This article is by Matt Stringer, executive VP of marketing at Men’s Wearhouse.
Recently, at their respective developer conferences, Apple and Google announced major changes coming soon to their mobile wallets. By the end of the year, Apple’s Passbook will be known as Wallet and Google’s newest offering Android Pay will replace Google Wallet, and both companies are focusing heavily on the loyalty capabilities in these apps.
For Apple and Google to invest aggressively in mobile wallet is validation of the technology, and signals accelerated consumer adoption. However, it also means if you aren’t integrating mobile wallet into your marketing strategy, you are missing out on a huge group of consumers who are even more aware of mobile wallet and payment functions today than ever before.
While interest in mobile wallets continues to heat up among technology companies, brands and consumers, some marketers have been investing in it for a while now. At Men’s Wearhouse, we were one of the first brands to start marketing to Apple Passbook soon after it launched in late 2012. Although it was early days, we immediately saw the role wallets could play in enabling customers to interact with our brand on any of their devices and through any of our sales channels.
With more than 1,700 stores in North America, we believed mobile wallet could be integral in driving customers to our store and amplifying that experience. We partnered with mobile marketing company Vibes to help us manage and send mobile coupons specifically for in-store purchase to customers to be saved in Apple’s Passbook and Google Wallet. The response has been pretty tremendous. Customers are putting aside their leather wallet and saving coupons in Passbook or Google Wallet where it can then notify them when they are nearby a store or remind them when an expiration date is approaching. Since moving our coupons to wallet, we’ve seen significantly increased top-of-mind visibility among consumers, and we expect to achieve seven-figure sales results from our investment in 2015.
And we’re not the only ones who believe in mobile wallets. Forrester Research’s recent report explains how mobile wallets can demonstrate incredible value beyond payments and are becoming powerful marketing platforms. So, for those CMOs who are looking to capitalize on the mobile wallet evolution happening right now, I would like to offer three key takeaways from our experience so far and discuss a few things to consider:
Put the customer at the center of your digital journey. It is marketers’ responsibility (and opportunity) to design a frictionless experience for customers through the use of mobile, digital and specifically mobile wallet. Why? The goal is to simplify brand-customer interactions across every channel.
Working with Vibes, we tapped into our email program and added a “Save to Wallet” option to our emails. Customers could simply add a Men’s Wearhouse coupon or offer to their mobile wallet in just a few taps. The process is frictionless, adds value, and most important, keeps the customer at the center by prioritizing their needs and wants.
As a result of putting the customer first in this strategy, here are a few things we’ve been able to accomplish:
- Intent – The integration of mobile wallet content makes our emails actionable. If consumers make the conscious consideration to add content from an email into Passbook or Google Wallet, they are saving it for later, indicating intent.
- Redemption – That intent is matriculating into a higher redemption rate. We saw a 10X higher redemption rate from those emails with the wallet feature versus those that didn’t have it.
- Data – With mobile wallet, we can close the loop on redemption and see the direct ROI from customers saving and redeeming the coupons.
Activate all marketing channels with mobile marketing and mobile wallet. As inboxes continue to get more crowded, it’s important to differentiate the ways you engage with customers using mobile wallet content. We’ve found that a multi-channel, multi-faceted approach (e.g. integrating campaigns with email, social, display ads, etc.) can deliver higher redemption rates and average order value at scale.
This past holiday season, we worked with Vibes to create a highly engaging, gamified holiday program using email, Web, mobile display ads and social media to encourage consumers to join our SMS database with a chance to win a $10, $20 or $30 coupon. After opting into the SMS program and playing a “scratch-off” game to win the coupon, the customer was then prompted to save their newly earned offer to Passbook or Google Wallet.
What we saw from this multi-pronged approach was among our best results yet — a 166 percent increase in redemption and a 35 percent lift in AOV compared to the other digital coupon programs we used.
Build loyalty by integrating mobile wallet with your own app and vice versa. According to the aforementioned Forrest Research report, consumers are most interested in having loyalty programs points and rewards in their mobile wallet above any other feature. And now that both Apple and Google will begin integrating loyalty programs directly into their mobile payment offerings, customers will be even more eager to throw away those plastic point cards. Retailers should follow suit.
Mobilizing our Perfect Fit loyalty program, which allows customers to earn points for every dollar they spend, is a big priority for 2015 and beyond. Even though the program has been very successful with high participation levels, we’re looking forward to ultimately pushing loyalty cards into both Passbook and Google Wallet to gain real-time dynamic communication and send any type of coupon or offer directly to our loyalty members.
In short, we believe mobile wallet is a space that ultimately all retailers will have to be in to remain relevant and competitive. Adoption rates are only going to increase as consumer awareness grows through mobile payments. While this space is rapidly evolving, one thing will remain constant — the customer will remain at the center of this digital journey.
