In 2014 there have been around 550 million mobile phone coupon users and according to Juniper Research the number will increase to 1.05 billion users by the year 2019. This increase combined with the fact that text messages have the highest read rate when compared to other promotional approaches such as email make it a very powerful marketing tool.

Seeing the potential of this mobile marketing trend Infobip created a flexible Coupon Service designed to meet the needs of enterprise clients to help utilise SMS to its full potential. With SMS coupon marketing, marketing agencies can run promotional campaigns that will both engage new customers and also improve the loyalty of existing customers.

Most enterprises and marketing agencies do not have the technical capacity needed to address the problems that can arise with mobile coupon marketing campaigns such as potential SMS coupon fraud, reliable SMS delivery, short code or virtual long number procurement. Dealing with all of these and other issues is a time consuming and resource-heavy task where Infobip excels at.

With 2-Way coverage in 49 countries, in-depth knowledge of worldwide markets and country specific legislature, our in house developed proprietary technology and expertly-trained tech support teams Infobip can ensure your marketing campaign's success. In addition to the Coupon Service, Infobip also provides the short code as well as connections for MT and MO traffic delivery with the ability to handle volumes of up to 10,000 SMS per second to over 800 networks across the globe and thus optimise your delivery time and resource costs.

The most commonly used coupon service is the Coupon Distribution service that gives an enterprise the possibility to check if the coupon entered by the owner of the mobile phone over SMS is valid or not, primarily addressing the need for fraud prevention. When a coupon has been used it is marked as such in the database and it is no longer valid. This automated solution enables a company to automatically handle incoming information without the need to spend valuable time and resources and helps you to focus on your core business.

A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF THE INFOBIP COUPON SERVICE:
1. Infobip generates new coupons based on the campaign identifier.
2. Infobip sends back coupons generated on the enterprise side or the Infobip side to the mobile phone owner.
3. Different rules can be set based on the needs of the marketing campaign:
• How long the campaign will last. You can set a fixed deadline to determine how long the campaign will last and manage your time resources.
• You can set how many coupons can there be per MSISDN number, limiting the number of coupons a single user can receive preventing coupon abuse.
• Determine the length of the coupons.
• You can define and customise an API call to share details of the campaigns, giving you access to a number of real-time analytics and the ability to optimise current and future campaigns.

So how does all of this look like in practice?
1. The mobile phone owner sees a promotional billboard.
2. The billboard displays a campaign identifier (for example BEVERAGE PROMO) that needs to be sent to a short code or a virtual long number.
3. Infobip system recognises the campaign identifier and sends back the coupon if the coupon is available.
4. Enterprise can track all mobile originated messages over the Infobip Portal.