Think about it: there are over 50 million active Twitter users who send out 140-character messages everyday, while there are more than 400 million users that log-on to Facebook on any given day. These numbers are more than enough proof that if there’s anywhere your business should be, it’s online. Because of these, e-commerce has slowly evolved into social commerce.

We all know that e-commerce means easy shopping with better choices, prices, and accessibility for the customer, and improved service and mileage for your business. Social commerce, on the other hand, gives the additional punch to the otherwise uneventful task of having your customers go to your site and click items to a shopping cart; it connects them to other consumers with the same needs and whose opinions can be of value to a pending purchase. Moreover, it makes for more interesting activities as social commerce taps the vast possibilities presented by social media platforms, giving them access to interactivity and real-time conversations.

Social commerce creates a personalized buy-and-sell experience not only for your customer, but for you as well. Brand presences on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have pulled businesses and consumers closer than before, oftentimes removing third parties from the equation. This means that people now have the voice to air what they want when they want it, and brands need to be sensitive to what their markets are clamoring for.

Be relevant: A recent study from Compete shows the reasons why people visit retailers’ Facebook pages.

It’s true that this kind of personalization always has the danger of backfiring, especially if your business gets caught in a scandal that goes viral. These days, lines are blurred between online platforms as people switch easily among them. Only the conversation remains the same, and if the conversation about you is bad on one platform, trust that it’s bad on almost every platform.

The risks are evident, but the rewards of social commerce are well worth it. The other side of the coin is that the personalization it offers gives your business the opportunity to listen in to the thoughts of your consumers in a more targeted level. A 140-character tweet can hold one of the most valuable market insights you’ve ever come across. Listening in to the conversation may even yield you that precise moment when your product or service is needed the most, and only the right bargain and the slightest bit of persuasion are needed.

Along with our social media partner, Needium, we have built an innovative system that monitors social media conversations to identify specific consumer needs, both explicit and implicit, to match them with relevant offers – all in real-time. With more than 100 businesses in 100 cities to index, filter, and match to relevant social media queries, the technology opens up possibilities of knowing consumer pulse and transforming conversations to conversions in just a few clicks. The platform is set to initially launch in Los Angeles, so if you’re interested to see what it can do for your business, contact us, and we’ll be more than happy to share with you how it works.

The deals landscape is changing. Where there used to be just a handful of services providing daily deals and offers, it’s now an entire global industry. There were 700 such sites that were launched in 2010, ranging from big players that cater to the entire spectrum of shoppers nationwide to niche sites targeting pet owners, soccer moms and college students. It’s getting a bit crowded in here for sure, so much so that even the more successful companies in the market are feeling the heat.

Yelp recently scaled down its deals operations and Facebook even went as far as killing off its own Deals product. Even Groupon is reassessing its pending IPO. With escalating costs of customer acquisition, increased audience fatigue from the deluge of daily deals and the lack of relevance and quality in offers, the industry seems to be in dire straits. But as the old business adage goes, problems are actually opportunities in disguise; you just have to look at them in a different way.

What we’ve discovered is that customers are not actually turning away from deals. They just want deals that are better and more relevant to their interests. With that, we’re revealing our new focus: smarter offers to monetize your audience.

It’s an established fact that you need to give people what they want to get them to buy. The host of daily deals people are shown all over the web is just too overwhelming to process. Our solution is to provide focus to a scattered deals marketplace.

What we’ve done is fine-tuned our offers system, delivering only the ones that customers will be willing to cash in. Our intelligent offer network collects all of the best commissionable offers that are in line with the interests and needs of our client’s audience.

Then, using our offer relevance engine, we continuously filter these offers based on contextual relevance, geodata and keywords coupled with the ability to sort by most profitable. The end result is a highly targeted set of offers that are enticingly lucrative to customers.

Finally, we craft a suitable relevance strategy that customizes these offers to improve conversion prior to publishing them. Our publishing tools make sure that these deals reach our customers wherever they may be: through email, on their desktop browser, via mobile devices and even through their favorite social networks.

And we don’t stop there. Our system continues to hone itself through our proven affiliate tracking system. We manage all affiliate relationships and negotiate higher margins for clients by leveraging our large network of publishers.

By presenting only the most relevant deals to our client’s customers, we make sure that they keep coming back for more. In turn, our clients monetize their audience while focusing on doing what they do best, be it publishing the best local news or engaging users with their app. If you want to see for yourself what OneBigPlanet can offer your company or brand, contact us (form below) and we’ll be happy to discuss our solutions with you.

Daily Deal revenue Chart courtesy of CreditScore.net

OneBigPlanet is proud to announce that our CEO, Eric Aubertin, will be speaking at one of the most popular daily deal events this year. The Daily Deal Media Conference is where the most respected experts in the field of social commerce and daily deals discuss the challenges and breakthroughs in this new and exciting industry.

OneBigPlanet is supporting the event in a big way by being a gold sponsor. In addition, Mr. Aubertin will be part of the panel for the Offer Networks event at the conference. He will be discussing a new approach towards B2B deal aggregation.
This new strategy aims to create custom offers that will yield the best results when it comes to consumer conversion. Using online deal publishing tools, a proven affiliate tracking system and an effective relevance engine, clients will be able to provide smarter offers to monetize their audience.

Started in 2003, OneBigPlanet aims to help partners create, manage and publish the most relevant deals for their customers. Some of the companies that are benefiting from OneBigPlanet’s expertise include Poynt.com, an all-in-one tool connecting users with local businesses, retailers and events while on the go; HurryHurry, a social and mobile platform helping small businesses reach out and build relationships with their customers; Gatehouse Media, one of the largest publishers of locally-based print and online media in the US; as well as Insperity (previously Administaff), one of the top HR companies in North america.

OneBigPlanet is excited to attend the DEALS3D event in San Francisco on the 18th and 19th of June.

About us:

• We have the most comprehensive & customizable digital couponing platform
• We help our partners create, manage & publish deals via the web and mobile
• OneBigPlanet is focused on offering relevant deals based on consumer’s location & interests
• B2B Technology company started in 2003
• 15+ years of technology and deals/loyalty management expertise

For more information regarding OneBigPlanet or to schedule a time to meet at the conference, please contact Audrey Nadeau at anadeau@onebigplanet.com

Hope to see you there!

Let’s face it: the future of marketing is paperless, online and digital. While coupon marketing has experienced astounding growth recently, traditional print cutouts have fallen by the wayside. In the age of the iPad and Facebook, those who stick with tradition would ultimately find themselves left out.

Mobile couponing generates higher redemption rates than traditional couponing, which in turn means that the dollars, both from consumers and marketers, will flow towards mobile. After all, why stick with paper-based coupons when the greater part of the population has embraced the culture of mobility? Mobile deals have proven to be far more efficient as well, as coupons can be easily forwarded via MMS or SMS or even be accessed via Email or Social Media apps on your smartphone. When properly integrated with other strategies, mobile coupons also generate higher returns due to brand loyalty.

As a business owner though, mobile coupons are often a far cry from the tried-and-true marketing strategies you are used to. Don’t fret. Here are a few questions to ask before starting on your new coupon program.

1. What coupon format should I use?

First and foremost, you need to familiarize yourself with the different formats and the underlying pros and cons.

Text-only coupons rely on Short Message Service (SMS) and/or email marketing providers. Since all mobile phones today have SMS and emailing features baked in, a lot of people have easy access to coupons that are spread this way. However, the 160-character limit constrains the amount of information that can be on the coupon so marketers need to be creative in SMS composition.

Image coupons are one way to get around this. A large percentage of mobile phones do support images but what now gets in the way is the small screen size, a limiting factor for mobile coupon consumption. Nonetheless, image coupons can incorporate attractive graphics and these coupons can be forwarded easily through social networks and Multimedia Message Service (MMS).

Web-based and app-based coupons have none of the problems associated when using text-only and image coupons. Links can be placed in these coupons for additional details, minor animated effects can be used to make it more attractive, and tracking views and clicks means you get better information about your coupon campaign. However, web pages do need to be optimized for mobile viewing, often one for each class of mobile device i.e. you need to optimize for iPhones, tablets, Android phones and even BlackBerry users.

2. How will customers redeem the mobile coupon?

Inform sales personnel about the terms and conditions of each coupon as they’re the ones checking its up-to-datedness and monitoring against duplicate redemption.

In addition, the mobile coupon itself must have specific redemption instructions embedded in it, such as where to redeem it, until when it is valid and if there is a limit involved like one per customer or one per day. Coupon text content should also indicate that the bearer must present his mobile phone with the coupon upon redemption.

If coupons can be redeemed over the phone, make contact numbers clickable (some phones allow you to use phone number links). Also, make sure that people remember to mention the coupon during the call and have a separate version of the coupon for mobile for easy tracking.

If your coupon is redeemable via your website, on your shopping cart webpage, highlight the field where customers will be entering the code for their coupons. On top of that, you need to ensure that your ecommerce pages are optimized for mobile as well. For point-of-sale coupon redemption, don’t rely on regular barcode scanners, which often do not work well with mobile screens.

3. What’s the best way to distribute these coupons?

Have a list of customers who have opted into your couponing program at the ready. Use a service provider to distribute your text-only or MMS coupons to this list.

For web coupons, advertise your offers through high traffic, mobile-friendly sites for maximum impact. Add them to your Facebook page, tweet about them, put the deal on Foursquare and spread them through as many of your social networks as possible.

At OneBigPlanet, we’ve made sure that our DealAdvertiser product has a strict quality assurance process so that our merchant’s coupons are of the utmost quality. We’re also working hard to make sure our services for our merchants are easy to use and provide valuable feedback on your coupon campaigns.

Questions make for more informed decisions, especially when creating a mobile coupon program. Ask them and the answers will come, often bearing not only instructions but insight as well.

No matter where you are in the world, chances are you spend at least several hours a week on social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter. In the past, you’ve been able to follow the daily musings of your friends, check out the cool vacations they’ve taken and interact with them through games, instant messaging and tweeting. Now, there’s one more thing you can do with your friends and contacts on a social networking site: shop.

You might think this isn’t anything new. After all, purchasing products and services online has been around for well over a decade. But combined with a massive online social network and the opportunity to share deals, e-commerce becomes an entirely new phenomenon: social shopping.

Simply put, social shopping allows everybody on your friends list to become involved in the online shopping process. They can voice their opinions about your prospective purchases. Friends can recommend other alternatives to the item you want. They can also share deals with you so you can buy what you for a much lower price or with better after-market service or even both.

Of course, with the wide variety of online stores and products available at your fingertips, and the ability to compare items and share deals with a few clicks, the whole shopping experience is made much more immersive, efficient, and fun.

To cater to this growing trend, several sites dedicated to social shopping have sprung up, such as MyItThings, ProductWiki, and Kaboodle, with existing social networking giants such as Facebook and MySpace moving in to capitalize on this trend as well.

Backed Up by the Numbers
Social shopping is a movement that is gaining plenty of recognition not just from web-based businesses, but also from the more traditional brick-and-mortar stores and retailers who are looking to move into new markets. What’s the reason for all this interest? Quite simply, the statistics don’t lie.

Research shows that people spend on average, a quarter of their time online either on Facebook or some other social networking site. In fact, in the United States, Facebook has surpassed even Internet giant Google as the website that people spend their time on most. Combine that with the fact that 9 times out of 10, a person will trust a friend’s recommendation about a product over any other form of advertising, and you can see the massive potential of what combining e-commerce and social networking can do for any business.

Think about it: Even the smallest, most unknown company needs only one hot product or good deal to go viral among Facebook’s 500 million users to really hit the big time. And the next company to do that could very well be your own.

Riding the Wave of Social Shopping
The most common method of leveraging the web for social commerce is by using digital coupon or deal sites but this is merely the first step. Larger brands with a greater audience often realize that they can include social feature within their own customer networks. But many are discovering that an important piece of information often falls outside the scope of their social efforts – the customer transaction.

Most companies looking to ride the social shopping wave are now looking for new ways to motivate people to spread some buzz about their company or their products via link sharing and recommendations.

Currently, companies and brands give such users incentives like points and badges for every link they share with a different person. While this won’t necessarily make your products go viral, they do still grease the wheels of the social networking machine a little bit, raising overall awareness of your product and building your company’s online identity.

The Future of Social Commerce
Creating a platform that encompasses both the social as well as the transactional aspects of e-commerce now becomes a key factor in creating a true social shopping ecosystem.

Just as search engine optimization has shaped internet marketing, so will customer network optimization shape social commerce. What companies need in the future are platforms that tap into the social experience holistically, taking data from all the diverse social networks and deal sites, and then creating the ideal incentive program that will draw customers to the brand.

As such, we at OneBigPlanet are here to provide you with the ideal platform for launching your social shopping programs. From introducing the brand through social media to closing the deal via online payment processing, we can create the ideal marketing strategy that will both increase your customer reach as well as provide the best service to your customers. Our aim is to give your customers the best social shopping experience, always.

As such, OneBigPlanet has made sure that we offer our merchants the tools they need to converge the social and shopping experience without a hitch. We’ve recently integrated a feature that allows merchants to sync our offer management system with both their Facebook and Twitter accounts. Every time a merchant adds a new deal to our offer management system, the deal will automatically appear in their Facebook and Twitter feeds with the potential of going viral and reaching Facebook’s massive userbase.

Nothing is more enticing than a freebie, discount, or special offer. Ever since a cereal manufacturer invented coupons a century ago, these tiny pieces of paper have turned into a marketing mainstay, utilized by businesses of all types and sizes. From tickets to newspaper clippings to mobile, coupons have grown to become a massive multi-billion dollar industry.

What coupons can do for your business

It’s an established fact that before you can make a sale, you have to get people into your store. Increasing store traffic is what coupons do best. It’s a good way to introduce your products and services to new people so that they can test and try what you have to offer without the hurdle of a large price tag. If the offer is fresh, it can bring back old customers as well. And if the offer delivers really good value, you might find your competitor’s customers coming your way as well.

Once you lure in new buyers in, you can now convince them to try out other related but undiscounted products and services. You might even succeed in upselling them to more profitable goods, which should more than make up for the initial price slash you gave out. Also, don’t discount the chance that some customers may be prone to impulse purchases and buy some additional items while at your store.

While there are other promotional techniques that can bring in traffic, coupons are by far easiest to measure. You can easily keep tabs on the redemptions and trace them back to the type of offer and product that was bought. After that, it’s all a matter of checking what factors made your coupon marketing program successful (and what failed), and then make the necessary improvements for the next time around.

How to create effective coupons

You can be creative in adjusting your profit margin with solid discounts, money-off’s, two-for-one’s, etc. But other things can enhance the offer as well, such as free information, samples or trials. However you craft the deal, the only requirement is that it directly answers your customer’s question: “What benefit will this product or service be to me?”

A cluttered, wordy or vague offer will not get the message across or even turn the heads of visitors who are too busy with all the other stuff lying around on the internet. A coupon is an ad, which means that only direct and specific headlines will work if you want to grab the attention of your buyers. Also, make sure a readable layout is maintained and don’t forget to include your company or store logo.

For digital coupons, you aren’t as constrained for space like in print but it still needs to be catchy. Web-based coupons have no problem in this regard and often use an entire page to discuss the deal in length. Just remember to keep it simple: use just two fonts, lots of white space, bullet points for better impact.

Mobile coupons are a different story altogether. Something like a mashup between print and web, you need to apply the principles of both to make it effective. Create the design as though making a print coupon but add links within the coupon that will help users share and read more about the deal.

Finally you have to decide how to distribute your coupons. While websites are the way to go right now, you have to consider where your potential customers go to get their information fix. If they are more mature buyers, you might want to opt for newspapers, magazine inserts, or direct mail. If your products are more adventurous or target a younger, more web-savvy audience, show the coupons online through a website, social networks, apps or mobile. The kind of media to use depends on how far you want to extend your market area and the demographic you’re trying to reach.

How to maximize coupon marketing.

Getting people into your store is just half the battle. You also have to maximize the opportunities that new traffic brings with it. Spreading out your special offer products, for example, can increase the chances of impulse purchases as the customer is ‘guided’ to walk around the store. This is also the time to build up your customer database by jotting down info in the most unobtrusive way possible, like through a quick survey or a short personal interview.

From there, it’s now up to you to maintain a good, lasting relationship with your customers by catering to their needs. Listen to the gripes they send you through your Facebook page. Give them exclusive offers via direct mail. Ask for suggestions through your Twitter account. Engage them so that they can spread the word about your business themselves.

Coupons are one of the most efficient ways to spread the word about your products. With the recent surge in the deal space and the rise of mobile coupons, the options for businesses are endless.

It’s true, the hype surrounding daily deals is dying down. As a consumer myself, a 50% off on anything will certainly pique my interest but to the market as a whole, the increasing number of sites entering the space (it’s not difficult to duplicate, after all) and the deluge of emails that it brings are beginning to take its toll on online consumers. In fact, traffic to sites like Gilt and Groupon has been declining over the past few months.

For some coupon buyers, the initial high of buying something at a discount often leads to what has been called Groupon remorse. The excitement wears off, followed by a lot of post-purchase questions. What will I use this for? Do I even have time for this thing? Wait, did I just save $10 for a one-hour drive that will likely cost me at least $20 in gas? This phenomenon is so widespread that a secondary market has even emerged for orphaned discount coupons, where disillusioned buyers can pawn off their unused discounts.

Merchants are feeling the burn as well. Even though there are a lot of coupon sellers that businesses can partner with, that also means that new offers are more likely to go unnoticed in the sea of daily deals out there. The space is becoming saturated and the opportunity for publishers, especially in bigger cities, is becoming questionable. On top of that, daily deals are changing customer views on product pricing. People are starting to look solely at the price of an item when buying instead of the benefits and features it has to offer.

To counter this, Groupon is launching a new service called GrouponNow. As opposed to its current offering of daily deals, this new service will be offering deals that are near the user’s location. An interactive map shows discounts that are available nearby and how long before they expire. Other companies are following suit, putting in their own spin to the daily deal concept. From LivingSocial’s Family Edition deals to LevelUp’s deals that get better on succeeding purchases, more and more companies are looking for ways to spice up their services and get more customers.

The Harvard Business Review warns though that, “merchants should be cautious and skeptical about these innovations.” While it might be too early to tell how these new twists will pan out, when it all boils down to it, all the time-bound, item-specific and location-locked coupons all just do the same thing: price promos.

This is why we believe that the traditional coupon is still the way to go. The daily deal has its uses, for sure, but the versatility of the traditional coupon is its own strength. Discount coupons can be delivered not just online, but through newspapers, magazines, coupon booklets and even through SMS and mobile apps. There’s no need for fancy online payments and verification, all a customer needs is to show the coupon to grab the deal. Merchants can also create coupons on their own terms, to reflect what best suits their clients. At OneBigPlanet, we’re well aware that you know your customers best and so we give you the freedom to acquire deals through our DealADVERTISER and publish in multiple formats with our DealPUBLISHER.

Daily deals are not the only thing you should look at when trying to promote your business, products and services. Often times, the advantages you get from participating in daily deals are the same as those from traditional coupons. It’s even better in many cases since you have a direct relationship with the clients who use these types of coupons. So next time you need to do some marketing, think about the possibilities you have with traditional coupons.

With The New York Times launching TimesLimited, a daily deal service for their subscribers, I think it’s high time for local media to rethink the way they do business. The NY Times is trying to leverage their advertiser relationships and market reach and I believe local TV, newspapers and radio should take the same approach if they want to remain relevant.

Local papers, TV and radio all have one thing in common: they know their audience well. A news team for a local paper works in the same town it writes in, is embedded in the culture of the area and even has personal relationships with the folks living there. It’s obvious that there is a strong connection with the audience present but the business model here needs a little tweaking. Indeed, Pew Research has reported a drop in ad revenue for local media outlets, some even going down by as much as 22 percent. Market research firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson also estimates that by 2013, old media will take in 41 percent less ad revenues than what they got in 2006.

And it seems that the trouble does not stop there. Big group buying sites like Groupon and LivingSocial have become successful in part because of their ability to write engrossing and entertaining copy. It might seem a bit much if all you sell is coupons but their investment in hiring an editorial staff is well justified with the numbers they are getting: $760 million in revenue for 2010 alone. With coupon sites becoming more and more entrenched locally, it will be just a matter of time before advertisers will be jumping ship and just selling through coupon sites instead of the local media.

There is a solution to this quandary though. Local media companies need to create advertising that is more relevant to their audience, especially online where most of the marketing dollars are headed. In fact, local media sites have the best conversion rates for local advertising, with upwards of 40% for local news, TV and magazine sites. The business is certainly there and the only thing that needs to be done is deciding on the type of ads to deliver.

One of the best ways to make the most out of a local presence is through coupons. While not all businesses can utilize coupons effectively (like real estate agents or insurance), these are still great for retailers and small businesses with inventory to spare, whether these are seats for a restaurant, overstock at a grocery store or time slots for a photo studio. Previously, a merchant had to spend hundreds, even thousands, of dollars monthly just to advertise online. Now, an effective coupon campaign can be created at a fraction of the cost of traditional ads. Coupons can be offered in a variety of customer-friendly formats such as through a local media website, via printable in-store coupons, or by easily redeemable mobile coupons.

For advertisers, the benefit of a coupon program is the presence of a measurable aspect to their advertising – actual product sales. This means that merchants get their money’s worth when they advertise, and if the campaign takes off, both the media company’s site and the seller benefit from the increased sales. If not, no one is the wiser since the merchant can optimize their offering and try again.

Daily group deals is an example of a great coupon program that has been a big hit with many merchants. Buying cooperatively is mostly a local phenomenon and since most people already visit their local news site at least once per day, offering a daily deal is a perfect fit.  A local media outlet already has brand recognition in the area and a network of merchants and advertisers under its wing, two of the most important elements when launching a deals site. On top of those, people are more comfortable dealing with someone local they trust instead of handing over their money to some bigwig company that they don’t have a relationship with.

Another great coupon strategy is offering discounts to clients. Whether it’s by giving introductory discount coupons to new clients or rewarding the most important and most loyal customers, these types of deals are often very sticky and make people come back, especially when combined with great service. Launching coupon campaigns was once a difficult endeavor, with all the tracking, logging and training involved. Nowadays, coupons are easier to implement and all that is needed is the right backend to process the deals. Customers get their discounts instantly, the retail staff have less headaches and management gets a better view on how well their coupon program is doing. All that is needed now is the technology to run this type of site.

At OneBigPlanet, we’ve built easy-to-use products to help you create and manage your coupon campaigns, providing the backbone for a smooth and customer-focused deals and offers site, iFrame or mobile app. Our primary coupon product is the DealAdvertiser, which offers two options to help you get started with your coupon program. For media companies with their own salesforce, we provide an admin dashboard that helps you create, track and manage coupons so you can offer the best campaigns to your merchant partners. And if your local media outfit doesn’t have a salesforce, OneBigPlanet also offers a solution where you can still offer coupon programs to local merchants by giving them access to an easy white-labeled self-serve platform backed by our experienced in-house team.

While it might seem that the local media is “selling out” when it offers coupons directly, it’s still the merchant that actually sells his wares. In fact, local sites that help their audience get the best deals on great products and services will be remembered for the excellent service they provided, and it aids in building the brand as well. Local media might be in a tight spot in today’s economy but with effective advertising online through a local deals site, they might just be able to beat Groupon at their own game.

Smartphone adoption has really grown in leaps and bounds over the past year. In fact, more smartphones have been shipped out versus PCs in the fourth quarter of 2010. Mobile apps are also booming as a result, with users downloading something between 14 to 40 apps per device. That might not mean much at first glance but multiply it by several hundred million devices out in the wild and you get a truly staggering number.

Mobile device usage has become second nature to a lot of people and coupon publishers and advertisers need to take a closer look as to how it will be affecting them in the future. Here are a few things to expect as mobile phones and other devices become more common:

1. Customers want ads and coupons, as long as it’s relevant to where they are. A study from Jiwire found that around half of the respondents aged 25 to 44 are more likely to engage with mobile ads if these were relevant to their location. Furthermore, they found that around 40% of the respondents said that coupons for nearby stores are the most appealing form of location-based advertising for them. That means that deal sites need to start partnering with location-aware mobile apps and offer discounts that cater to where users are. People are becoming more accustomed to using smartphones to find deals where they are. After all, coupons are most useful if those using them just need to turn a corner to redeem them.

2. Customers are okay with sharing stuff about themselves as long as there’s something in return. Credit card companies have long tracked individual user behaviors but it seems that what once was a creepy, behind-the-scenes activity has now burst out in the open. The same study mentioned above states that half of the respondents aged between 25 and 44 were willing to share their location provided it meant more relevant ads. People are now more comfortable sharing personal information like favorite activities, brands and products but they will be expecting you to put up your end of the deal by delivering deals that are relevant to their interests.

3. Customers will soon be paying not by card or cash, but by phone. This is already being implemented in the Android Market where users can charge app purchases against their carrier bill instead of their credit card. Soon, this will also extend to other digital media and even physical goods. Mobile payments will certainly drive coupon use since a buyer just needs a mobile phone to both find and redeem coupons as well as to complete payments. Gone are the days of signing receipt copies, inputting passwords and scanning barcodes.

4. Customers expect you to have a web presence on mobile. Yes, you might have a website but to truly be part of the mobile revolution, you need at the very least a version of your site optimized for smaller screens. The mobile site should still have all the basic functions of your main site, like coupon search and access to stored coupons.

5. Customers expect you to have an app. While a mobile site might do for some sites, to truly become a player in the couponing arena a site is expected to have an app available. There are a few ways to go about this: you can build your own couponing app from scratch or alternatively, you can partner with apps that have a huge following and use them to deliver deals and offers. This is exactly what Old Navy did when it partnered with Shazam’s music service. Another solution is to create an app that offers some useful functionality, like a grocery list app, and bundle in coupons that way, which is how GroceryIQ from Coupons.com works. For a custom-made app, you can work with companies like OneBigPlanet to create a homegrown mobile app for iPhone  and/or Android.

6. Customers still want great service. Whether you’re a coupon site or a brick-and-mortar who offers discounts, customers will still want to be treated well. Mobility not only means easier discovery of deals, it also means easier access to social networks by users. Disgruntled buyers can complain to the community at large and sometimes this sparks the same sentiments from others, leading to some very damaging PR. On the other hand, it also encourages immediate feedback for satisfied customers, which translates to free advertising all over the internet.

OneBigPlanet is keen on helping its partners discover how mobile will be affecting their businesses. This is why we have been hard at work developing an iPhone app for one of our partners that will help merchants better reach their customers. It puts the convenience of finding deals at your user’s fingertips, giving them the ability to find coupons near them and locate the nearest store to redeem them and add even add deals to their favorites to access them later. It will also feature coupon alerts so your users can stay up to date on a merchant’s latest promos.

With this upcoming iPhone application, we hope to help merchants acquire new customers by offering a fun and easy way for their customers to find and redeem coupons. Check the App store in the coming weeks for our first release of the RadarFrog iPhone App.