Portland, Oregon, USA – Urban Airship, the global leader in mobile solutions to build relationships with connected consumers, has announced the general availability of Urban Airship Wallet Studio—the industry’s first cross-platform digital wallet solution.
Wallet Studio enables business users to easily create, launch and manage digital wallet campaigns and programmes seamlessly for both Apple® Passbook® and Google Wallet. Smart audience segmentation and an enterprise-class API power real-time pass and card updates, which together with rich analytics offers everything necessary to launch effective, large-scale digital wallet campaigns.
“We’re at the proverbial tip of the iceberg for what’s to come in mobile,” said Scott Kveton, co-founder and CEO, Urban Airship. “Consumers are just now discovering the value and convenience of digital wallets, and 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.”
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 web site for some time, several thousand boarding passes were added to Passbook within the first few days of Urban Airship-enabled support.
A growing number of companies are looking beyond apps to digital wallet programmes to reach more customers and offer new experiences that grow their loyalty. 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 they never leave behind. Passes and cards are also time and location-aware to appear on-screen at the most appropriate moment to capture consumers’ attention.
For brands, the benefits of digital wallets include greater operational efficiency in delivering coupon, membership and ticketing programmes, which help increase consumer awareness and drive acquisition and redemption. Digital wallets help close the gap between brands and consumers, increasing relevancy and driving more engagement from loyal customers who want modern mobile conveniences.
Urban Airship makes the entire process of launching large-scale digital wallet programmes easy, from white-glove onboarding services to a simple drag-and-drop interface and WYSIWYG editor, with which business users can design and preview passes and cards in real-time. 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, web site, email, SMS, and social media services such as Twitter and Facebook. In addition, Wallet Studio’s detailed analytics reports allow businesses to measure programme performance and optimise the results of their digital wallet initiatives.
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. Its powerful API offers enterprise-class scale and security, and delivers real-time updates for digital wallet items including personalised information such as customers’ names, member numbers, 1D or 2D bar codes, 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.
Urban Airship enables brands to build relationships with their constantly connected customers through mobile relationship management solutions that streamline delivering highly targeted cross-platform mobile push messages and creating and managing Apple Passbook passes and Google Wallet cards. Billions of push messages and tens of thousands of passes are delivered each month, sparking exceptional consumer experiences, driving app engagement and increasing customer loyalty and lifetime value for leading brands such as CBS Interactive, Cinemagram, ESPN, Groupon, Walgreens and Warner Bros. The company’s solutions manage the end-to-end process of high-performance push messaging, location-targeted messaging and digital wallet management.
