Listen to this articleBelow is our recent interview with Katie Wilson, Founder and CEO, and Sara Castillo, Co-Founder and President of TapOnIt Mobile Deals.
Q: For those who haven’t heard of it, what is the best way to describe TapOnIt?
Katie Wilson: TapOnIt drives traffic to local businesses, while making it easy for people to save money and try new things in the community! We send pictures of offers via text message to a database of people who have 100% signed up to receive them. We’re able to track all of the engagement and redemptions for each offer, so businesses can clearly see their ROI. We all know that everyone is constantly looking at their phones, and 99% of text messages are opened so it just makes sense for businesses to focus on this medium!
Our sharing feature allows users to share offers with their friends via text, Facebook or Twitter right from the TapOnIt mobile site! We like to call this Word of Thumb™ because everyone loves word of mouth advertising…but that’s not always positive. People complain much louder than they compliment. Word of Thumb™, is ALL positive! People share great offers with their friends and can earn bonus offers for signing up new users. This literally turns customers into influencers for every business!
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Q: What types of deals can be found on your website?
Sara Castillo: People eat three times a day so restaurants are 40% of what we send to consumers, but you can also find offers for retail shops and stores, salons, gyms, entertainment, etc. We typically feature buy one get one free offers, free items, percentage discounts, monetary discounts, etc. It totally depends on the business and what makes the most sense for their customers. Since we’re able to track the success of each campaign, we have a lot of data to help lead businesses in the right direction with their offer selection! A consumer does not need to purchase the offer in order to use it, they just take it into the business and show their phone and checkout!
Q: How exactly does it work?
Katie Wilson: People can sign up by texting the word “TapOnIt” to the number 82928 (message and data rates apply). They’ll be prompted to reply with their zip code and then they’ll get back the latest nine offers available in their area. Users can click the link in the text thread to view all available offers, other markets, tutorials, and more in the mobile site! On each offer, consumers have the ability to favorite the offer, click to call the business, and click for directions to the business.
TapOnIt is not an app so it doesn’t take up storage on your phone! People love this and so do we, because apps have a 70% churn rate. Think about it, what’s the first thing we all do when we run out of storage? Delete all the apps we don’t use on a daily basis. TapOnIt has a 2% churn rate. People tend to stay opted into TapOnIt because we only send out a maximum of 3 texts a week, and we only send out really great offers!
Q: What’s the best thing about TapOnIt that people might not know about?
Sara Castillo: TapOnIt has actually changed consumer behavior. Our users wait to receive their offers before deciding where to go for dinner. They use the marketplace to browse for new places to try and things to do in the community. It’s so cool to present our product to businesses because we have thousands of people waiting to be texted ads. It’s crazy! People pay a lot of money to block ads on platforms every single day. These people have signed up to be texted ads.
It’s difficult for local businesses to compete with the big brands like Amazon, but it’s also hard on our community when people shop there. When someone purchases online, that money does not go back into our community. Online shopping is making it harder and harder for local businesses to stay competitive and profitable. By driving people into local businesses, TapOnIt is helping to save the businesses that make each of our communitiesunique.
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Q: What are the company’s plans and goals for the future?
Katie Wilson: To take over the world!!! We did not start TapOnIt with the intention of only flourishing in our initial market, the Quad Cities. We’ve expanded into 40 markets across the country so far and will continue to grow worldwide in the coming years. Every single day we are improving our technology and learning about our users to ensure we’re evolving accordingly. We have some really cool updates in the pipeline that we can’t wait to roll out over this next year!
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