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Shopkick builds bigger offline-online bridge with video, receipt scanning

Shopping companion application shopkick continues to evolve the mobile coupon space by introducing video viewing and receipt scanning, providing consumers with a wider range of methods to receive rewards while enabling retailers to enhance engagements.

In response to the growth of mobile video, shopkick is now providing users with rewards in exchange for video views within the mobile app and has seen average completion rates of 90 percent in test markets. Shoppers can now also scan receipts from stores and earn rewards for items purchased.

“When using our app consumers are already in the shopping mindset and planning a trip to the store, which drives significantly higher engagement with product-related content and videos,” said Alexis Rask, chief revenue officer and chief operating officer at shopkick. “Because this content is relevant not only for their shopping trip, but also to store locations nearby, the video makes more of an impact and completion rates are much higher than industry standards.

“With shopkick Video we see a 90 percent average completion rate, compared to the 68.3 percent industry standard for mobile video (IAB 2016), which makes sense given the sight, sound and motion of video brings products to life in a way that static visuals cannot, while providing consumers with fun, memorable content that will stick with them when they are out in stores,” she said.

Viewing and scanning
Users can now view branded mobile videos in the shopkick app to earn loyalty points. Shopkick video allows consumers to browse various video ads from brand parents, view the ones they are interested in and in turn receive rewards.

The mixture of marketing and retail makes a lasting impression from an advertising perspective, while also directly driving sales through loyalty and rewards.

The shopkick app now has capability to scan receipts made from in-store purchases. The scanning feature will automatically determine what items the user has bought, and provide loyalty points known as “Kicks.”

Brand partners can gain significant insight from the scanning receipt feature, as each consumer that using the shopkick app has information paired to his or her name. The feature allows brands to see who is buying what products, where and when.

Marketers saw significant positive results during test rollouts of both features. The average completion rate of shopkick video compares to the industry average which is 68.3 percent.

Shopkick has also acquired content discovery platform Theneeds to expand on delivering personalized content based on users’ interests.

Shopkick success
Shopkick doubled its users last year to a whopping 15 million, partially due to the shopping companion’s wide-scale deployment of beacons in major retail stores, which focus on offering consumers rewards rather than banal product information (see more).

With the presence of in-store beacons continuing to grow, shopkick also recently brought its mobile engagement platform built around the technology to retailers as a white label solution for the first time via a new partnership with ShopperTrak (see more).

“With the addition of these new features, we are offering our brand and retail partners a full funnel solution, from out-of-store content engagement to in-store conversion, as well as clear visibility into a consumer’s path to purchase with features that validate consumer awareness, product engagement, unit sales, and ROI,” Ms. Rask said. “As a mobile marketing platform, we recognize that in order to bring the most value to our partners we need to anticipate consumer trends as well as their customers’ needs, which drives us to continually update and evolve the shopkick platform to meet those needs.”