A recent Sears SMS blast offered Shop Your Way members $15 off of a $100 purchase, reflecting how the retailer is using personalized mobile offers and driving redemptions rates up.

The retailer is able to take into account real-time customer feedback along with hyperlocal and transactional data to deliver more personalized offers and messages to customers. The platform is powered partly by Pikato and other Sears technology components, with retailers leveraging Pikato’s offerings seeing up to a 1,100 percent increase in redemption rates.

“Marketing automation not only improves efficiency, it drives increased marketing effectiveness through better targeting, content management and closed-loop tracking and measurement,” said Jesus Sanchez, CEO of Pikato, Tampa, FL. “The key is speed to market. Sears and Kmart now have the ability to launch a personalized mobile marketing campaign within minutes and with no need of writing segmentation rules based on transactional and real-time customer data.

“Also, Sears and Kmart now have not only the option to create quick campaigns, also tracking marketing responses, marketing empowerment through improved information and knowledge, improved quality of campaign executions,” he said. “[The] improved marketing performance [and] reporting framework allows Sears and Kmart to track and analyze how campaigns are running while providing a consolidated view across the organization.”

Personalization is key
The personalization platform runs across Sears’ mobile Web site, Android and iOS apps, in-store Wi-Fi, SMS and iBeacons.

When consumers access Sears on any of these channels, they can select their preferences and view a list of personalized and targeted coupons. Members can like and dislike offers, share them across social media, load them to Passbook or redeem them immediately online or in-store.

Each coupon is accompanied by a bar code that can be scanned in-store.

Pikato then aggregates the data based on a consumer’s action to better personalize future offers and content.

Sears and Kmart members can access the experience through the “Shop Your Way” program by logging in with their phone or email address. They can also save coupons to their account for easier future access.

Guests can also clip coupons to save to their smartphone.

Another benefit of the Pikato platform is that it can launch a new campaign in under an hour, offering retailers such as Sears the ability to create new programs with agility and ease.

Shop Your Way
A specific campaign that Sears rolled on the Pikato platform took place on Friday, Jan. 10, and leveraged SMS.

The SMS blast read, “Shop Your Way: Amazing Member Deal! Get $15 off your purchase of $100 at Sears PLUS other great deals!”

Mobile has long played a key role in Sears’ efforts towards loyalty and customer engagement.

Last month, Sears reported that 70 percent of sales are made to Shop Your Way members, and that number continues to grow, with mobile playing an instrumental role (see story).

During Black Friday, Sears also leverage the Shop Your Way program and mobile to give members program early, online access to Black Friday specials days before in-store shoppers. Consumers could get special offers via the retailer’s app or mobile site (see story).

“It’s [the ability to] leverage predictive models and algorithms based on big data combined with real-time information that allows marketers to deploy mobile marketing campaign across multiple touch points and arbitrating hundreds even thousand or offers, coupons and content,” Mr. Sanchez said.

“Within Sears and Kmart, Pikato is managing 10-plus mobile channels including in-store Wi-Fi, SMS, mobile Web, iOS and Android apps,” he said. The most important role of automated campaigns is to coordinate and arbitrate all this many combinations of channels, offers, data customers and still keep all the content that is being presented relevant and personalized.”

Final Take
Rebecca Borison is editorial assistant on Mobile Commerce Daily, New York