Mobile loyalty programs can engage customers in ways traditional reward programs simply cannot. It allows brands to bring coupons, passes, special offers and even customer cards right to their customer’s pockets through digital wallets (which live inside your smartphone).
Now imagine combining the power of mobile loyalty programs with carefully thought of mobile moments. That means you could not only digitalize your rewards program but also have it interact with your already loyal customers at the right time and place. That’s undeniably a whole new level of customer experience.
Where it gets even more interesting is, with the technologies currently available, brands can also have an API call right at POS to allow coupons to be easily redeemed.
If you put all these concepts together - suppose I’m a loyal brand X customer and have their app installed on my smartphone. Brand X sells coffee and snacks. Tuesday morning, on my way to work, I get to the station right on time for my train only to find out it’s running 10 minutes late. That’s a bummer, now not only I’m late for my morning meeting but also obviously frustrated. Suddenly, I receive a push notification from brand X offering me a one-time free coffee redeemable in the next 10 minutes. The offer goes right into my digital wallet, I walk up to the cashier, he/she scans my phone and hands me my free coffee. The transaction is recorded on brand X’s system and my one-time coupon goes away. I happily walk back to the platform to wait for my train. More importantly, guess where I’m buying coffee from next time I feel like a pick me up before my morning train ride? That’s right, brand X.
And it gets better. After having such a delightful experience during my almost-gone-wrong morning train ride, I am so pleased with Brand X I just might tell all of my friends about the experience I had and chances are, some of them might download brand X’s app too; opt-in for push notifications and location tracking. And there you have, audience growth of active app users.
I understand this might seem complex at first but at the end of the day, with the right mobile marketing platform to assist you, delivering campaigns like the example above are not much more time-consuming than blasting your audience with one-size-fits-all messages. Specially if you measure time investment against results obtained. What’s the point of executing a quick campaign if it’s doing you more harm than good? The point is, anyone claiming push notifications are intrusive, creepy, etc... is obviously not doing it right. Another myth busted is regarding push notifications leading to users opting-out. In fact, if done right, they actually lead to more new active users signing up because even in this highly connected digital world we live in, word-of-mouth still lives on.