We’ve begun to refer to one of our key product development themes at Closely as “Wallet Bias”.  It captures an increasingly important new promotion marketing concept.

Return shopping behavior is undergoing a sea change, as consumers begin to modify their shopping decision making. They are being conditioned to “check for promotions” before deciding on a particular product/service purchase.  Indeed, a consumer today can jump from Spa to Spa, from Restaurant to Restaurant, or from Cleaning Service to Cleaning Service, living off the growing inventory of Deals being continually published.

As a new gen of “live promotions” migrate into the mainstream, this behavior will further accelerate to a new norm in consumer shopping decisions. Just as Review content has become central to consumers shopping, Promotions will take their place as a key factor in final business selection.  Consumers shop based on quality and price.  Reviews have become the proxy for quality, and Promotion will become the proxy for communicating price.

The Wallet Bias Imperative

A small business can no longer rely solely on the quality of product and consumer experience to ensure return visit behavior, even by their traditionally loyal customers. This puts an acute new priority on leveraging the point of live interaction with customers to build bias for future return visit shopping decisions.

One approach we take with Loyalty engagement is to employ the point of “check-out interaction” to select and reward your most interesting consumers – the ones that the business wants as repeat customers.  Wallet Bias is the goal, as we leverage pre-purchased offers to secure a position of recall and preference when the consumer is ready for their next use of their product/service. Having a $20 value voucher in the consumer’s wallet can secure a bias towards your business, delivering more effective promotion impact than a generic Happy Hour standing offer.

The Increasingly Strategic Consumer Wallet

Today, Wallet Bias is a metaphor for achieving top-of-mind recall when a consumer is ready to decide in your product/service category.  In the not-too-distant future, this wallet will become a very tangible promotion distribution target.

In the rapidly approaching world of mobile wallets, the consumer will increasingly use smartphone apps for making purchases, and these apps could grow to become central to loyalty and promotion.  We need to think of this wallet not simply as a payment tool, but as a destination for targeted distribution of promotional offers. Imagine having a set of contextual recommendations “waiting for you in your wallet”.

To see the battle forming over this new app space, look no further than the news of the day!

The best early example I saw of the potential for a new generation of wallet applications was in the GroceryIQ app (acquired by Coupons.com) – designed to help you create your grocery list, the application automatically appends coupons for the identified products – and related ones!

Project this into the future, and you see a new battlefield in which consumers may come to activate and navigate their shopping actions via this new highly targeted promotion distribution channel.  To a merchant, the opportunity to target related purchase behavior, qualified by precise identity, location and time-based context is very compelling.

At Closely, We’re Already There!

We help today’s small business begin to shift their promotion plans into this emerging behavior of consumers.  Daily Deal campaign do nothing to secure return behavior, but the underlying concept of pre-purchased offers can be directly applied.  We’ve innovated in two directions here.

One, we’ve created a “Private Promotion” product – simply, it’s a way to target and deliver a return visit deal to individual consumers. The business owner can hand select the customers they want to return, and deliver a Return Visit purchase offer at the time of service completion or check-out.  There is no better time to secure return visit bias that at the completion of a good product/service experience.

Two, we’ve refined the promotion instrument to create smart everyday promotion programs.  We’ve provided a simple way to incent the best behavior (time/day patterns, for example, as seen below).

From a Best Practices viewpoint, we recommend designing return promotions to establish Wallet Bias.  The intent is not to replicate a Daily Deal, but simply to create a position that hooks the customer into a bias towards choosing you when they are ready to transact again. Lower price point return visit promotions can hook the desired return purchase behavior, and bonus time structures can give the business the confidence to use this as an everyday marketing tool.

Finding your place to top-of-mind recall and decision bias of your best customers (and the related social referral opportunities) is becoming central to a well deigned Business Promotion strategy.  Loyalty increasingly needs to be triggered, and it’s a new world where decision processes and tools are in motion.

If you’re not aiming here, you’ll simply be missing your customers.