How to send your first wallet notification

What you're actually sending

A wallet notification in Waya comes down to four decisions: who gets it, what it says in 140 characters or fewer, when it lands, and whether you read the delivery report afterward. All four happen on the Notifications screen of your dashboard. Your first send takes about two minutes once your business hours are correct.

This isn't an SMS, and it isn't a push from an app your customer installed. It rides on the loyalty pass already sitting in their Apple Wallet or Google Wallet. Apple Wallet gets told the pass changed and surfaces your line on the lock screen; Google Wallet shows the equivalent on Android. No phone number leaves Waya, and nothing is handed to a third-party messaging vendor.

One consequence is worth knowing before you write anything. Only customers who actually added the pass to a wallet can receive a notification. If someone enrolled and left the web card open in a browser tab instead, there's no lock screen to write to, and they'll appear in your report as "no pass".

Step 1: pick the audience

The default is a broadcast — every customer holding a card from your shop. That's rarely the right choice. Save it for a new branch opening or a holiday closure, and make everything else narrower.

You have three ways to narrow it. By card, if you run more than one (Growth allows up to 10). By lifecycle band, which Waya derives from days since the last visit: Active is 14 days or fewer, Slipping is 15 to 30, At risk is 31 to 60, and Lapsed is 61 or more. Those thresholds are defaults and you can edit them band by band.

One quirk catches people out. Anyone with 2 or fewer recorded visits sits in the New band regardless of how long they've been gone. A customer who enrolled in March, came once, and never returned is still "New", not "Lapsed". So if you're chasing people who drifted away, target At risk and Lapsed, and treat New as a separate first-repeat problem with its own message.

The third option is hand-picking. Search by name or mobile number, tick individual rows, or send to a single card straight from its row in the table. That's genuinely useful for a "your order is ready" note. It's not a growth habit.

Step 2: write it for a lock screen

The composer stops at 140 characters and counts as you type. Your shop's name is used as the notification title automatically, so repeating it in the body wastes space. Write as if the reader sees one line and nothing else, because that is often exactly what happens.

Four variables get substituted per customer: {customer_name}, {stamps_left}, {reward}, and {shop_name}. So "Hi {customer_name}, {stamps_left} more stamps and the {reward} is yours" resolves to real values on each phone. Personalization isn't the point though — specificity is. A line with a number in it reads as information; a line without one reads as an ad.

Here's the difference in practice. "We miss you, come visit us soon" gives the reader nothing to act on. "2 stamps left on your card, then the coffee is free. Open until 11 tonight" gives a reason and a deadline in 79 characters. There's also an optional link field if you want the tap to open something specific, like a menu, a booking page, or a WhatsApp thread.

Step 3: send inside your own trading hours

Waya refuses a manual send while your shop is marked closed. Instead of sending, it shows your next opening time and offers to schedule the message for then in one click. This is deliberate: the system would rather delay your message than spend one of your monthly sends on a lock screen at 2 a.m.

That gate reads the business hours saved in your store settings, so if those are wrong the gate is wrong too. Fix them before your first send. Saudi trading patterns make this matter more than it sounds — plenty of shops close through the afternoon and reopen in the evening, and during Ramadan, the fasting month, most of the day's business shifts to after sunset.

The schedule picker accepts any future time, which makes the useful habit obvious: write the message when you think of it, then set it for the hour you actually want people walking in. For a cafe that's usually 60 to 90 minutes ahead of your known busy window, not in the middle of it. Automatic triggers skip this gate entirely, because the daily job that fires them runs at a fixed daytime hour and would otherwise get stuck against a closed shop forever.

What actually counts against your monthly quota

One message per targeted customer, not one per campaign. A broadcast to 420 cardholders costs 420 messages. On the Free plan's 100 a month that send is rejected before anything goes out, which is usually the moment merchants discover how the accounting works.

The charge is applied to the targeted count, before delivery is attempted. If 60 of those 420 never added the pass to a phone, those 60 are still charged. That's the mildly annoying truth, and it's the strongest practical argument for keeping audiences tight instead of broadcasting out of habit.

Automatic instant messages draw on the same balance. The stamp confirmation, the redemption confirmation, the welcome note, and the 14-day win-back each cost 1 per send. Those are gentler about waste: a card with no registered device is skipped without charging you. Lifecycle band rules also carry a 30-day cooldown, so the same lapsed customer can't be nudged twice inside a month.

Geofenced branch reminders cost nothing. They're baked into the pass itself rather than sent, so Apple Wallet can surface the card when a customer is near your branch, at most once every four hours, with no deduction. Note that the trigger radius setting only applies to Apple Wallet; Google Wallet doesn't use it. Quotas are 100 messages a month on Free, 5,000 on Growth at 85 SAR a month, and unlimited on Premium at 149 SAR a month. Free stops hard at 100 — cards keep collecting stamps, you simply can't send again until the month turns over.

Step 4: read the delivery report

Every send lands in the history table with four numbers set against the audience it targeted: delivered, no pass, failed, and pending. Reach is delivered divided by audience. You can view the last 30 or 90 days.

"No pass" is the number to act on first. It counts customers whose card exists in your dashboard but was never added to a wallet on a phone. That's an enrollment problem at your counter, not a messaging problem — most often the cashier handed the phone back before the customer tapped Add. Fixing the counter script raises every future send's reach for free.

There is no read receipt on a wallet notification. Nobody can hand you a real open rate for this channel, and any tool that quotes one is inferring it. The honest measurement is your visit count in the three days after a send, compared against the same weekday the week before, using the new-versus-returning split already on your dashboard.

Here's a worked example with the assumptions written out. Say you have 300 cardholders and you target the 78 sitting in At risk. 71 are delivered, 7 come back as no pass. If 9 of those 71 walk in during the following week, you spent 78 messages for 9 visits. Whether that's worth repeating depends entirely on your margin per visit — work that figure out once and you'll never have to guess about a send again.