Money Mailer Direct Marketing and Coupons Inc.’s Coupons.com have expanded their partnership to include mobile coupons.

The companies are leveraging the iPhone platform to deliver a new application where consumers can browse local businesses for savings. An Android application is set to follow.

“Our strategy is to partner with a platform provider that can syndicate our content across as many mobile handsets as possible and with Coupons.com and their embedded relationships the iPhone platform helps us extend across 5 million mobile handsets as well as thousands of Web sites doing local content,” said Steven Gray, chief operating officer of Money Mailer Direct Marketing, Garden Grove, CA.

 “We’re not abandoning having the Money Mailer brand and Web site, we’re doing both,” he said. “We want to be where consumers are and let them be in control of our content and Coupons.com’s new iPhone app gave us the quickest opportunity to be on as many handsets and Web sites as possible.”

Money Mailer Direct Marketing is a division of Money Mailer and provides direct marketing services from direct mail to mobile advertising.

Coupons.com is a worldwide provider of interactive coupon services.Kraft Foods, CVS and Johnson & Johnson are some of Coupons.com’s clients.

The savings and offers available online through the partnership are being converted into mobile coupons that consumers can easily redeem via the Coupons.com application for iPhone.

Consumers can redeem the coupon’s savings by showing the iPhone screen with the offer to the service provider.

Coupons can be browsed based on a consumer’s GPS location. Additionally, the application will pull up a map leading the consumer directly to the merchant that is offering the savings.

Mr. Gray said that the Coupons.com application for iPhone is set to debut in a week.

Money Mailer and Coupons.com first partnered last year to increase the amount of coupons searchable via mobile and available online to consumers nationwide.

The strategy behind the first partnership was to combine Coupons Inc.’s distribution network and Money Mailer’s reach, which includes 22 million households through shared mail (see story).

In August, Money Mailer helped regional restaurant franchise Brixx Pizza see a spike in sales and increased customer traffic from mobile offers during the normally slow Monday-through-Thursday period.

Before the mobile campaign, Brixx had worked with Money Mailer on a number of shared-mail campaigns. While the direct mail ad worked well for them, Brixx viewed a mobile campaign as a tactic to improve targeting and increase the number of potential customers the restaurant could reach (see story).

Mr. Gray said that mobile coupons are becoming increasingly popular for several reasons.

“Not all consumers want it, but many want paperless,” Mr. Gray said. “Many don’t want to be in the position where they have to print to redeem just the convenience factor alone on handset is making mobile coupons more impactful and getting such high redemption rates.

“Coupon usage is at an all time high right now,” he said. “In the last10 years coupon usage and search been on downturn, but since the recession started there has been rebound and coupon usage has gone higher.

“Companies have to get real and see that couponing is a way of life in today’s environment.”