News

Promoting success

February 14, 2005

There are many ways kiosks or self-service devices achieve ROI for retailers. The most common are loyalty programs promoting customer retention, and self-service devices that lower the cost of doing business. However, attracting new customers is also a key benefit that retailers can easily obtain with kiosk technology.

Kiosk-based promotions packages have proved successful in short- and long-term deployments. Kiosks allow retailers to provide promotional offers that can drive new traffic into their locations, as well as induce existing customers to come back more often.

Loyalty systems have been effective for retailers, but they can be even more effective when paired with promotions. Casino operators have known this for years: When loyalty customers can swipe a card and win a prize such as a car, it entices existing customers to come back more often and encourages new customers to enroll in the loyalty program.

Self-service kiosks are a key factor in the implementation of these programs because they allow customers to quickly enter the promotion without burdening in-store staff.

Case in point

A few years ago, the Florida Mall in Orlando underwent a grand reopening. Mall operators wanted a lot of customer traffic to help increase business for their tenants and get people in the area reacquainted with the mall. To this end, they deployed 15 Apunix-designed kiosks. Monday through Thursday of the grand reopening week they handed out 45,000 plastic encoded cards - one to every customer visiting the mall. Customers could return to the mall Friday through Sunday to swipe their card at the kiosks to see if they won the quarter million-dollar grand prize.

More than 30,000 customers returned to the mall to use the kiosks. All customers won something, ranging from logo gear to electric cars.

According to Dr. Sylvia Berens, vice president of Apunix, "Just as CRM was pioneered in the casino marketplace and moved quickly to retail, we see our popular promotions package widely used in casinos today moving very quickly into a wide variety of retail operations."

Key to any brick and mortar retail operation is getting customers in the store. Promoting store traffic, both from new and existing customers, can be easily achieved with kiosks.