As Chief Technology Evangelist of Pocketstop, one of my jobs is to evangelize our products and help developers and potential customers better understand how to best leverage our platforms and combine our capabilities into a complete solution. Having said that, I would like to introduce you to the next-generation implementation of our Digital Offers capabilities and share with you some ways in which you can use the technology in your business. In this blog post, I will tell you why we built it, tell you what it is and how you can use it to drive revenue for your business and I will do it in less than 10 minutes.
Why did we build it?
As some of you know, Pocketstop started out as a mobile coupon company. Back in the summer of 2006, we started work on what would become the Pocketstop MOM system or Mobile Offer Management system. While it was a great idea and we had great intentions, our timing was off. Instead of abandoning the idea all together, we sought out another way to implement the technology. The end result was a loyalty program for shopping malls and shopping centers that aggregated the offers into a portal that consumers could access. Over time, more shopping malls signed up for the service and we eventually created an API that allows the offers to be displayed and consumed in any website, in a mobile application on any device, in virtually any web browser. Pretty cool, huh?
What is it?
Here’s the marketing speak. Pocketstop’s Digital Offers API (Application Programming Interface) solution is the number one in-store offer consolidation source. It provides your consumers and site visitors what they want — valuable promotions and coupons for virtually everything they buy at more than 1,100 US retail chains.
How can I use it?
Simply put, the Digital Offers API generates a feed of content that consumers want, in the form of offers. For marketers, this is the holy grail. Instead of manually creating offers or aggregating them yourself, our feed does the work for you. Best of all, the feed can be filtered, so that you only display the offers that you want to. So, if you run a shopping mall in Lincoln Nebraska, tell the feed to only use offers for your shopping mall and display those offers on your website. That’s actually pretty easy to do. With some code snippets, either our team or any developer worth their salt can easily work with the feed. Here is an example of a Pinterest look and feel (tiles) to display coupons.
For all you developers out there, here is an example call to the API.
AllOffers This resource will return all offers sorted by offer rank. The results can be filtered by store, mall, and/or category.
What other Pocketstop technologies can I leverage to create a complete solution?
That’s a great question. The feed by itself is extremely powerful, but you do need somewhere to display it. An easy solution is to display the feed on your current website. For those with mobile websites or mobile applications, the feed can easily be displayed there too. You can also combine the feed with text messaging and capture a consumer’s mobile number while gaining their permission to market to them in the future. Here’s how that would work. This solution combines Pocketstop’s Text Message Marketing platform with the Digital Offers API. For example, a potential customer sends a text message with a specific keyword to a unique short code. The system then responds back with a message like “Thanks for your interest in Nebraska Shopping Mall. Here is a link to this week’s digital offers”. You’ve just added another person to your database and you have their mobile number and if you’ve asked for permission, you can send a follow up text message the following week with a link to your offers. See how that works? There are many, many other ways in which the Digital Offers API can be implemented. For more ideas, pick up the phone and call us or send us an email. We would love to hear from you. Thanks for giving me 10 minutes of your time.
