AT&T recently announced that it will be extending mobile barcode services to its small business customers. As mobile barcodes continue to gain in popularity, businesses of all sizes including smaller retailers, brands, restaurants and enterprises will have an opportunity to deliver marketing content to consumer mobile devices.
The AT&T Code Management Platform enables small businesses to create and manage mobile marketing content. The platform provides customized, pre-made templates to easily create mobile-optimized web land pages. The results of scanning a 1D or 2D barcode can also be changed without replacing the physical codes to keep content up-to-date. After users have created their mobile barcodes, they can use the platform’s reporting tools to measure the effectiveness of any given campaign.
VDC’s research in mobile barcode scanning confirms that mobile barcodes are no longer a stranger to the mobile consumer. The vast majority of Tier 1 retailers and brands (i.e., Macy’s, Best Buy, Coca-Cola) have deployed some form of mobile marketing with barcodes. Meanwhile, smartphones are becoming more widespread with improved displays and cameras. These advances in consumer exposure and comfort with scanning and displaying barcodes using their smartphones will continue to help drive mobile marketing.
VDC views the new offering from AT&T as a critical market enabler as AT&T is catering to an underserved community of Tier 3/4 small merchants that typically lack the resources and/or expertise required to launch a successful mobile marketing campaign on their own. The company’s extended mobile barcode services offers small businesses the opportunity to deploy an effective, lower-cost marketing strategy that leverages an increasingly popular behavior among consumers equipped with smartphones – namely, mobile barcode scanning.
We expect that mobile marketing services targeted at smaller enterprises will help increase mobile barcode scanning traffic among consumers. Furthermore, consumers want to do more with their smartphones in terms of mobile barcode scanning at more places. In fact, our research reveals that “the ability to scan barcodes in a diversity of stores” was rated the second most important factor in terms of scanning experience in retail stores, with an average consumer rating of 3.68 out of 5. Given this consumer desire/level of interest, the new services from AT&T are expected to enable smaller business to better serve, target and market to their customer base.