Monday, June 18, 2007

Pay By Touch Survey Results

press release

New Consumer Survey Reveals Positive Response
to Discount Coupons In-Store

UK Despite traditionally low redemption rates and consumer apathy to money-off coupons in the UK, a recent survey carried out on behalf of Pay By Touch has proved shoppers have a positive response to discount schemes if they are both highly targeted and convenient to use.

In fact, the survey revealed that 88% of shoppers would use discount coupons, if these were more focused on their product preferences and were available in store while they were shopping.

Of those surveyed, 95% of shoppers who use a retail loyalty card have received in-store discount coupons. However, 75% of these shoppers said they frequently forget to redeem them even though some of the discounts offered were on items they normally buy.

Other factors that contributed to low redemption rates were the inconvenience of having to carry pieces of paper around and the fact that discounts were mostly for items the shopper did not have a history of buying.

It seems clear, therefore, that retailers who offer targeted discounts and make it easy for those offers to be redeemed, could have a compelling way to develop customer loyalty.

At Retail Solutions this week, Pay By Touch will be demonstrating SmartShop, its new in-store personalized marketing solution. SmartShop combines Pay By Touch's patented biometric technologies with its relevance marketing platform to offer unparalleled targeting based on shoppers' known preferences and established buying habits, to provide the first truly personalized marketing solution for retail environments.

Shoppers collect their offers by simply identifying themselves at the SmartShop kiosk when they enter the store. By identifying themselves again at checkout, discounts are automatically redeemed for any items they have purchased without the need for paper coupons.

SmartShop provides retailers with customer-based metrics and accurate data that improves the efficacy of marketing campaigns. SmartShop's sophisticated targeting engine 'learns' from each shopping trip to generate the next set of rewards. It provides analytics to make reporting and account settlement easy and accurate.

SmartShop has been available at Green Hills supermarket in Syracuse, NY, USA for the past 12 months and is now being adopted by other US grocery retailers.

Over 100 shoppers were questioned in May 2007 by an independent research agency.