Digital Coupon Wallets: The Unexpected Driver of Customer Loyalty

Imagine a convenient space where you could store all your necessities: money, IDs, other documents, and all sorts of cards – credit cards, business cards, loyalty cards, gift cards. Hey, wait a sec! This thing has already been invented and goes under the name “wallet”. What if the idea of a wallet was digitized to make the storage of digital currencies, documents, and cards more convenient? Well, this has happened too – digital wallets are out there, and here’s why they’re such a useful and popular solution.

According to Airship’s State of Mobile Wallet Marketing Report, 54% of respondents have used a mobile wallet card and expect brands to use this channel more often. To make it more precise and telling: mobile wallets are popular among 67% of millennials surveyed and among 62% of respondents with household incomes greater than $60,000.

In this blog post, I will explore the subject of digital coupon wallets, diving into their functions and benefits. You’ll learn how to leverage the potential of digital wallets to build customer loyalty and how to do this with a reliable promotion engine.

Digital coupon wallet – what is this?

A digital or mobile coupon wallet is an electronic platform where users can store and manage their digital discount cards, coupons, and vouchers. It replaces traditional paper coupons with a more convenient, sustainable, and easily accessible digital alternative. It is like a one-stop shop for all the rewards and incentives belonging to the customer, including loyalty and referral codes as well as gift vouchers.

Digital coupon wallets are typically accessed through mobile applications like Apple Wallet or Google Pay. Apart from these most popular solutions, they can be distributed to consumers through email, a dedicated online platform, or other channels. Some brands partner with reliable technology providers to build their own customized mobile wallet apps. If you use a ready-made and customizable solution instead of building wallet software from scratch, you can be sure that it will be quick and easy to deliver and maintain by saving on development time.

In short, consumers can access their digital coupon wallets to have a clear overview of all their coupons and discounts and to redeem them. Coupon wallets streamline the couponing process, making it more efficient and user-friendly. They are a digital environment where coupons can be both stored and redeemed. You can use a mobile wallet to offer value to your customers through numerous loyalty, discount, and referral programs and connected campaigns with just a single tool.

But there’s much more to that! In the following section, you’ll find a detailed list of all the practical uses of digital coupon wallets.

How to use a digital coupon wallet?

Using digital coupon wallets, customers have instant access to all their offers and deals in a single virtual space. They can manage, organize, and track their digital coupons.

So, what are the main uses of mobile wallets in terms of coupon management?

1. Coupon storage and organization

No matter what type of incentives you offer to your customers – coupons, vouchers, discount credit points, loyalty programs, gift cards, and other rewards – with a digital wallet, they are all accumulated in one digital repository. The wallet organizes coupons, e.g., based on different categories, expiration dates, and other criteria. By aggregating all the discounts and coupons in a central location, customers get a convenient and neatly organized source of information about their available deals, and they are more likely to use them.

2. Coupon redemption

Even more importantly to your customers, a digital wallet is a place where they can easily locate and redeem their mobile vouchers and coupon codes at a selected point of sale. To do this, they can enter a numerical code, scan a barcode or a QR code, or use another method of your choice. A digital wallet is also a place where customers can exchange their points for rewards.

3. Communication channel

A digital wallet can be used as a convenient communication channel between the retailer and the customer. It can send notifications to users to inform them about upcoming expiry dates and other important events related to their accumulated deals. Users receive real-time alerts about their discounts and announcements about new offers. They can also get notified about reaching the next level of a loyalty or rewards program. This gives them better control over their general online shopping experience, while the retailer may use the notifications as a marketing tool and to boost sales.

4. Promotion personalization

This may be one of the most important features of digital coupon wallets: they allow brands and shops to create and send highly personalized incentives and exclusive offers to their customers. Based on the data stored in the mobile wallet concerning user preferences, interests, shopping habits, and purchasing history, you can provide tailored promotions and recommendations.

What are the key benefits of digital coupon wallets?

Mobile wallets benefit both the retailer and the customer in a variety of ways. Here are the most important and value-driving examples:

1. Extreme convenience and accessibility

The digital wallet feature takes the convenience of digital coupon usage to the next level. All of the given customer’s incentives are aggregated into one mobile space, which remains available at any time. To access all their promotions, users only need to tap their smartphone or another device. Since the coupons are clearly arranged based on selected categories, there is no risk an offer will get lost and overlooked.

2. User-friendly self-service

Customers seek solutions that are as easy to use as possible. The digital wallet functionality is a great response to this need, as it offers simple ways of coupon, loyalty, referral, and membership management, as well as real-time updates. It provides a way better experience than having to search through mobile coupons scattered all over various channels, not to mention the clutter that paper coupons used to create.

3. Simple coupon tracking

This feature of digital coupons stored in a mobile wallet is definitely equally beneficial to customers and retailers. The former can track their earnings and spendings, which allows them to coordinate their incentives redemption and savings, while the latter can easily track their users’ behavior to draw relevant business conclusions and simply monitor the individual processes that build their promotion marketing approach.

4. Smooth coupon flow

With a digital wallet, the multistep process of coupon publication, validation, and redemption becomes surprisingly flexible and efficient. Since coupons in a digital wallet get regular real-time updates, expired coupons are removed and new ones are added, ensuring access to up-to-date offers. The creation and management of coupons are simplified on both sides and the smooth coupon flow creates better customer experience.

How to leverage the power of digital coupon wallets to build customer loyalty?

All of the uses and benefits of digital coupon wallets outlined above make for an actual ace up your sleeve when it comes to building and reinforcing customer loyalty. If you’re wondering how exactly the strengths of mobile coupon wallets can be used in your digital marketing strategy targeting loyalty, consider these aspects:

1. Better user experience

Improved customer experience directly translates to increased loyalty. By offering a personalized and easily accessible solution, you make sure your customers will rely on the tool and remain loyal to your brand simply out of convenience. Moreover, by creating personalized offers and recommendations, you can send targeted coupons to individual customers and increase the likelihood of coupon usage to foster loyalty.

Learn more: How to improve the UX of promotions?

2. A sense of control

Buyers typically feel the need to control their shopping experience and to own the promotions offered to them. Thanks to the digital wallet feature, they are able to see how their discounts combine and bring combined value. Having all their deals in one place increases the shoppers’ willingness to remain loyal and active customers to a given retailer.

3. Ongoing interaction and engagement

With a digital wallet, you can create ongoing interactions with customers and drive engagement, which, in result, will enhance their loyalty to your brand and help you build long-term relationships with them, based on a simple communication channel. With an accessible and readily available mobile wallet, customers are more likely to redeem their coupons spontaneously whenever they are shopping.

4. Make use of digital wallet notifications

By sending notifications to your users about changing their loyalty tier or upgrading their rewards status, you will encourage future purchases and thus strengthen their sense of loyalty, commitment, and belonging. What’s more, real-time alerts about approaching expiry dates of vouchers and coupons will create a sense of urgency and also push customers to make a long-postponed purchase.

5. Introduce gamification elements

You can gamify the shopping experience using a mobile coupon wallet to increase enjoyment and excitement among your customers. To do this, implement the functionalities of progress tracking, point systems, achievement badges and levels. You’ll see how your engaged users find it hard to stop playing the shopping game.

6. Gather customer data and feedback

But before you do that, make sure all your actions comply with the Omnibus Directive. Once you’ve confirmed this, you can set off to analyze the data-driven insights on your customers’ preferences, consumer choices, and purchasing habits. With the knowledge of their behavioral patterns, you’ll be able to optimize your strategy to improve user experience even further. This way, you will encourage them to become ever-loyal customers who will come back for their repeat purchases.

7. Build advanced loyalty programs

Since a digital wallet is a perfect place to store all the incentives belonging to one client, it is also a useful space for offering all the attractive features of a loyalty program to your users. With a clear overview of their loyalty cards, tiers, and rewards, accompanied by timely notifications and reminders, customers will surely feel encouraged to engage in the program. In fact, 73% of consumers are more eager to join a loyalty program if their points and rewards get automatically updated and visible on a mobile wallet.

Learn more: Explore Voucherify's Open Source Loyalty Accelerator

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4 real-life examples of mobile wallets

Let’s take a look at how brands approach mobile wallet marketing through their own digital wallets and customer dashboards:

1. H&M Club

In the customer-assigned mobile wallets, H&M displays the loyalty club membership level, collected loyalty points, the number of points missing to the next reward as well as all available H&M and partner offers. They don’t show expired offers but they do hint at upcoming deals. All types of promotions are displayed on one, visually-friendly screen. What’s more, the interface lets the user know how to maintain or upgrade the current loyalty level.

2. Sephora Beauty Insider Program

Sephora’s Beauty Insider loyalty program comes with an easy-to-use-and-read digital wallet solution, where the loyalty points and cash status are displayed for a given customer account alongside historical data, such as up-to-date savings, redeemed rewards, redeemable rewards, and points activity (accumulated, redeemed, and expired points).

3. GAP Wallet

The digital wallet of all the customer’s offers and coupons is visible on GAP’s main page. It gives an overview of available offers and loyalty points credit with the earning history and earning rules. To use an available promotion, the customer clicks “Tap to apply”.

4. Shein Digital Wallet

Shein displays its digital wallet in the customer account with a simple and minimalist design. The display provides information about coupons (those yet unused as well as expired), Shein credits, loyalty points, gift cards balance, and spending history. The customer can see the data in a small preview of the most important numbers or on detailed subpages.

Digital coupon wallet as a promotion software feature

To make the most of the digital coupon wallet functionality, you can choose promotion software that offers mobile wallets as a feature. In this section, I’ll show you how this feature can be used to the best results with Voucherify.

Voucherify is an API-first, low-code, composable promotion engine for creating omnichannel and scalable digital promotions, including coupons, gift cards, referrals, and loyalty programs.

As a platform for effective coupon creation, management, and distribution, it also offers a highly customizable digital wallet functionality. It uses API to send all customers’ incentives to a single space. Thanks to the built-in integration with some of the existing solutions and POS systems, it can communicate with any mobile app and you can connect it with your marketing stack.

Within the Voucherify dashboard, the digital wallet is presented in the form of a customer cockpit that shows an individual customer’s incentives, active campaigns, and current loyalty score.

Take a look at the list below presenting the characteristics of digital wallets at Voucherify:

1. Customer data storage

The customer cockpit shows the customer profile with all the essential information, such as order history, available discounts, card balance, pending rewards, or redemption conditions. Customers can easily navigate through their incentives to find what they’re looking for and complete a purchase.

2. Personalized branding

As Voucherify is a backend solution, you have full frontend freedom to use your own branding and create the customer experience by your own rules.

3. Custom currencies

The rewards and points earned and collected by your customers can be presented as any type of currency you choose to match your brand. It can be steps, miles, stamps, diamonds – only imagination is the limit.

4. Notifications and messaging

When integrated with external customer engagement platforms, the e-wallet can send automated expiration and last-chance reminders to customers, encouraging them to speed up their purchase. Loyalty, gift card, and coupon code validity dates are clearly visible in the customer dashboard, which improves the shopping flow.

5. Tracking

All the information gathered in a customer cockpit is a valuable source for you regarding campaign performance and customer preference. You can analyze and leverage this data to offer targeted deals to the user, make use of geofencing methods, improve user experience, and increase your sales in the process.

The digital wallet system offered by Voucherify has all the benefits of mobile passes and helps in fostering customer loyalty. With the redemption process made easy and straightforward access to all the customer’s incentives in one place, it ultimately contributes to increased repeat purchase rates. Research shows that 64% of respondents are more likely to use a coupon if they receive expiration reminders via mobile wallet. It’s time to include mobile wallet marketing in your sales funnel strategy.

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