Faced with the explosion of acquisition costs and the erosion of margins, chasing new customers has become a financial pit for retail and catering.
This observation is shared by all marketing and network directors. franchise : in 2023, customer acquisition has become a money pit. Between the explosion of advertising costs on Meta platforms or Googlethe asphyxiating commissions of delivery aggregators and the ephemeral cost of influence campaigns, attracting a consumer for the first time to a physical point of sale has never been so expensive.
However, once the customer is seated at a table or goes to the checkout, the mechanism stops. An overwhelming majority of freelancers and networks make the same strategic mistake: investing 90% of their budget to get a stranger through the door, and virtually nothing to bring them back.
Faced with the erosion of margins, the real growth lever no longer lies in frenetic conquest, but in maximizing Customer Lifetime Value. To achieve this, local commerce must undergo its technological revolution.
The illusion of the proprietary mobile application
To solve this retention problem, the answer over the last ten years has often been the same: “Let’s develop our own mobile app of loyalty”. A false good idea paid at a high price.
Today, we have entered the era of app fatigue. Unless called Starbucks or McDonald’s, no brand can decently expect a consumer to saturate the storage space and battery of their smartphone with the application of a neighborhood concept or a medium-sized network. The friction is too strong, the download rate is marginal, and the return on investment is almost zero.
Conversely, the traditional cardboard loyalty card, although it has the merit of existing, suffers from a loss rate close to 90% and condemns the merchant to radio silence. Once the customer leaves, the link is permanently broken.
The advent of “Wallet Marketing” and zero friction
The key to precision commerce lies in leveraging the infrastructure that already exists in consumers’ smartphones: Mobile Wallets (Apple Wallet and Google Wallet). Initially designed for bank cards and train tickets, these digital wallets have become the new preferred relational channel for retail.
By dematerializing customer relations directly in these native applications, brands benefit from a formidable triptych:
Instant membership: A simple scan of QR code at checkout allows you to install a loyalty card in less than 3 seconds, without any tedious forms or downloads.
The direct and free push channel: The Wallet transforms loyalty card into a dynamic communication tool. The merchant can send push notifications directly to their customers’ lock screens to reactivate flows on off-peak days, thus avoiding the hassle of algorithms capricious social networks or anti-spam filters in newsletters.
Contextual and geolocalized marketing: Thanks to GPS chips in smartphones, a map embedded in the Wallet can trigger an automatic and non-intrusive notification when the customer passes in the immediate vicinity of the point of sale. Impulse buying is no longer a coincidence, it is caused by data.
From passive flow to predictive flow
Running a business or franchise network simply hoping that the customer will come back “because the product is good” has become a risky bet. Faced with a plethoric and hyper-volatile supply, the sustainability of a point of sale depends on its ability to generate flow on demand.
By rethinking retention not as a cost, but as the primary profit center, and by relying on frictionless mobile technologies, merchants are finally regaining control of their data and their turnover. In 2026, local tech must no longer seek to impress, it must simply integrate where the customer is already looking: in the palm of their hand.
OUAZIL Mimoun, founder of Loyzia, the SaaS platform that modernizes customer retention for restaurateurs and merchants by integrating their loyalty program and their relationship marketing directly into Apple Wallet and Google Wallet.
