Dotdigital is one of the most popular marketing automation platforms among UK retailers and ecommerce brands, trusted for its powerful email and SMS capabilities. But even the best-crafted campaigns face a fundamental challenge: getting seen. With Litecard, you can extend your Dotdigital automations beyond the inbox by adding digital wallet passes that put your loyalty programme directly into your customer’s phone.
The Inbox Problem
UK email open rates hover around 20-25%, and that figure has been declining steadily. Promotions tabs, spam filters, and simple inbox overload mean that even your most engaged subscribers miss campaigns. SMS performs better for immediacy, but messages are typically deleted after reading.
Wallet passes solve the persistence problem. Once a customer saves your pass to Apple Wallet or Google Wallet, your brand occupies a permanent slot on their device. It’s not competing with other messages – it’s sitting alongside their bank cards and boarding passes, visible every time they reach for their phone.
How the Integration Works
Connecting Dotdigital to Litecard doesn’t require rebuilding your automations. You’re adding a new distribution channel to your existing flows:
- Welcome series: Include a wallet pass CTA in your onboarding flow. New subscribers save your branded loyalty card alongside their first purchase confirmation. From that moment, you have a persistent presence on their device.
- Post-purchase automation: Trigger a wallet pass delivery after checkout. The pass displays their points balance, reward tier, and any available promotional vouchers. It updates automatically with each subsequent purchase.
- Win-back campaigns: For dormant customers who’ve stopped opening emails, send a wallet pass update via push notification. This bypasses the inbox entirely and lands directly on their lock screen with a compelling offer.
- SMS + wallet pairing: Include a wallet pass link in your SMS automations. Customers tap once to save the pass – it’s the fastest path from message to permanent brand presence.
- Browse and cart abandonment: Trigger a pass update with a time-limited incentive when a customer abandons their basket. The notification appears on their lock screen, not buried in their inbox.
For all automated and manual email campaigns, you can add a reference to an image or QR code which points to a wallet pass download link (the QR code is for desktop users). These values are stored against a customer record as a data field and are automatically populated and mapped with Litecard’s native integration.
You can also choose to surface this block in emails where conditions such as ‘a person hasn’t download a mobile wallet pass’ is satisfied and checked against a download flag meta field.
Dynamic Passes vs Static Coupons
This is the critical difference between wallet passes and traditional email promotions. A discount code in an email is static, it sits there until it expires or gets deleted. A wallet pass is a living, dynamic asset that your team controls in real time.
You can update the content without sending a new email. Push a new offer, refresh a points balance, add a seasonal message, or change the reward tier, all reflected instantly on the customer’s device. For UK retailers running frequent promotions, this eliminates the need for constant email sends while maintaining engagement.
Tracking and Measurement
Every wallet pass interaction is tracked through Litecard’s performance dashboard. You can see who’s saving passes, who’s deleting them, who’s engaging with push notifications, and who’s redeeming offers.
This data feeds back into your Dotdigital segments. You can create automations that respond to wallet pass behaviour – for example, sending a follow-up email to customers who saved a pass but haven’t made a purchase within seven days, or triggering an SMS to customers who engaged with a push notification but didn’t convert.
Why This Matters for UK Brands
UK consumers are increasingly resistant to downloading branded apps. The average smartphone user downloads zero new apps per month. Wallet passes eliminate this friction entirely – there’s no download, no account creation, no onboarding. The pass saves in two taps.
For brands already investing in Dotdigital’s automation capabilities, wallet passes represent the highest-impact, lowest-friction addition to your retention stack. You’re not replacing email and SMS – you’re giving them a permanent extension that lives on your customer’s device.
Getting Started with Litecard UK
If you’re running Dotdigital for your UK marketing, adding wallet passes is a natural next step that requires no technical overhaul. Explore Litecard’s CRM and platform integrations, or contact the team to see a live demo with your Dotdigital setup.
