Foursquare, the popular check-in app service, will soon offer personalized coupons. Starting in July along with an update of the app, Foursquare will let merchants pay for special placement of personalized local offers.
Users will be able to see the specials, but have to "check in" to redeem them. Foursquare lets its app users alert their friends to their location by "checking in" via smartphone from coffee shops, bars, stores and other locations.
"We're getting really good at connecting people with places, and connecting those places with people," co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley told the Wall Street Journal. "We're finding ways to do this algorithmically."
Newer products enable Foursquare subscribers landing in a new city to be guided to places similar to what they have visited in other regions or their friends have patronized. Said Mr. Crowley, "We can do the same things for businesses, and [tell them] these are the folks that are most likely to come here, based upon their check-in habits, based upon the places they've been to and their friends have been."
The service is peaking the interest of the 750,000 merchants it already works with on largely what have been freebee check-in offers. Beyond deeper data around best and former customers, Foursquare can provide details such as the time of day a customer typically reaches a location.
"It is insights they haven't had before" said Mr. Crowley. "The question they always ask us: How do we act on these different groups? They always want to target specific segments of those customers, whether they are new, repeat or lapsed customers. That is one thing we are getting pretty good at being able to segment out."
The coupon launch comes as two smaller check-in services, Gowalla and Facebook Places, closed down in the last six months. Suzanne Choney of MSNBC Tech adds that Foursquare still has "to deal with the issue of many users who are wary about sharing more information than they have to online."
On a more encouraging note, PewInternet found in a February 2012 survey that 41 percent of U.S. adults get location-based information on their smartphones, up from 23 percent in May 2011. Eighteen percent used check-in programs in 2012, up from 12 percent at the same time the prior year.
Mr. Crowley told the Journal that people are still "warming up" to location sharing. He adds, "We are inventing this category, or really pushing it forward. You open up a map with list of customized results of things that are relevant to you at this moment in time - that's something a lot of people haven't experienced before."