ePrize Passbook Integration Helps Marketers Reward Customers On the Go

ePrize, providers of online promotions and contests, has announced its integration into Apple's Passbook app for mobile access to rewards, contest offerings, coupons and loyalty programs.

Passbook, a new Apple iOS 6 feature, helps people corral their airline info, coffee house cards and concert and movie tickets into one place. ePrize is tapping into Passbook to allow its own digital engagement platform to coexist along with customers' other mobile wallet-like items.

Real-Time Rewards

In business for over a decade, ePrize provides a full suite of advertising and promotions to many popular websites. It makes use of a mobile device's geolocation to offer coupons when a person walks by a participating store. In an interview, David Wachs, ePrize's vice president of the mobile division, said that as iPhone 5 users start to take advantage of Passbook, it presents a great opportunity for ePrize.

In January, ePrize bought Cellit, a company more focused on mobile than on standalone sites. The Cellit buy brought Wachs into the fold, and the new Passbook integration is the next step for the combined companies. Companies hire ePrize to design and build contest and promotion websites, and then connect out to the ePrize-hosted site, which looks and feels just like the companion site it is working with. 

ePrize contest in the Passbook app helps incentivize customer behavior.
 

Now that ePrize is focusing more on mobile, Wachs believes that Passbook integration is just the first step. Eventually, he said, other mobile operating systems will have Passbook-type apps that ePrize can work with.

Google's Android OS has the Google Wallet app, but it has more to do with transactions, something Passbook doesn't include. Google Wallet allows people to buy things with their smartphone and near field communication technology, something that, for a variety of reasons, has yet to become very widespread. 

In order to really make use of apps like Wallet, people need to be connected all the time, and stores need to have the technology to allow the NFC feature to work as well. Those are just two of the roadblocks in the way for Wallet. With Passbook, there is less focus on those transactions, and that's where the ePrize instant rewards and coupon reminders come in.

"Apple is doing things without credit cards, which is smart," Wachs remarked.

Apps Over Email

With traditional coupons and rewards, people have to go into their email to redeem them. An ePrize-based coupon can be saved right into Passbook and redeemed from there. Additionally, any loyalty programs used can have the points updated right in the Passbook app.

As for other geolocation features, if someone has an ePrize coupon that is about to expire, Passbook can remind them once they get close to the store's physical location. 

All this activity is tracked and stored by ePrize and analyzed to improve performance, helping digital marketing campaigns be more efficient. EPrize has over 800 customers worldwide, and it provides fully customized promotion and mobile marketing programs of various sizes. ePrize also has integrations with systems like Salesforce and SurveyMonkey. Pricing for ePrize products will depend on what the customers need, so that information is not publicly available.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Will iOS 6's Passbook App be the iPhone 5's Big Feature

 The world is pretty much resigned to a slightly bigger screen as being the highlight of Apple's new iPhone release. But could the real seller be iOS 6's Passbook app that brings your coupons, loyalty cards, cinema and transport tickets together, be the real highlight?

Aiming for Practicality

While the advertisements looked slick, and the feature is fun to play with, I'm yet to find anyone who lets Siri run their life for them. That was the stand-out feature of the iPhone 4S and iOS 5 launch, as Apple maintained the look of the phone and only upgraded the internals. 

While the iPhone 5 will feature a new, bigger, screen and many other tweaks at its unveiling this week, many are starting to get bored of the whole feature creep and bloat "advances" in smartphones. However, Passbook on iOS 6 could be the app that really makes some progress and sells the phone (as well as whichever previous models Apple decides it will be compatible with). 

Yes, Google has been pushing NFC and wallets for some time, and Microsoft has high hopes for similar features in Windows Phone 8, but overall, digital wallets seem to have had a limited push so far. If Apple makes a concerted effort, and achieves a high degree of user interaction and positive reaction, then all rivals will really be pushing the feature, and it could make smartphones worth talking about again. 

Replacing the Wallet?

While any sane person should be a little nervous about adding all their various account details to a digital wallet, if Apple manages the process well enough, and security is both manageable and Fort Knox standard, then it could be onto a real winner. 

On the security side, Apple has announced the acquisition of AuthenTec, a company that specializes in fingerprint recognition technology, which could help secure the app against fraudulent use, enable secure NFC, all done quickly and easily. 

Passbook could popularize the digital wallet

With simple tasks like cinema and store loyalty cards all managed from the one place, Passbook could become something that offers an everyday benefit to huge numbers of users. Regular travellers will really appreciate that airlines and train companies are already up and running on the beta, suggesting the ecosystem for the app will be running from day one. 

With that, the new maps app and other features in iOS 6.0, whatever the new phone looks like, it could well be the little bits of software that help sell this year's model. 

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com