How to Add a Digital Membership Card to Apple Wallet and Google Wallet

A digital membership card is a wallet pass that lives in Apple Wallet or Google Wallet on a member's phone. It shows their name, member number, tier and expiry date — and it comes with a built-in push notification channel that plastic cards will never have. This guide explains exactly how to set one up, what to put on it and how to keep it useful long after the initial issue.

What goes on a digital membership card

A membership card pass has two surfaces: the front and the back. The front is what the member sees when they open their wallet. The back holds supplementary information they occasionally need to reference.

Front fields should be limited to what staff at the venue need to see or what the member needs at a glance. For most organisations that means three things: the member's display name, their member ID or number and their current tier (Bronze, Silver, Gold, and so on). Adding an expiry date as an auxiliary field is also worthwhile — it reminds the member when their subscription is up for renewal without requiring them to log into a portal.

Back fields are for reference information. Include your website URL, a support email address, a link to your terms and conditions and any relevant policy summary. These fields accept plain text and URLs. Apple Wallet renders URLs as tappable links automatically, so a properly formatted address will open in Safari with no extra work.

Keep a barcode on the front — a QR code is preferred over PDF417 because it scans reliably from greater distances. The barcode value is typically the member ID, which your scanning system can look up in real time.

Designing the pass

The strip image is the most prominent design element on an Apple Wallet pass. It runs the full width of the card and sits behind the primary fields. Use your brand colour as the background and place your logo centrally or to the left. Keep text on the strip to a minimum — the field labels below it do the heavy lifting. Apple recommends a strip image of 1125×432px (375×144pt at 3× resolution).

Google Wallet uses a hero image at 1032×336px. The same principles apply: brand colour, clear logo, minimal copy.

Choose a background colour that contrasts with the foreground and label text. Apple Wallet lets you set backgroundColor, foregroundColor and labelColorindependently in the pass bundle. A dark strip with light field text is usually more legible than the reverse.

The goal is a card that a member can scan at the venue in under three seconds. If staff have to squint to find the barcode or the member number, your layout needs simplifying.

How to distribute the pass to new members

Distribution happens at the moment a new member joins. The three most effective channels are email, a website QR code and NFC tap at the venue.

Email is the highest-reach option. When a member completes signup — whether through your website, a CRM form or in person — trigger an automated email that contains an “Add to Wallet” button. The button links to a personalised pass URL. Tapping it on an iPhone prompts Apple Wallet to open; on Android it prompts Google Wallet. The whole journey from email tap to pass in wallet takes under ten seconds.

A QR code on your join page serves members who are already on their phone and do not want to wait for an email. Place the QR code on the confirmation page after payment. Scanning it takes the member directly to their personalised pass.

NFC tap at the venue works well for gyms, clubs and libraries where staff hand out membership at a physical front desk. An NFC tag programmed with the pass URL lets the member tap their phone at reception and add the pass immediately.

Updating the pass when a tier changes

One of the core advantages of a digital membership card over a plastic one is that it updates in place. When a member upgrades from Silver to Gold, you do not print a new card and post it — you push a field update via the API and the pass on their device reflects the new tier within seconds.

The mechanism on Apple's side works like this: your server sends a lightweight push notification via APNS to the device, signalling that the pass has changed. The device then contacts your server to fetch the updated pass bundle. The new tier value appears on screen. Apple also displays a notification on the lock screen announcing that the pass has been updated — a moment that feels like a reward for the member.

On Google Wallet, you PATCH the pass object via the REST API. The change propagates to the device the next time the wallet syncs, which typically happens within a few minutes. UseaddMessageRequest to attach a notification message — something like “You've been upgraded to Gold membership” — which appears on the device.

With Issuepass, both of these updates happen through a single API call. You send the updated field values, and we handle the APNS push and the Google Wallet PATCH simultaneously.

Sending renewal reminders

Membership renewals are the highest-value moment in the membership lifecycle. A push notification sent 30 days before expiry reaches the member directly on their lock screen — no email subject line to compete with, no spam filter to clear.

The recommended pattern is a two-stage reminder. The first notification goes out 30 days before expiry: “Your membership expires in 30 days. Renew now to keep your benefits.” The renewal link lives in the pass back fields, so the member can tap through immediately. A second notification goes out seven days before expiry for members who have not yet renewed.

You can also update the pass's expiry field as the date approaches, giving the member a visual countdown on the front of the card itself. When the membership expires, updatingexpirationDate in the pass bundle causes Apple Wallet to display the pass as expired automatically.

Why digital beats plastic

No print or postage cost. A physical membership card typically costs between £1.50 and £4 to produce and post. A digital pass costs fractions of a penny to issue and nothing to update.

Cannot be lost or damaged. A plastic card left in a jacket pocket gets forgotten. A pass in Apple Wallet appears on the lock screen when the member arrives at your venue — surfaced automatically by location and time intelligence built into iOS.

Always up to date. When terms change or a new benefit is added, you update the pass template and push the change to all issued passes. Every member sees the latest information without any action on their part.

Push notifications included. Wallet passes carry a push channel that works without a native app. Research shows wallet pass push notifications achieve a 69% open rate compared with roughly 20% for marketing email. That channel is active from the moment the member adds the pass.

No app required. Apple Wallet and Google Wallet are pre-installed on every iPhone and Android device. There is no download friction and no App Store review to wait for. 94% of smartphones shipped today have NFC, and all of them have a wallet app.

Setting up your digital membership card with Issuepass

Issuepass provides a template builder that covers the full membership card workflow: design the pass, set the fields, configure the distribution email and connect renewal reminders — all without writing backend code.

When a member joins, your CRM or website calls the Issuepass API with the member's details. We create the personalised pass, generate the Add to Wallet links for both platforms and return them for use in your confirmation email. From that point, any update to the member's record — tier change, points balance, renewal date — can be pushed to their pass in a single API call.

The dashboard lets non-technical staff send push notifications to individual members or to segments — for example, all Gold members or all members expiring in the next 30 days — without touching the API.

Start free and have your first digital membership card live in under an hour.