forbes.com
Most people assume the whole point of ApplePay, Google Wallet
and other mobile wallets is to pay for stuff with your smartphone.
And sure, you can. It even works pretty well. But most
people still can’t figure out why they’d use a smartphone to pay rather than
just swipe their credit or debit card.
So what could spur more use of mobile wallets? If a newreport from Forrester is any indication, what consumers want more than
anything else in Apple Pay or Google Wallet is to store loyalty program points
and rewards, coupons, and other special offers. They can do that today in
Google Wallet and in Apple’s Passbook, but it requires people to know they can
do it and proactively add loyalty accounts to their phone.
That’s why a company that once made money from marketing on
pagers–remember them?–today is announcing a way for marketers to run ads for
deals and offers that can be saved to Apple’s Passbook and Google Wallet.
Chicago-based mobile marketing company Vibes is introducing what it calls WalletAds.
Marketers can run the ads like banners, but if you tap them, the offer or other
branded content gets saved to the wallet. Then, the marketer can choose to send
a reminder when you’re within, say, 100 yards of a store, popping it up on your
lockscreen. “There’s a huge marketing opportunity in wallets,” says Vibes CEO
Jack Philbin.
Vibes, which counts the likes of Sears, Home Depot HD +0.04% and Gap GPS -1.71%among its
clients, says the point is to offer marketers, whose apps often are ignored or
deleted after awhile, a more permanent presence on people’s smartphones.
“You’re getting a presence in Apple Passbook or Google Wallet that doesn’t go
away,” says Philbin. He says that data from more than 400 mobile wallet
campaigns Vibes has helped run using its existing Wallet Manager service
that sends offers via email, text messages and other means, shows that 90% of
the content doesn’t get deleted. That provides the opportunity to stay in
contact with the consumer and collect data that could be useful for targeting
new offers.
Could all this ultimately prove annoying, though? After all,
there are always marketers who can’t stop themselves from overdoing it. Walgreen's , for
instance, keeps reminding me it’s nearby the cafe where I fuel up every
morning, requiring me to swipe away the notification every time.
Philbin thinks it will be a long time before that happens,
if only because marketers will take awhile to figure out how best to use the
ads. (After all, it’s no insult to say that Vibes is no Facebook or Google, and
even their new ad formats take months to catch on.) “We’re a long way from
bombardment,” Philbin says, and even when we get there, beacons and better
targeting can ensure that people don’t get turned off.
Forrester thinks Starbucks’ app provides an
early example of how mobile wallets can become much more than very thick credit
cards. Paying at a Starbucks using the app is almost the least appealing part
of the app, which allows its
loyalty program members to store and use rewards and offers. “In the next
three to five years, we expect mobile wallets to take off significantly,
becoming a new marketing channel where marketers will mix their offline and
online marketing efforts,” Thomas Husson, author of the Forrester report,
said in a recent blog post. “Instead of replacing merchants’ own integrated
apps, mobile wallets will complement them and offer more reach to engage beyond
apps and loyal brand aficionados.”
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