Five Things Marketers Should Know About Apple Passbook

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock during the last couple months, you know that Apple announced the new iPhone 5 back on September 12, 2012. On this date, Apple also rolled out its latest mobile operating system, iOS 6, which came chock full of new features like enhanced Siri, new 3D maps and deeper integration with social networks Twitter and Facebook.

Arguably, the most important new feature to arrive on iOS 6 was something called Passbook, which allows marketers to provide coupons, tickets, loyalty cards and more, all in one place on the iPhone or iPad.

Apple Passbook

For anyone that is interested in a deeper dive, the Passbook Developer kit is a great resource. Assuming that the rest of you are like me and just want the Readers Digest version for marketers, here is the good stuff:

1) The real power behind Passbook, and the most important reason any marketer should consider it, is that for iPhone and iPad users who have upgraded to iOS 6, it is the killer location-based app.

What I mean by that is that if you can encourage a customer to accept a coupon, ticket, loyalty card or pass from you a single time, you have ongoing permission to communicate with them/provide value as long as they have that item in their Passbook.

2) Because Passbook comes pre-loaded on iOS 6 (on the homescreen, to boot), it is impossible not to see. It’s also impossible to delete the app.

And while you can delete items from your Passbook, the user has to flip the item over and then find the delete button in the top left corner. It’s one of the few times that a non-intuitive user interface is helpful to the marketer.

3) While the Passbook functionality integrates nicely with mobile apps, thanks to an easy-to-use API (download the American Airlines, Target or Eventbrite apps for examples), the benefit here is that you can also deliver passes via e-mail or the Web, ensuring that almost anybody can use Passbook.

Speaking of anybody using Passbook, there are several sites that allow one to build their own Passbook functionality — DIY sites like Passdock, and Tello’s PassTools.

4) As mentioned in bullet one, tapping into the location-aware capabilities of Passbook is one of the more powerful aspects of the app. This allows marketers to message customers when they are in store or near a particular location.

Unlike foursquare and other location-based services (LBS), the customer only needs to activate an item once in Passbook to allow for ongoing messaging. Passbook is also date-aware, so it can be triggered on holidays/certain days of the week, as appropriate.

5) And finally, an ability to customize the items within Passbook to include messaging, barcodes, QR codes and other scannable formats allows for the proper connectivity of Passbook with most point of sale (POS) systems.

While Apple Passbook is good now, I can only imagine that it will get better in time. Over the next few months, I will keep readers of Marketing Land updated on the latest and greatest functionality.

Have you seen any great uses of Passbook? If so, please include links in the comments.

Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Aaron Strout

Aaron Strout is Chief Marketing Officer at integrated marketing and communications firm, W2O Group. During his tenure with the company, he has served as President of WCG and head of W2O's technology practice. Aaron has 20 plus years of social media, mobile, online marketing and advertising experience, with a strong background in integrated marketing. Prior to joining W2O, Aaron spent time as the CMO of Powered Inc. (now part of Dachis Group), VP of social media at online community provider, Mzinga, and as director of digital marketing at Fidelity Investments. Aaron is the co-author of Location Based Marketing for Dummies (Wiley) and writes a monthly mobile/location-based marketing column on Marketingland.com. He also recently launched the What 2 Know podcast (iTunes) which features industry leaders talking about innovation and best practices.