Addtowallet.io offers a mobile wallet marketing platform that lets brands create, manage, and distribute digital offers and pass them on to Apple Wallet and Google Pay. Traditional coupons, loyalty cards, gift cards, and event tickets can be made visible and accessible to customers no matter where they are—dynamically updated in real-time and tracked from inception to intent-to-purchase to redemption.
After the Addtowallet platform was built, the company realized that there were not many marketers active in the digital wallet channel. The company saw an opportunity for marketers and brands to start learning about the technology as the team at Addtowallet believes the digital wallet channel is the next place for marketers to focus.
Mark Johnson, CEO of Loyalty360, spoke with Steven Douglas, Founder and CEO at Addtowallet, about how the wallet channel offers marketers the opportunity to personalize loyalty efforts and how customers’ interactions with coupons in their digital wallets can reveal an intention to buy.
Addtowallet.io offers a mobile wallet marketing platform that lets brands create, manage, and distribute digital offers and pass them on to Apple Wallet and Google Pay. Traditional coupons, loyalty cards, gift cards, and event tickets can be made visible and accessible to customers no matter where they are—dynamically updated in real-time and tracked from inception to intent-to-purchase to redemption.
After the Addtowallet platform was built, the company realized that there were not many marketers active in the digital wallet channel. The company saw an opportunity for marketers and brands to start learning about the technology as the team at Addtowallet believes the digital wallet channel is the next place for marketers to focus.
Mark Johnson, CEO of Loyalty360, spoke with Steven Douglas, Founder and CEO at Addtowallet, about how the wallet channel offers marketers the opportunity to personalize loyalty efforts and how customers’ interactions with coupons in their digital wallets can reveal an intention to buy.
Good afternoon, good morning. It's Mark Johnson from Loyalty360. I hope everyone's happy, safe and well. Want to welcome you back to another edition of Loyalty Live. In this series we speak with leading agencies, technology partners and consultants, and customer channel and brand loyalty about what they are seeing and hearing in the industry and also how brands should be looking at the ability to drive unique experiences, enhance engagement but, most importantly, impact customer loyalty. Today we have the pleasure of speaking with Stephen Douglas. He is the founder and chief executive officer at Add to Wallet. How are you today, stephen?
Speaker 2:
Doing good. Mark, Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:
Absolutely. Thanks for taking the time. First off, we'd like to know a little bit more about the individual we're speaking with, so we'd love to know a little bit more about yourself and your role at Add to Wallet, and a little bit about your background would be great as well.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, my role at addtowalletio is a CEO, so I'm the CEO of the company and the founder offer wallet technology so that we can add your coupons, or paper coupons, your membership passes, your loyalty cards, directly into Apple Wallet or Google Pay, with the ability of designing the pass, designing the medium that you'd like to put into the wallet, and then be able to distribute that as well to your customers or your members, or to your attendees if you're putting on an event type thing.
Speaker 2:
My background is in software engineering. I actually, as a kid I was about nine years old really wanted to run my own company, but at the same time, I really liked coding in foreign languages, so I fell in love with programming as a foreign language to most people and I became a webmaster for AAA, the travel company, the roadside company and then learned how to make emails, distribute emails to mass medium, and, over the years, built my own agency, my own company, and we built a product out of wallet, obviously and then realized that marketers are scarce in the wallet channel and we see a big opportunity for marketers and brands to start learning about the wallet. As it's becoming the 2020s has definitely shown that the wallet is the next channel to be in. Okay, excellent.
Speaker 1:
When you look at add toet, customer loyalty is very important. You support brands who have customer loyalty programs creating some simplicity and creating awareness and also impacting engagement opportunities. So when you look at Add to Wallet, can you talk a little bit more about how you do support those brand loyalty efforts? Overview of the technology and the industries you support?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, so we've done a lot of practices with retail. We've also started to dabble into the service-based businesses. But the retail companies, what they've typically been doing is sending paper coupons in direct mail and what we can do is digitalize that paper into a digital medium, directly into the Apple Wallet with a QR code. They're able to scan the QR code and make that wallet a digital coupon in the wallet itself for our customer and that shows up real time, native in the mobile device Android or iPhone and then they can go into the store, redeem that coupon by showing and presenting the coupon in their wallet and the clerk would scan it with their mobile, with their scanner, with their barcode reader, and be able to redeem the coupon there. What we're seeing is the ability to encourage. So what happens that's really interesting is that marketers can identify when that pass is added to a customer's wallet, so that intent to buy is being a measurement that is unreal to whatever else you have to be able to measure with, from paper coupons for example.
Speaker 1:
That makes sense. So there's an intent there too. So that might be kind of from a nudge perspective, from behavioral science perspective, may operate to open up the opportunity to send a reminder, either a text, SMS or an email, to potentially nudge them. And obviously you don't want to say that you've always put it in the wallet, but you do it in a very subtle manner.
Speaker 2:
Yep, exactly. And then it's similar to like if you're doing email campaigns, you're having drip campaigns, you can actually send push notifications to the wallet holders. You know, and you don't want to be noisy, you don't want to saturate that wallet because customers can disengage easily just as unsubscribing from email. They can uninstall that pass. So what you're trying to do is engage with that customer and make sure that their intentions are to buy and if not, they're going to remove that coupon from their wallet or throw it away anyway. So really trying to encourage and educate marketers that the wallet can be used as a mechanism to get them into the store or to make that purchase.
Speaker 1:
You talked a little bit about when it's added to the wallet and how you can do some unique things in that regard. How does adding a wallet help brands increase the longevity and visibility of the campaigns?
Speaker 2:
Yeah. So one story is AAA has a business line where it's in the automotive car care repairs, and what was really interesting with that aspect is when a customer adds a car care repair coupon to their wallet, they may or may not get into the store by the time that coupon expires. What we can do with the technology is actually push a new coupon and replace to the coupon that expired and encourage them for a free oil change to get them into the store. What we've learned in the automotive business is that an oil change costs about $12 internally, but it's the relationship you gain and the potential of other businesses that you can create once the customer's inside the store for an oil change. So the cost for $12 to get someone in the store is a great value.
Speaker 1:
Absolutely. Can you give some other examples of how brands have successfully integrated add to wallet into their customer loyalty program, customer loyalty strategies?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, so from like the service level based like I was talking with the car care there's also the retail based, which is more of the coupons. But you know, I think brands that we haven't worked with but it really inspired me would be like the Chick-fil-A, the Target, the Starbucks, the Home Depot. They all have a way to entice people to come in the store through a wallet mechanism. Maybe it's not the native wallet, but it's a mobile app and what we found is that the mobile apps are extremely expensive to create and creates roadblocks for brands many brands to get into the wallet or into the mobile app space itself. So what we've really started to see is that we need to simplify the barriers of getting into a mobile phone as marketers, and what we've seen is the Apple Wallet and the Google Pay really has that capability to simplify our loyalty programs and for brands to easily access consumers from a different channel and mechanism. Ok, excellent.
Speaker 1:
When you look at what's working with your clients when it comes to building successful customer loyalty programs and strategies. You've talked a little bit about that. Can you provide maybe an example or two that that you see holistically that your clients are doing that is working well?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, so the oil change sticking with the car care company, the car repair business. They see about 800 to 1,000 customers in the store with the wallet device in their hands, customers in the store with the wallet device in their hands. So that was really quite a telling moment that customers really want this medium to be engaged, to be activated. What was the surprising element was the clerks didn't know ahead of time that the customers would have these in their wallet, in their mobile wallet space. So the clerks were actually even more excited than the customer was to see that these were getting digitalized. And what we saw was the redemption was higher with digital than it was with paper.
Speaker 1:
Interesting. Okay, One of the things that we saw. We do a state of customer loyalty report each year. Brands are focused on either redoing, enhancing, adding incremental functionality to their customer loyalty programs. What are you seeing around your customers? Are they interested in adding new functionality? Are they looking to redo the program or updates? What are clients looking for from you?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, so a lot of companies are, like you said, are investing heavily into loyalty, and that's what's exciting for us as well. But I think what we see is a lot of companies spending a lot of money up front to design this loyalty program. That is just like everyone else, and they spend a ton of money setting it all up before even trying it out to see if the customers really want what they're setting up all up before even trying it out to see if the customers really want what they're setting up. What we've learned is to simplify that loyalty program as much as possible, to engage with customers sooner, to attempt to see if this is a good fit for your audience as you're getting into the market. So what we've done is educated our brands that we work with, to simplify the process down, to test it and then reinvest more into it, as you see that the results are paying off Absolutely.
Speaker 1:
When you look at the future, what's the next big thing you think brands should be looking at or considering with regard to technology opportunities and tools for customer loyalty engagement type opportunities?
Speaker 2:
Yeah. So, like I said earlier, the Wallet Channel for me is like the next channel for marketers. It's similar to the days where marketers didn't feel like they belonged in the SMS channel when SMS came out for text messaging. Yeah, and I think this is the same kind of aspect that marketers believe yeah, we're not a financial company, we don't belong in the wallet, we don't have a credit card, and I think brands are starting to realize, like, wait, we can put that in the wallet, we can put this in the wallet. And if you actually open up your physical wallet or your purse, you see a lot more than just bank cards in there.
Speaker 2:
And that's what's very interesting is that this needs to just be educated more about where we're heading with the wallet and what you can do with it. And really the KPIs, the key performance indicators tell us that we can see the intent to buy, we can see the customers uninstalling or disengaging in the offer that you're giving them, and we're seeing it a lot that it's being able to get that personalization factor. So there's a lot in just that space alone. That I think the innovation of the future is really, really neat and you're really heading in the right direction. A lot of people like you and I, mark, would say AI is the way to go. I would say AI is a way to buy yourself more headspace and time to really engage properly with all your audiences from a one-to-one perspective. You really need, as marketers, to get into that personalization level and to get that right time, right moment touch, and I think that's where AI really helps. Is that right time, right moment place.
Speaker 1:
Are there programs you admire or are loyal to from a customer loyalty perspective and if so, what do you like about their offerings?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, so, as I kind of mentioned earlier, the Target and the Starbucks are my go-to. When I say that they're my favorite, they're my golden child's favorite. When mobile apps were kind of the thing to download and learn about, home Depot really kicked butt on their mobile app experience. When you go into a store, you get a different experience in the store than if you were outside the store as a consumer, and I think that's a really cool way to educate that you can do a better job inside the store and use your barcode scanner to read the SKUs and be able to see if something's in stock or not, and kind of act like an associate but as a customer, and I think that's a really neat way to engage with something where you're trying to find an answer to something you can't find. That makes perfect sense.
Speaker 1:
When you look at what's next for Add to Wallet. What do you guys have on the horizon? What do you bring to the market that will kind of help brands even more in their customer loyalty journey?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, so our tech is in the space where we can already distribute. We're really in the in the space to that one-to-one personalization. Um, the the hardest part for our side of things is actually the tech on the other side. The integration piece to these crms and these point of sale systems needs to catch up. Um, we actually see that a lot of point of sale systems are kind of dinosaurs in their tech where they don't have the capability to do barcode reading or capabilities of this stuff. So we're trying to I think that's where a lot of brands are kind of investing first into is the better POS, but they don't really know what they need to ask for in that barcode reading capabilities and really that capability should be a one-to-one coupon. So one coupon to one individual hyper-personalization is the way to go.
Speaker 1:
Okay, makes perfect sense. And now we have the wonderful quick fire questions. I'd like to keep the answers to one word or a short phrase. I'll try my best. Yeah, absolutely. What is your favorite word? Efficient.
Speaker 2:
Okay, what is your least favorite word For marketing days? Blast Blasting emails. What excites you, goals.
Speaker 1:
What do you find?
Speaker 2:
tiresome Negotiating.
Speaker 1:
Excellent. Is there a book that you like that you potentially recommend to colleagues and or business associates?
Speaker 2:
There's one I just recently read. It's the Power of Moments, by Chip and Dan Heath Yep.
Speaker 1:
Perfect, great, amazing book. When you look at this profession that you're obviously doing very well in, would there be another profession that you potentially like to try and or find of interest?
Speaker 2:
I've always been interested in brick and mortar businesses, so you know one of the easiest things I keep on my mind is a real estate agent.
Speaker 1:
Okay, interesting Yep. What do you enjoy doing that you don't get enough time to do 3D printing. Okay, wow, okay. Who inspired you to become the person that you are today?
Speaker 2:
It was a blind old, grumpy, very clever inventor, my grandfather.
Speaker 1:
Oh wow, interesting, cool to hear. What do you typically think about at the end of the day, relaxing, and how do you want to be remembered by your friends and family?
Speaker 2:
Passionate to learn new things. Okay, great.
Speaker 1:
Well, thank you very much. It was great getting to know more about you, steven, and also learning more about Add to Wallet. Looking forward to seeing you at the Loyalty Expo in a month, and we definitely have some very unique technology that can help brands create some very unique engagement. I'm looking forward to learning more about your technology as well. Thanks, mark. Appreciate it Great and everyone, have a wonderful day. Make sure you join us back again for another edition of loyalty live and until then, have a wonderful day and look forward to seeing everyone at the loyalty expo in June in Orlando. Thanks,
