Polo, the fashion retail brand, has developed an innovative way of using consumers’ mobile wallets to acquire customers, drive outlet store visits and grow loyalty.

“Acquisition is a key piece for us,” Malene Da Silva, EMEA retail marketing director for Polo Ralph Lauren, told a recent conference

“We have a huge number of people coming through our doors and once they make it to the till we have a very successful sign-up program [Polo Live]. We sign up the vast majority of people who purchase with us.”

The problem is, most people don’t make it as far as the till. “We have an 80% delta between footfall and ultimate store conversion,” she admitted.

“There was a need to communicate with prospects earlier in the path to purchase.” (For more, read WARC’s report: Polo Ralph Lauren taps mobile wallet as a marketing channel.)

The brand attracts 47 million visitors a year to its 64 “factory outlet stores” carrying overstock in 42 locations across 14 European countries, so the potential is huge. A pilot in two UK stores proved so successful it is now being rolled out across Europe.

Store visitors were incentivised to sign up via text – which, in addition to moving the process to earlier in the path to purchase, ended the sign-up bottlenecks that had developed at the till – and then invited to go to a microsite to give some limited details that enabled Polo to ascertain if they were existing customers.

Having completed this, consumers were then sent a message which included the offer and a wallet pass enabling the recipient to add it to their Apple Wallet or Google Pay; a barcode allowed redemption via scanning at the point of sale.

The drop-out rate is low, Da Silva said, with 80% of those starting the process carrying on to the end, and SMS had proved better than email in driving Wallet downloads: a Wallet save ratio of 34% had been achieved without having to educate users on how to go about doing this.

Footfall has increased 4% as a result, and Polo has also been able to use the limited information it collects on new users to fuel a loyalty drive based around birthdays.

Read more on mobile payments in next week's issue of Admap: The future of payments.

Sourced from WARC