The technology powering mobile airline boarding passes also enables push notifications for retail marketers.
Mobile wallet passes are digital representations of tickets, boarding passes, and cards for auto insurance, loyalty programs, coupons, and memberships.
Stored within mobile wallet applications such as Apple Wallet, Google Pay, or Samsung Pay, these passes allow users to access and use them directly from their smartphones, streamlining transactions, improving security, and avoiding physical alternatives.
Marketing Opportunity
Wallet passes also work for brick-and-mortar and ecommerce shops, with three key features: persistent storage, updates, and push notifications.
Consider an airline boarding pass.
- A traveler checks in remotely for a flight and adds the boarding pass to her wallet. The pass will remain in the wallet until she deletes it manually. Passes stay for years and, often, move from an old phone to a new one.
- If the flight’s departure gate or time changes, the digital boarding pass updates with the most recent information.
- Finally, the boarding pass can send notifications on a smartphone’s lock screen, informing the traveler about the new gate or departure time.
Expired boarding passes from the author’s digital wallet.
Imagine similar steps applied to a retailer.
- A shopper adds a store loyalty card to his wallet to earn discounts.
- During a week-long promotion leading up to Black Friday or Cyber Monday, the store offers daily updates with special offers and discounts. Each day, the digital loyalty card (wallet pass) shows the sale item and offer.
- The retailer can also send push notifications directly to the lock screen on the shopper’s smartphone, announcing each day’s deal.
The store could include external links in either the loyalty card or the notification (depending on the mobile operating system), sending the shopper directly to a sales landing page to make a purchase.
In some cases, it could be a single-click checkout, where tapping the message link leads directly to the order confirmation page. Few other channels offer this level of conversion potential.
Notably, the mobile wallet pass reaches a shopper directly on her phone. It’s a potent channel during the holiday shopping season amid saturated email and advertising campaigns.
Digital coupon and loyalty cards can link directly to the checkout. These hypothetical examples are from the Apple Wallet documentation.
A Good Fit?
A do-it-yourself approach to wallet pass marketing is entirely possible. All major mobile operating systems have well-documented software development kits (SDKs) or application programming interfaces (APIs).
Yet one hardly needs to make the effort. Prominent mobile pass providers include Vibes, PassKit, and Airship. The Shopify app store has more than 70 options for wallet passes. Some providers offer 1,000 persistent loyalty card passes for less than $100 per month.
Still, shoppers need a reason to add a pass. The motivation might be a loyalty card with its promise of points and prizes or a recurring monthly coupon. Both likely appeal to shoppers more than downloading an app.
Clearly, however, wallet passes don’t make sense for every retailer. They likely fit merchants with:
- Physical and online stores,
- A wide range of products,
- An existing loyalty program,
- Frequent sales or promotions,
- Diminishing returns from other promotional channels.
Nonetheless, mobile wallet passes are a potential marketing channel for sellers online and off. The technology’s ability to persist on shoppers’ smartphones, provide real-time updates, and send push notifications directly to locked screens makes the passes especially valuable during high-competition periods such as the holidays.
