Digital loyalty cards

A digital loyalty card is a pass in Apple Wallet on iPhone or Google Wallet on Android. It carries your logo, your colors and the customer’s points balance, and it sits beside their payment cards and boarding passes instead of in a drawer at home. Nobody downloads an app: the wallet is already on the phone.

How customers add it

Every program gets a hosted sign-up page with its own QR code. Put the code on a counter card, a table tent, a receipt or your website. A customer scans it with the phone camera, fills in their name and email address, and adds the pass to Apple Wallet or Google Wallet in one tap. The pass arrives with a Member ID that belongs to that customer alone, the same code your staff scan at the till.

If a customer deletes the pass or changes phone, they open the same sign-up page, enter the email address they joined with and get their card back, balance included.

Points, rewards and tiers

Name the balance whatever suits your business: points, stars, beans or petals. Set a reward target and the pass can tell the customer how many points are left before their next reward. For a tiered program, give each tier the balance it starts at, for example Silver at 500 points and Gold at 1,500. Members move up on their own as their balance grows and can get a message when they reach a new tier, and staff see each member’s tier when they scan the pass in the Stow Cards Merchant app. The pass itself can show how many points are left before the next tier.

If every visit is worth about the same, a digital stamp card may suit you better. It is the same loyalty card in its stamp style, with a grid that fills one stamp per visit.

Updating the balance at the till

Staff open the Stow Cards Merchant app on a phone or tablet, scan the QR code on the customer’s pass and award points in one tap. You choose how many points a tap adds, and staff can enter a custom amount for a bigger spend. If a customer’s phone won’t scan, staff can find them by Member ID, name, email or phone number instead. From the web console you can adjust any balance, for example to take points off when a reward is claimed, and every change is recorded against the staff member who made it.

What customers see when the balance changes

The pass rebuilds as soon as the balance changes, and the new version reaches the customer’s phone in real time. On iPhone you can attach a short message to the change, such as “You now have 450 points, 50 more for a free coffee”, and it appears on the lock screen. On Android the Google Wallet card updates in place. Customers never have to open anything to see where they stand.

One design, both wallets

You design the card once in the Stow Cards Pass Designer and it becomes both passes. In Apple Wallet the balance sits in large type over your strip artwork, with a field of your choice in the header and up to four more fields underneath. In Google Wallet the card shows the balance, your header field and two more fields, with the same artwork as its banner. The QR code and Member ID are the same on both, so staff scan every customer the same way.

Bringing customers back

Because the card is already in the wallet, you can reach members without collecting phone numbers for text messages. Send a campaign that updates the pass for every member or for a segment, and add your store locations so the pass can surface on the iPhone lock screen near your stores. The console shows sign-ups, pass installs and in-store scans, including scans by hour, and lists the members who received each campaign.

New to wallet passes? Read how to add your loyalty card to Apple Wallet and Google Wallet, see how Stow Cards works in four steps, or find out why a wallet card beats another app.