Gone are the days when you could find all of the Black Friday shopping deals in the newspaper. Now stores are taking advertising mobile and only letting customers know about super-secret deals via cell phone.
“Mobile makes a lot of sense for retail. … People are accustomed to interacting on their phone,” said Bill Jones, president of Air2Web, a mobile messaging company that is providing alerts to Wal-Mart customers for the first time Friday and Saturday.
Customers can sign up for Wal-Mart’s alerts on the store Web site or by sending a text message to a code.
Sam’s Club is also using Air2Web’s service, but customers have to sign up in stores, and Office Depot is sending mobile messages with Air2Web for severalweeks during the holiday season.
Text messaging isn’t the only advertising vehicle of choice this season. Staples ran an ad on The Weather Channel’s mobile Web site on Wednesday, the store’s first mobile ad.
As the customer “continues to be mobile” and the amount of information that can be accessed on a mobile phone increases, mobile ads will become a “more important piece of the marketing mix,” said Peter Scala, executive vice president of merchandising for Staples.
Even malls are jumping on the technology bandwagon.
Westfield shopping centers are relying less on direct mail and advertising. The chain is launching an effort to collect customers’ email addresses to send them notices with promotions and mall-wide and individual store sale announcements, according to Debbie Young, marketing director at the Westfield Wheaton. It has also partnered with NearbyNow.com, a site that provides a searchable database of inventory in a mall’s stores. Westfield started using NearbyNow in the summer.
“People do so much on the computer now, it makes sense to have all that information at your fingertips,” Young said.
The malls provided the site with a list of stores, and NearbyNow added the stores’ inventory. When customers search for an item, a list of stores that carry that item, along with notices about sales and links to coupons appears.
The site also includes information about where to park, the closest entrance to the store, and a map of the store’s location in the mall.
