacy of presence information is completely under the user’s control.
