Placecast’s ShopAlerts service, which delivers retailer and merchant offers and discounts to consumers via their mobile phones, has been used by a number of high profile brands such as The North Face, and even AT&T. Today, the company is unveiling a self-serve version of ShopAlerts which allows merchants to create, deliver and track redemptions of mobile promotions.
ShopAlerts Self-Serve is a white-label geofencing platform for businesses that want to deliver geo-triggered offers to their customers on their mobile phones. Consumers can opt-in to receiving text messages in a variety of ways—at the store, online, via text-message, mobile websites or on Facebook. Geofences are virtual areas set around physical locations; when an opted-in consumer is inside a geofenced area, she receives a message from a business, including a discount, notice of a sale, directions to a store or other content.
The self-serve version of ShopAlerts allows merchants to upload and manage store locations and information, create geofences and promotions, track coupons and redemption codes and access analytics on participants, geofences and ROI. Users can also change messages in real-time.
ShopAlerts Self-Serve is actually not directly open to small businesses, but rather larger vertical companies like mobile operators, yellow-page providers, retailers, financial institutions or deal services who can then work with SMBs and can deploy this tool for merchants.
Placecast says that currently ShopAlerts can reach 268 million phones currently across the AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and T-Mobile networks.