What’s in Your Customers' Wallets?

Do you know what’s in your customers’ wallets? With Apple Pay, Passbook, and Google Wallet to name a few, maybe far less than before.

With Apple Pay making its official debut this week at over 220,000 locations throughout North America, marketers who are not yet familiar with mobile wallet apps such as Passbook and Google Wallet should quickly get on the bandwagon and get to know these marketing tools that are changing the rules of customer engagement.

Think of them as the ideal shopping companions. Introduced in 2012, Passbook and similar apps like Google Wallet allow consumers to store and organize all the plastic and paper they would normally store in a physical wallet, such as loyalty cards, coupons, special offers and even airline boarding passes and concert tickets, on their smartphones instead, making for an easier shopping experience. Add to that the location and notification features available on smartphone devices to notify customers when they are near a store, remind them to use an offer or even extend a new offer, and you have the perfect recipe for powerful marketing channels that can not only help you get customers into your store or restaurant, but also have them spend more once they are there.

Here are some tips and tricks to help you take full advantage of the opportunities that these mobile wallet apps can offer:

Don’t forget about reach.

When creating a campaign for a mobile wallet app, make sure it will reach 100% of your market. Implementing an integrated campaign with content that is compatible with Passbook for iPhone users, Google Wallet for Android users, and a fallback mobile web page for all other smartphone users will ensure that 100% of your customers can participate.

You can start small.

Getting started is as easy as taking an existing loyalty offer or coupon program you are running and mobilizing it. You can work directly with Apple or Google to develop your own mobile content management platform, or better yet, use a provider that has already build a platform, to easily and quickly start creating and managing your own mobile wallet content. Digitalizing your offers means that you’ll have complete content control to update and change your active offers in real time, which is a huge advantage over the static nature of physically distributed plastic cards or paper coupons.

Use data and metrics to learn.

By adding a mobile wallet management platform as a layer over top your current email campaigns, SMS programs or mobile advertising means that you can start collecting usage data to see who’s redeeming your offers and where, which campaigns are working, and which ones are not. Let the data be your guide to iterate and make each campaign even better, more targeted and more personalized for your customers. And last but not least, you’ll be able to effectively measure the ROI for each of your campaigns.

So if you’re one of the many marketers who’s never used Passbook or Google wallet, get started by putting your consumer hat on and using the mobile wallet apps in your everyday life. It’s as easy as storing your Starbucks or Dunkin' Donuts cards in Passbook or Google Wallet and using the apps to pay for your coffee. Enter your loyalty cards or boarding passes, and leave all that plastic and paper at home. Before long, you’ll see how these apps add tremendous value to the shopping experience, and can help you take your customer engagement initiatives to the next level.