Target Targets Your Cellphone
Your iPhone can now save you $1 on cheese.
Giant discount retailer Target (TGT) announced on Wednesday that it was rolling out a program to beam coupons directly to customers’ smartphones. The mobile coupons work just like their old-fashioned paper cousins: the checkout clerk scans them right from a barcode on your cellphone screen.
You get the coupons by signing up to receive SMS from Target, either at http://m.target.com or by texting COUPONS to 827438 (TARGET). After doing so, you’ll get text messages about once per month with a link to a mobile Web page that contains multiple special offers for super-techie shoppers. It would work on any cellphone that includes a Web browser.
Target is hardly the first brand to experiment with mobile coupons – there are apps aplenty that proffer deals at local stores, and J.C. Penney has tested a similar effort in some of its stores. But Target may be just about the largest retailer to roll out this sort of effort in all of its stores.
