More than 75 percent of retail passes in Apple Wallet are the result of peer sharing

There are two kinds of Apple Wallet passes: loyalty cards and coupons. Both can be shared via iMessage and email. And it turns out that more of them are there as the result of peer-to-peer sharing than brand and retailer marketing efforts.

Notifications and mobile-marketing platform Urban Airship analyzed more than a million Apple Wallet coupons and loyalty cards. The company found that “for every mobile wallet pass a customer installs, it is shared and added to 3.3 other mobile devices on average.” Accordingly, more than 75 percent of these passes are installed through sharing rather than downloads from retail and brand marketer channels.

Source: Urban Airship

Between coupons and loyalty cards, mobile coupons are more popular and more shared, as one might expect. The aggregate composition of Apple Wallet passes is 60 percent loyalty cards, 40 coupons.

Overall sharing rates varied by brand, with “the top-half of retailers seeing 46.4 percent of passes being shared on average, while the bottom-half saw 17.4 percent of passes shared on average,” according to the study.

Apple Wallet passes can operate like mini-apps with much less consumer resistance to downloading and installing them. They can have a persistent presence, change or update and support notifications, including location-based notifications.

This set of findings from Urban Airship indicates Wallet passes — especially coupons — are a new kind of earned media that have the potential to be very effective at driving transactions and store visits.