Friday , March 29, 2024

How Mobile Marketing Can Help Boost Mobile-Wallet Adoption And Usage

Just as there are two sides to every coin, there’s a second side to the mobile wallet beyond payments. It’s marketing. That’s one of the takeaways from a recent survey from Vibes, a Chicago-based mobile-marketing specialist.

Though the survey of more than 1,000 smart-phone owners found that only 32% of them currently use a mobile wallet, a majority of this group—94%—are likely to save personalized mobile-wallet offers and coupons.

The marketing, or demand generation, aspect of mobile wallets is as essential as providing frictionless forms of payments, says Mark Tack, vice president of marketing at Vibes.

The mobile wallet can be a way to get consumers into stores to buy merchandise. “The physical store always has been and always will be one of the most important aspects for retailers,” Tack tells Digital Transactions News. Retailers contend not only with competitors that set up online stores, but consumers, too, who in many cases shop them while inside another retailer’s store.

Retailers are challenged with getting more consumers to their stores and persuading them to buy while there. Mobile wallets, and their ability to directly connect to consumers, can help. The emphasis on mobile marketing is near universal, Tack says, as smart-phone use among consumers continues to grow. That’s why understanding consumer behavior—even for activity not directly tied to payments, such as how the wallet is funded—is critical for retailers, and can be vital to payments companies pitching mobile-wallet acceptance to merchants.

The next step for retailers, after deciding to integrate mobile wallets among their customer-relationship tools, is to ensure offers are personalized. Personalization of mobile-marketing messages is essential, Tack says. “It’s become the norm and expectation of the consumer.”

Given the immediate and intimate nature of the relationship between consumers and their smart phones, marketing messages should have a look and feel comparable to messages consumers receive from friends and family, Tack says.

Merchants can use a variety of methods—text messaging and email messages are very common—to deliver offers that consumers can load into their wallets. Apple Inc.’s Wallet feature, for example, enables that capability. Doing so may engender good will for the merchant, too. The survey found that 59% of consumers held favorable opinions of retailers that offered digitized coupons.

Payments companies could pitch value-add services, such as online marketing tools that use email or text messaging. Vibes’s research found that 73% of consumers prefer to receive mobile-wallet items by email and 48% prefer text messaging.

“All businesses, whether small, medium, or large, should think of the mobile wallet as a new marketing channel,” Tack says, “just as they do email marketing.”

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