How to notify wallet pass holders about a reward

Tell loyalty members that a reward is ready the moment they earn it, with a message that appears on their Apple Wallet or Google Wallet pass. In this guide, you build a Customer Journey that sends the message only to members who have added your pass.

Prerequisites

• Connect the iOS platform and complete Apple Wallet pass setup, and/or configure Google Wallet for Android, for the platforms you support.
• Issue your loyalty pass to members by User ID, in the same application as this journey, for example from a Wallet Pass Campaign or with How to issue a wallet pass on signup.

Create the reward event

An event is a signal that your system sends when something happens to a user. Here, it’s sent when a member earns a reward, for example when they reach 100 loyalty points or collect the tenth stamp on a coffee card.

1. Go to Audience → Events, click Create event, and choose Custom Event.
2. Name it RewardUnlocked. The event needs no attributes, because the message text is the same for every member.
3. Ask development to send the event when a member earns a reward. Learn more about creating events

Developer assistance needed

Send RewardUnlocked with the postEvent API call or the SDK, and pass the member’s User ID in it. Use the same User ID the pass was issued to, otherwise the journey can’t find the member’s pass.

Prepare the message

Create a push preset with the reward message, for example:

• Title: Riverside Café Rewards
• Text: Your free coffee is ready. Show your loyalty card at the counter.

Always fill in the text. The pass shows it, and on Apple Wallet a push without text only refreshes the pass, so the holder sees nothing.

What the holder sees depends on the wallet:

• Apple Wallet: a notification from the pass with the iOS text of the push, under the push title. Pushwoosh removes the message from the pass after about an hour. Apple Wallet notifies only when the text changes, so a second push with the same text within that hour doesn’t show a notification.
• Google Wallet: an Android notification with the push title and text, and the message on the pass. The pass keeps only the latest message. Google also limits how often a pass can notify its holder. See Google Wallet notification.

Build the journey

Go to Campaigns → Customer Journey Builder, click Create campaign, and build everything below on one canvas.

Set the entry

1. Add a Trigger-based entry element to the canvas.
2. In Point name, enter Reward unlocked.
3. Under Event, select RewardUnlocked.

Keep only members who hold the pass

1. Add a Reachability check element after the entry and name it Holds the pass?.
2. Under Reachable by, click Wallet Pass in Add a channel, then delete the Push Notifications channel the element starts with.
3. Keep All platforms selected to check Apple Wallet and Google Wallet passes.
4. Under Which devices to check, select All devices of the user. The pass is registered as a separate device of the member, so checking only the device that sent the event would miss it.

The element gets two branches. Members who have added your pass go to Wallet, and everyone else goes to All others.

Send the reward message

1. On the Wallet branch, add a Push element and name it Reward message.
2. In Preset, select the preset you prepared.
3. Select Transactional message. The member earned the reward and expects to hear about it, so the message reaches everyone who holds the pass, including members in the global control group and those who hit the frequency limit. Learn more about message types.

4. Keep Send to all user devices (from UserID) turned on. The push then goes to every device tied to the member’s User ID, including the pass and, for example, the phone with your app. With the setting turned off, the push goes only to the device that sent the event, and the pass gets nothing.

5. Optionally, add an Exit element after Reward message, and connect the All others branch to another Exit element.

When RewardUnlocked fires, the member enters the journey. If they have added your pass, Reward message sends the push to all their devices, and the wallet shows it on the pass. Members who don’t hold the pass leave the journey through All others and get no message. A member with no device at all in the application drops out at Holds the pass? with the Device not found reason.

Launch and check

1. Launch the journey when the canvas is ready.
2. Ask your developer to send a test RewardUnlocked event for a member who holds the pass.
3. On Holds the pass?, check how many users went to Wallet and All others.
4. On Reward message, check the stats.

Update the pass content (optional)

The push doesn’t change the fields of your pass design. On Apple Wallet, the push title shows in place of the pass’s organization name until the message is removed. To show the reward on the card itself, for example a new points balance, update the pass separately:

• In the Control Panel, with Edit in All passes, or with a design change in the pass’s Wallet Pass Campaign.
• Through the Apple PassKit API or the Google Wallet API.

Other ways to start the journey

• Audience-based entry: send the message to a whole segment once or on a schedule, for example a weekly offer to members of your loyalty program.
• API-based entry: start the journey from your own system, for example when an event’s start time changes for everyone holding a ticket.