With the increasing prevalence of smartphones, marketers have a keen interest in the mobile channel hoping to enhance the effectiveness of marketing activities and improve sales performance. Prior research on mobile marketing examines for example, coupon redemption, time sensitivity, and message optimization, and find that marketing activities and the corresponding performance should be understood based on contexts in which such actions are employed. Following this stream of research, we focus on the context in which consumers interact with mobile phones, and evaluate the role of real-time mobile coupons in driving e-commerce interest. To this end, we collaborate with an online retailer selling beauty products as well as a credit card company distributing mobile coupons on behalf of the online retailer. Target customers are selected using prior usage of credit cards such as category preference and spending amount. When SMS texts are being sent to smartphones with transaction confirmation, mobile coupons are attached to such texts in order to induce target consumers to sign up for the online retailer. Thus our data comes from two sources. The credit card company provides transaction information along with demographics and the online retailer track consumers’ behavior in log and purchase data. Our empirical analyses suggest that real-time contexts matter in determining the effectiveness of mobile coupons. To be specific, consumers who have just spent a small amount of money show a greater propensity to redeem the coupons despite small rewards. Also, heavy users of e-commerce tend to be more responsive to the coupons promoting the online retailer whereas those with large spending on beauty products are less likely to sign up. We discuss theoretical contributions of these findings and offer practical insights.

• Yeohong Yoon(Yonsei University, Republic of Korea)
• Jeonghye Choi(Yonsei University, Republic of Korea)
• Sarang Sunder(Texas Christian University, USA)
• Minakshi Trivedi(Texas Christian University, USA)