Mobile Wallet Deep Dive: Offers

Those of us who are a certain age remember watching our parents pull out the local newspaper and a pair of scissors and clip out coupons. Then go with them to the grocery store as they took out the crumpled pieces of paper from their wallets and sorted through them at the cash register just as the person in front did before them. It was time consuming and tedious.

Even today, we’ve all been that person who stands in line frantically trying to get our email or app open and sort through it to find the special offer we want to redeem before we get to the cash register. Yet, somehow, not quite making it and having to apologize to the cashier for holding things up as we finally pull up the offer to have the bar code scanned.

For consumers this can be frustrating. For brands operating in the digital age, but their customers don’t always have seamless experiences trying to redeem offers to purchase their products, this should be alarming.

Couple this with consumers’ desire to limit direct contact with people and objects as much as possible nowadays and you have a situation where the time is ripe for brands to activate Mobile Wallet for their offers. Just like our parents before, consumers respond to incentives to shop. By providing them with a convenient way to store, immediately find, and redeem offers in a contactless manner through mobile wallet passes enables brands to deliver the same easy customer experience as paying for their purchase using their phone.  

And with the ability to update the content on mobile wallet passes and send lock screen messages with new information at any time, brands have a versatile, persistent, visual way to engage with and activate consumers.

What Is A Mobile Wallet Offer?

A mobile wallet offer is a digital offer or coupon that is stored in Apple Wallet or Google Wallet on your mobile phone as a mobile wallet pass. The pass is prominently branded, clearly shows the offer, allows for placement of all necessary terms and conditions, and has a bar code, QR Code, or alphanumeric code for easy redemption in-store and online.

How Do You Deliver Mobile Wallet Offers to Consumers?

A mobile wallet pass can easily be distributed through any existing marketing channel – from in-store signage, print and TV advertising, and direct mail to lower-cost digital channels like SMS, email, web, social and your mobile app. The goal is to create a frictionless experience for customers as they engage with your brand.

If you’re wondering how this exactly comes to life in the customer journey, read on.

Dynamic Content Brands Can Control

The mobile wallet pass itself is completely dynamic, meaning all the real estate on the pass can be updated at any time, as often as the brand desires, and in real time.

By having the ability to update the content on saved mobile wallet passes with new information at any time, brands have a versatile, persistent, visual way to engage with their customers.

So instead of a static coupon or deal, a mobile wallet offer can be used as an ongoing channel to continuously keep customers updated and drive them to act.

For example, if you’re a brand that wants to extend the life of an offer or change its value as a tactic to help you meet your sales goals, you can immediately update the pass with a new expiration date or value and then message your customers on their lock screen, so they are aware of the changes and reminded to take advantage of the opportunity.

But Mobile Wallet doesn’t stop at the one:many approach, it also gives you the ability to reach each of your customers on an individual level.

Let’s say you want to make sure each customer has 30 days to redeem an offer. Since mobile wallet content can be built to dynamically personalize a pass, you can grant a 30-day expiration window from the moment an individual clicks to save their mobile wallet offer. In other words, if one customer opens an SMS with their mobile wallet offer today and downloads and another customer opens an email a week from today to download, the latter customer doesn’t lose a week’s time to redeem the offer before it expires.

Geolocation-Based Notifications

This is one of my personal favorite features of Mobile Wallet. Just like a push notification a user receives from an app, if a customer has your mobile wallet offer downloaded to their phone, you can similarly deliver notifications to the lock screen of the customer’s phone, giving you the ability to nudge them to act when they might not have otherwise.

There are many types of Mobile Wallet notifications to activate, though when it comes to offers geolocation notifications are particularly impactful when it comes to purchasing decisions.

Geolocation notifications can be set to automatically deliver when a user is 100 meters or less away from a physical location. This precisely timed notification enables brands to engage with customers at a critical time, whether it’s deciding where to shop or prompting a purchase that might not otherwise have happened.

So, when a customer is near one of your Mexican restaurant locations and has an offer saved to their phone, the mobile wallet pass can use the phone's geolocation to automatically send a notification reminding them that your brand's offer is still redeemable. This friendly reminder can motivate the customer to stop in for a free chips & salsa, redeemable with a purchase. A purchase they may have otherwise not made. That’s the type of power Mobile Wallet has.

Post-Purchase Targeted Messaging

Mobile Wallet notifications can also be personalized down to the individual pass holder based on customer data and behavior.

So, same scenario: One week later you can send a mobile wallet notification that the customer can earn 2x the points on their total order and redeem a free drink. But not just any free drink, it’s the same drink they purchased during their last visit when redeeming the free chips & salsa offer.

Upon you swiping that notification open the customer sees that their original mobile wallet pass reflects this new promotion and its details.

Long story short, your brand's pass can be automatically updated on a regular basis with personalized offers and promotions without your customers having to do anything other than show your new offer at checkout.

Why This Matters

Thanks to mobile wallet offers brands like yours can always keep their customers up to date on the latest promotions, new products, flash sales, and limited time offers based on their purchase history, all of which deepens their brand loyalty and motivates them to shop more frequently with you over the competition.

The seamless customer experience can also result in them buying more in a single shopping trip. If you’re a brand with any type of offer or promotional strategy, Mobile Wallet provides an immense opportunity to increase how often a customer shops with you, and how much they spend during each visit.

Just think of how much more foot traffic and incremental transactions you’d see if you activate personalized mobile wallet offers with your customers. Holy guacamole is right.

Talk to your Customer Success team or contact our sales team to learn more about how you can use the power of the mobile channel to have a substantial competitive advantage during this holiday season and beyond.