Wallet notification or SMS: what it changes for a shop owner

You still have half the window display to sell, or three empty slots tomorrow morning. You know exactly what to say, and you know that one message would be enough to bring a handful of people back this evening. That leaves the obvious question: through which channel, and at what price?

There are two answers. SMS, which everyone knows, billed per message. And the notification that appears on the loyalty card already stored in the customer's phone. Both land on the same lock screen. Economically, they are two different worlds.

Here is the comparison made with the public prices of French SMS providers, the arithmetic spelled out, and the part that sales pages forget: what SMS does better.

French SMS platforms publish their price grids, and they all work the same way: the more messages you buy at once, the less each one costs.

• Octopush: €0.061 excl. VAT per SMS for a pack of 1,000 messages to France, i.e. €61 excl. VAT, then €0.058 at 2,500, €0.055 at 10,000, down to €0.037 for a million.
• SMSFactor: €0.066 excl. VAT per SMS for a pack of 1,000, i.e. €66 excl. VAT, then €0.062 at 2,500, €0.056 at 10,000, and from €0.035 beyond a million.

Two things to remember. First, these prices exclude tax, and VAT is added on top. Second, the volume discounts are designed for large volumes. A neighbourhood shop that sends a few hundred messages a month stays at the top of the table for good, where SMS costs the most.

Take a business that is doing well: 600 customers on file, one message a month. At the unit price of the first tier, the campaign comes to €36.60 excl. VAT with one provider, €39.60 excl. VAT with the other. For a single monthly send. Since credit is bought in packs, you also have to pay €61 or €66 excl. VAT up front for a thousand messages, with the balance covering the following months' sends. Nothing outrageous, but it is not nothing either.

Move to two messages a month, which is still reasonable, and you are at 1,200 SMS a month, i.e. 14,400 over the year. At the 10,000-message tier price, the annual routing bill comes to around €792 excl. VAT with Octopush and €806 excl. VAT with SMSFactor.

And that sum buys only one thing: delivery of the messages. It includes neither the loyalty card, nor the dashboard, nor the scan at the counter. The software is paid for separately.

The problem is not the unit price, which is acceptable. The problem is the direction the meter turns. Every new loyal customer adds a line to the bill. You go from 300 to 900 cardholders, so your programme works three times better, and the same message costs you three times as much.

What follows is mechanical: you hesitate. You give up on reminding the customers who have not been in for two months, because there are 180 of them and that is another dozen euros. You save the sends for big occasions. The channel still exists, but you no longer use it.

Add to that the legal constraint, the same for everyone: the CNIL (the French data protection authority) points out that electronic advertising, SMS included, in principle requires the prior consent of the people contacted, with an exception when the person is already a customer and the message concerns similar products or services, provided they are informed of it and can object simply and free of charge. Consent or not, you slowly build up a list of numbers, and then you pay every time you talk to it.

The Wallet notification answers the same question differently. The message is not sent to a number, it lands on the loyalty card the customer has added to Apple Wallet or Google Wallet. No credit to buy, no cost per message, no cost per customer.

At Digikart, these notifications are included in the subscription: 3 a month on the Plus plan, at €17 per month, and with no limit on the Pro plan, at €49 per month or €490 per year, with no commitment. The price is the same with 200 customers and with 5,000. Both include flash promos that expire by themselves on the date you choose; the Pro plan adds win-back of inactive customers, the birthday reward, the proximity notification, statistics with CSV export, employee accounts and the connection to your till.

Let us go back to the business from earlier, 600 customers and two messages a month. By SMS: about €800 excl. VAT of routing over the year, i.e. nearly €960 incl. VAT at the standard VAT rate, plus the software. On the card: €490 for the year, software included, as many sends as you like. At two messages a month, the Plus plan and its 3 notifications a month are enough: €170 for the year. The details are on the unlimited notifications page, and full prices on the pricing page.

Let us be frank: SMS keeps three advantages the notification will never have.

• It reaches everyone. If you have the number, the message arrives, including for the customer who has never added your card and on a phone without Wallet. The notification only speaks to cardholders.
• It stays. An SMS waits in the message thread. The customer finds it again on Saturday morning, with your address and opening hours in it.
• It also works outside loyalty. Appointment reminders, an order ready for collection, closure for building works: these are service messages, often sent to people who are not in your programme.

Digikart does not send SMS, and that is a choice. If your trade needs it, a salon that confirms its appointments for example, keeping an account with an SMS provider alongside is perfectly consistent. The two do not contradict each other.

The dividing line fits in one sentence. What comes back every week goes on the card: the promo of the day, the reminder that the reward is two stamps away, the win-back of dormant customers, the birthday. Frequent messages, sent to a lot of people, so precisely the ones that inflate an SMS bill.

What is rare and individual can stay on SMS: tomorrow's appointment, the order waiting to be collected. Few messages, targeted, whose cost remains negligible.

Before signing with anyone at all, ask three questions. Are campaigns billed per message? Is the number of customers capped? And above all, how much will I pay in a year if my customer list doubles? If the answer to the last question is “double”, you are not buying a loyalty tool, you are renting a meter. The rest of the figures are in how much a loyalty card really costs and in the FAQ.