A wallet used to be a lump of leather full of cash, plastic, and forgotten punch cards. Now it’s an app icon. For your customers, that app is where payments, passes, and offers live by default, not their inbox and certainly not paper coupons.
That shift is already visible in the numbers: over half of consumers have used a mobile wallet card and want brands to use this channel more, with uptake even higher among millennials and higher-income households. Digital coupon wallets sit right in the middle of that trend. In this post, we’ll look at how they work, why they’re so effective for loyalty and retention, and how to wire them up to a promotion engine so offers stay in sync across channels instead of getting lost in the noise.
A digital (mobile) coupon wallet is a place where customers store and manage all their digital offers: coupons, vouchers, loyalty passes, referral codes, gift cards.
Think of it as a software layer on top of your incentives:
Most coupon wallets live inside Apple Wallet, Google Pay, or brand apps, but they can also be reached from email, web, or SMS deep links. Some companies build their own wallet-style apps; others plug into existing providers to avoid building wallet infrastructure from scratch and just connect it to their promotion engine. From a UX point of view, a coupon wallet does two jobs:
Once you wire it up to loyalty, discount, and referral campaigns, the wallet becomes a single tool to deliver and redeem value across channels, not just a prettier version of email coupons.
Mobile wallets benefit both the retailer and the customer in a variety of ways. Here are the most important and value-driving examples:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Let’s take a look at how brands approach mobile wallet marketing through their own digital wallets and customer dashboards:
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.
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).
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”.
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.
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