If your business moves, your customers cannot see your schedule. Somebody who joined at the Tuesday market has no way of knowing you are two towns over on Friday, and a stamp card they never remember to bring out is a stamp card that stops working. This is the answer to that: each day of your trading week can carry one short message, and when that day’s trading starts we ask your customers’ wallets to show it.
It is one sentence about where you are, written by you, going to everybody who holds one of your cards. Nothing is personalised, nothing is targeted, and it says nothing about anybody’s stamps.
Setting one up
- Go to Settings, then Locations. You need at least one Roaming location: that is a place you trade at only sometimes, like a market stall or an event pitch. A Static location, such as a shop or a salon, is somewhere you are always open, so there is nothing to announce and no trading week to fill in.
- In Your trading week, choose Add event on the day you want, then pick the location, the start time and the end time. A day that already has an event offers Add another event instead, so a morning pitch and a lunchtime one are two rows on the same day.
- Tick the box in the Try to tell customers column beside that event. The small i beside that column heading says what the tick does and does not promise.
- Write the message. Something like: We’re at Diss Town Market until 2pm today.
- Press Save schedule. That is the whole of it: there is nothing to send and nothing to remember on the day.
The message is needed if you tick the box. A tick with nothing written would interrupt your customers to say nothing, so the save asks you for one rather than sending an empty message.
Your trading week is where all of this lives. If a week changes, change the week: move the times, pick a different location, turn the event off with the switch at the start of its row, or take it off the day altogether, and press Save schedule. An event that is switched off announces nothing, and keeps its message for when you turn it back on. What the week says is what your customers are told, so a week that is right needs nothing else doing to it.
Writing a good one
It is up to 120 characters, which is about a line and a half on a phone’s lock screen, and it is the whole of what anybody sees. The ones that work say where, and until when:
- "We’re at Diss Town Market until 2pm today." Where you are and how long they have.
- "On the square in Harleston today, 9 till 1. Bring your card." Says what to do about it.
- "At the Wednesday market as usual. Same pitch, by the church." Useful for a regular pitch people still lose.
Avoid anything that stops being true. "New flavours this week" reads oddly in a month, and the message stays on the day until you change it, so a sentence about where you are today is the one that keeps working.
When it goes out
Within about five minutes of the start time you set, on the day that event runs. There is nothing to trigger. If your day starts at nine, your customers hear from you somewhere between nine and five past. Nothing goes out early: the message waits for the start time, exactly as you wrote it.
- Once per event. However long you are there, the message goes out once at the start, not every hour. A morning event and an evening one at the same place are two events, each with its own message.
- Nothing goes out in the last half hour of an event. "We’re here until two" at ten to two is no use to anybody, so it is skipped rather than sent late. For the same reason an event has to be at least 30 minutes long before you can tick Try to tell customers on it: the page says so beside the box, and a shorter event saves fine with the box unticked.
- The times are read in that location’s own time zone, which is worked out from the map pin.
- Editing your trading week during the day does not send it again.
If you trade at two places in a day
That works, and it is what this is for: a morning market and an afternoon pitch are two real events and two messages, whether they are at two places or the same one. What we will not do is a third. At most two of these visibly reach any one customer in 24 hours, and past that their card is still quietly brought up to date but their phone is not interrupted again. A loyalty card that buzzes three times on a Tuesday is a loyalty card that gets deleted.
Each event carries its own tick box and its own message, so a busy day can announce the morning pitch and say nothing about the afternoon one. The two-a-day limit is counted per card, not per event: adding a third event does not get you a third message.
If you run more than one Loyalty Program
The message goes onto the cards of every Program you have switched on, so a customer sees where you are whichever of your cards they open. The notification is asked for through only one Program, though: a customer who holds two or three of your cards is one person with one phone, and being interrupted three times for one market opening is how a loyalty card gets deleted. LoyalPack picks your first Program that has a card in a wallet (the earliest one you created), asks the wallet to notify through that Program’s cards, and quietly brings the other Programs’ cards up to date without an alert. It decides once, when the event starts, and does not change its mind for that event; the next event decides again. Whether the alert appears is still the phone’s decision, not ours.
What it does not do
- It does not use up your own one-message-a-day limit, in either direction: a message you send never holds one of these back, and one of these never stops you reaching that customer.
- It is not the same thing as your card appearing when somebody walks past. That happens on its own, from the map pins on your locations, needs nothing from you, and needs no tick in this box: the place you are trading at goes onto your customers’ cards at the event’s start time and comes back off at its end time, whether or not you send a word. What that shows is the Nearby suggestion text on the location itself, which you can change under Settings, then Locations.
- It does not know where any customer is. We never receive a location from anybody’s phone.
- It says nothing about a customer’s stamps or rewards. Those are Scan updates and Reminders, and they are separate.
What it needs, and what to expect
- A Roaming location with a map pin, and a day in your trading week with the box ticked and a message written.
- Location messages work on every plan, like Send Message and the other messages LoyalPack sends for you.
- Only customers who added the card to Apple Wallet or Google Wallet are reached. There is nowhere else to show it.
- A Loyalty Program you have switched off is never included.
- Nothing has to be set up on the customer’s side, and they do not need an app.
A notification is not guaranteed. LoyalPack requests one, and the wallet decides whether anything appears on the phone; neither Apple nor Google tells anybody what happened. That is why the tick box says "try to". A customer reading their loyalty card later sees the message whatever their phone did at the time, which is often how these get read: somebody opens their card at the market and it already says where you are.
A card shows one message at a time, so this replaces whatever the card was carrying, including a message you sent earlier. Your own message is still in your Audit Log, under Reports, with Messages chosen in the Event box. That is a limit of what Apple Wallet and Google Wallet give a loyalty card, not a choice we made.
Where to see what happened
Each one appears in your Audit Log, under Reports, marked "Trading location". Choose Messages in the Event box and you get one row per customer card, saying who it went to and what that card actually got. A customer whose phone was not interrupted because of the two-a-day limit is listed as "Card updated (daily limit)", so you can see it happened rather than wonder. A card on one of your other Programs, updated without an alert because the notification went through your first Program, is listed as "Card updated (alert requested through another Program)", and the message’s own page names the Program the alert was requested through.