HipCricket Chirps Up Mobile Coupon Service


Mobile marketing firm HipCricket is the latest to target its business at capturing mobile coupon partnerships. Mobile marketing firms and retailers are quickly rushing to figure out the best way to make money from the fast-growing market.

HipCricket’s new measurable mobile coupon targeting retailers and quick-service restaurants will provide partners with single-use promotional codes that are fully trackable by any point of sale system that accepts Visa or Mastercard.

Even though more fancy mobile coupon solutions are available from other firms – such as 2D barcode coupons – HipCricket is focuses on the masses with its solution optimized for all 240 million U.S. handsets that are SMS – text messaging – enabled.

As big-name retailers like Starbucks and JC Penney are testing out mobile coupons (both announced test campaigns last week), the market is surely hot. Other mobile marketing firms already established in the mobile coupon space include Los Angeles-based MobileStorm, Cellfire, and quite a few others, so HipCricket faces some tough competition. JupiterResearch estimates that by 2011, over 87 billion dollars in sales will be generated by 3 billion mobile coupons.

Founded in 2004, Seattle-based HipCricket has worked with retailers, restaurants and consumer packaged goods manufacturers. Over this time, HipCricket’s retail and QSR clients have successfully employed strategies to deliver mobile offers including Jiffy Lube, which sent an offer via mobile that produced redemption rates of nearly 50 percent new customers.