In an ‘industry first’, US mobile moguls from Urban Airship have launched a cross-platform digital wallet solution.
The mobile-focused business, which has three offices in America and one in London, has announced the general availability of the Urban Airship Wallet Studio.
The Wallet Studio enables business users to create, launch and manage digital wallet campaigns and programmes seamlessly for both Google Wallet and Apple Passbook; an application that allows users to store forms of mobile payment, such as tickets, store cards, plane boarding passes etc.
The offering’s API delivers real-time updates for digital wallet items including personalised information such as customers’ names, member numbers, promo codes, trackable links, images and more.
In addition, messages and updates can be pushed to smartphone home screens and digital wallets in real-time, delivering expiration alerts, new offers and personalised information such as member point totals or flight gate changes.
Together with rich analytics, Urban Airship says it offers everything necessary to easily launch effective, large-scale digital wallet campaigns.
Goodbye Forgotten Paper Coupons
Co-founder and chief executive officer of Urban Airship, Scott Kveton, said a growing number of companies are looking beyond apps to digital wallet programmes in a bid to reach more customers and offer new experiences that grow their loyalty.
“We’re at the proverbial tip of the iceberg for what’s to come in mobile,” Kveton said.
“Consumers are just now discovering the value and convenience of digital wallets. Businesses can gain greater efficiencies and more effectively close the loop on ROI over decades-old paper and plastic-based processes and newer but siloed social channels.”
Kveton said unlike often forgotten paper coupons and plastic membership cards, digital wallets are designed to bring convenience to consumers so that all of their coupons, loyalty cards and tickets can be found on the one device that they never leave behind.
The new Wallet Studio expands on templates included in Apple Passbook and Google Wallet with out-of-the-box designs for coupons, loyalty cards, gift cards, event tickets, boarding passes, and membership cards, as well as a generic version for other mobile use cases.
Passes created for Apple Passbook can be automatically mapped over to corresponding cards for Google Wallet, and vice-versa. Once created, wallet items can be delivered to a brand’s entire mobile audience via app, website, email, SMS, and social media services such as Twitter and Facebook.
Boosting Customer Acquisition & Loyalty
In addition, Wallet Studio’s detailed analytics reports also allow businesses to measure programme performance and optimise the results of their digital wallet initiatives.
Since the launch of Apple Passbook last September, many major brands have claimed successes in boosting customer acquisition and loyalty, and many apps have seen their popularity skyrocket in the App Store with the introduction of Passbook support.
Coupons.com notes 70% of Passbook users who viewed passes added them to Passbook for in-store redemption. And while Alaska Airlines has offered mobile boarding passes through its app and mobile website for some time, several thousand boarding passes were added to Passbook within the first few days of Urban Airship-enabled support.
It was only last month we featured a news piece on how momentum was gathering in the US between digital wallet giants and earlier this year at our Performance Marketing Insights New York event, keynote speaker Denee Carrington, a Forrester Research analyst, highlighted the digital wallet wars.
Is it time the UK caught up with the US on the digital wallet front?