Ads aren’t just valued for bringing in calls and walk ins. Local businesses increasingly place value on consumers looking up maps and directions, or participating in loyalty efforts, notes SuperMedia Director of Mobile Development Chris Folmer, who was speaking on a panel at The Local Search Association conference April 16 in Las Vegas. “There are lots of ways to drive true value,” he says.

Loyalty programs represent a real growth opportunity. Consumers are already engaged with the client. They need to maintain the relationship,” says Folmer. He notes that SuperMedia is rolling out a number of new loyalty programs. The programs are great acquisition tools. They are “really good to talk to new clients about. They really like it.”

The traditional backbone of loyalty programs have been text messaging, he adds. Texts really deliver results, and are “exploding” for SMBs. The key is to “get people to want to engage in content.” But they can also be tricky because they are so easy to unsubscribe from. “It only takes one bad offer for someone to opt out,” he notes.

Speaking on the same panel, Placecast SVP Blair Swedeen also emphasized strong results from text-based programs. Promotions sent out when consumers are near a store result in a 2.5 x boost in frequency, and a 22 percent purchase rate. There is also a 5 percent increase in average order value, he notes.

Increased smartphone penetration has greatly expanded the universe for smart offers, says Swedeen — smartphone users will also get push offers on their Apps and emails. “Most customers want delivery across all channels,” he says.

Edo Interactive VP Jeff Fagel says that texts in fact have already been surpassed by smartphone emails. Apps are also proving to be very effective. Merchants that have a promotion on a mobile app are seeing a 20 percent boost in their response rate.

Redemption rates are also soaring. A program that Edo ran with Subway, for instance, achieved a 15 percent redemption rate across the board. It drove the value of purchases up 30 percent. Moreover, 40 percent of those customers who redeemed offers came back at least once or twice in the next 90 days.

The key is driving “the right offer to the right customer,” and keeping it simple, adds Fagel. “There is nothing as impactful as ‘thumbs in faces,'” he says, noting that mobile offers will see 10-15x redemption rates of traditional coupons.

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Loyalty sales (including analytics) are typically associated with large brands such as Hilton and United Airlines. But a number of companies have been also trying to crack the code on SMBs, where the volume is.

This week, Edo Interactive announces it is doubling down on its SMB loyalty efforts, going far beyond what it has previously done since launching in late 2010. The 90+ person company, which has raised a total of $54 Million, has nearly doubled in size since it began building up its Nashville office to head up the SMB initiative, which it is calling “Edo Marketplace.”

Marketplace will have a broad rollout in 2Q, after testing in Chicago and Nashville with 200 local and national partners for the past month. Notably, Edo is moving away from its sole dependence on financial institutions for sales. (It currently works with 140 financial institutions.)

One outside sales partnership is already in place with 2GoMedia. Several additional sales partnerships are in development. The SMB marketplace suffers from “a lot of irrelevancy,” says VP of Marketing & Brand Development Jeff Fagel. “Local campaigns lack data.“

Edo hopes to provide its SMB customers with pay for performance marketing, and a better ability to “find customers, convert and measure” via real time reports that include impressions via Web page views, email, Texts, redemption texts and email. “We want to be able to answer the question: “What does $1,000 buy me?” asks Fagel. “Customers don’t want to pay for 1,000 Facebook likes.”

Edo, of course, is entering into direct competition against a wide range of players that have loyalty and offer components. We have counted more than 18 companies that are vying for this market segment in one form or another.

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