ABCs of Successfully Distributing Promotional Content

How can we improve the odds of consumers paying attention to what we have to say?

In the development of anything dealing with the marketing of promotional content (disclosure: part of my day job), there are three challenges to overcome:

1. App Abandonment: with less than 25% of mobile apps being used more than once, there is obviously no silver bullet from a functional point of view.
2. Banner Blindness: recall, relevancy and results are often in the realm of single digits or lower making the shift from media tonnage to targeting an imperative.  We simply don't remember what we saw.
3. Coupon Clutter:  the impact of 329 billion coupons being distributed in the US alone has to drown some segments to the point of not even wanting to deal with coupons.

Since a PhD dissertation in 1999 first described the irony of consumers skipping the creative designed to help then find the information they were looking for there has been a lot of research into what makes for engaging experiences.  There is even an organization dedicated to banner blindness that quantifies the impact tuning out.   (Great infographic here.)

All this suggests consumers (or a least a sizable segment) don't want to deal with the hassle - they just want the benefit.  This point is confirmed in Inmar research (free registration required to download.)

There seem to be so many rules to coupons. I don't want to have to carry around the store coupon policies in order to get a deal.

So, entering the market are digital coupons of two types - Print-at-Home and Load-to-Card - to help remove the friction in the process of saving money.    The research ends with a consumer survey stating the obvious: Consumers want "easy" couponing.  More specifically, they don't want to do it -- they want somebody else to ensure they get the benefits.

• 65%  "I want coupons loaded to my store loyalty card for products that I normally buy."
• 65%  "I want stores to email me with coupons for products that I normally buy."
• 58%  "I want all available manufacturer's coupons to be loaded onto my store loyalty card."
• 63%  "I want all available store coupons to be loaded to my store loyalty card."

Q5.10: Now I want you to think specifically about coupons that you can access online using your computer, mobile phone, or tablet.  Please rate your agreement with the following statements (top 2 box -- Agree/Strongly Agree).

The answer to the opening question appears to be another question:  Should we identify a loyal segment where we can simply take coupons out of the equation?