Remember our post on geofencing‘s role in location-based marketing? Well, Placecast –the first mobile platform aimed at retailers — has come out with a text-message marketing platform that uses geofencing and is geared towards shoppers.

Placecast has launched ShopAlerts, a new location-based mobile marketing platform that allows retailers to send location-triggered mobile text messages to consumers.

If a customer has registered for ShopAlerts, they receive product incentives or store discounts directly to their phone when they’re within a certain proximity of a store they opted to receive alerts form. Retailers can white-label the ShopAlerts platform as their own and integrate it into their CRM program.

To compete with services like Foursquare and mobile apps like ShopKick, ReadWriteWeb reported that Placecast commissioned a Harris Interactive study on mobile behavior. The study showed that only 7% of men and 4% of women were currently using location-based “check-in” apps like Foursquare. 40%, however, were avid text message users. The findings in Placecast’s study was backed up by a Forrester Ressearch study, which found that only 4% of U.S. online adults use location-based mobile check-in apps.

Using this information, PlaceCast’s ShopAlerts hopes that its use of text messaging will make geo-location more appealing to shoppers.

So what do you think? As a consumer, would you use ShopAlerts  if it offered relevant ads, promotions or discounts on items you wanted to purchase right then in a store?  Would it cause you to shop in-store instead of online?