Why digital marketers should be excited about Apple Pay

Apple has shattered its own record of iPhone sales with a staggering 10 millions iPhone 6 units sold within the first couple days following the highly anticipated launch. This creates an immediate and very sizable base for its new mobile payments service, Apple Pay, expected to launch later this month. Jack Philbin, a digital marketing expert, likens this to when American Idol put text messaging on the map in 2003 by letting fans vote via text message. This is another one of those moments when marketers really have to pay attention to mobile and take advantage of the opportunity before competitors.

Consumers are getting fed up with carrying around many loyalty cards and there is a very real opportunity to make them digital. One example of this is Pep Boys. The car service and retail chain uses its mobile wallet application to remind customers of routine maintenance, such as oil changes. Notifications can be scheduled or triggered by location. Initial results show that 25% of customers that received a promotion saved it to Passbook and 30% of these were redeemed. That means that > 7% of mobile coupons let to additional sales, a huge percentage.

The technology used in Apple Pay, Near-Field Communications (or NFC) only accounted for 2.5% of mobile payment; however, that still amounted to $8.2 billion. Apple Pay is expected to drive those numbers up significantly and companies are not planning to stand by quietly during this mobile payments revolution, they all want to capitalize on it. Time will tell which ones will succeed.

http://fortune.com/2014/09/26/digital-marketing-apple-pay/