Beacon technology transforms retail by connecting cell phones to in-store apps, allowing for targeted promotions and better customer information.
Retailers can use beacons to provide targeted discounts, track customer activity, and increase engagement through proximity marketing. Major retailers such as Macy's and Target currently use beacon technology to increase sales and deliver unique shopping experiences.
As beacon use grows, shops can expect more foot traffic, higher customer retention, and valuable data analytics, making it an effective tool for modern retail success.
How Does Beacon Technology Work In Retail?
Beacons in retail are small devices that transmit Bluetooth signals from nearby smartphones to connect customers who have Bluetooth enabled and have downloaded an application specific for retail onto their phones.
When placed within stores, beacons facilitate interaction between shoppers with smartphones that have Bluetooth turned on and have downloaded an application specific for retail on them and customers within that store location who use these beacons as beacons transmit Bluetooth signals from nearby smartphones via beacons located around it.
Retail beacons are typically utilised as proximity marketing or proximity beacon marketing; location-based notifications may also inform nearby customers of promotions or messages.
Customers walk into your store looking at jeans. Your business sends out an alert with a 10% discount if they make their purchase within one hour.
Macy's and Target, among other top North American retailers, already employ beacon technology. As its popularity continues, beacon wireless technologies could reignite brick-and-mortar retailers by providing tailored shopping experiences that cannot easily be recreated online.
Benefits Of Using Beacons For Retail
All the tools necessary for businesses to attract new customers while simultaneously keeping existing ones.
Leverage Facebook, Instagram, and Google to reach local consumers while driving sales growth and managing your entire operation from one convenient platform.
- Advertisement: Customers today expect more tailored messaging that caters specifically to them and meets their needs; beacon technology not only meets this expectation but can even trigger advertisements depending on where a customer is present.
- Personalisation: Beacon technology empowers physical stores to offer customised shopping suggestions based on past purchases from coupons. It provides personalised product suggestions explicitly tailored to individual customer preferences. Beacon technology can be the ideal way to bridge this gap when your sales representatives may only sometimes be available for some customers.
- Customer insights: Retailers can gain valuable consumer intelligence by tracking the shopping preferences and habits of consumers. Retailers can analyse when shoppers most commonly utilise coupons before delving deeper into demographics or linking products bought during similar shopping sprees.
- Mobile app use: Beacon-triggered notifications not only serve as valuable reminders but can also increase interest in an app used by its users. Messages sent from beacons not only act as handy reminders but can also spark more significant user curiosity for such apps.
Use Beacons To Increase Sales In The Retail Sector
Beacon technology bridges the divide between brick-and-mortar retailers who remain open today and their customers who primarily access mobile devices for shopping purposes.
Beacons enable retailers to interact directly with customers by encouraging them to visit your shop, spend some time there, and make purchases there.
Here Are A Few Ways You Can Increase Your Retail Sales Using Beacon Technology:
- Discounts and special offers are readily available. Alerts that notify when someone has been present in your shop for at least 20 minutes allow you to capture customers before they decide to depart from it altogether.
- Display product availability to in-store shoppers. Inform them if the items they added to their online cart have become available in person for sale, and include a product map so customers can locate those they need faster.
- Improve customer loyalty to win points: encourage people to come into your store and check in via social media, as this will earn points. Furthermore, analyse how customers move through your shop for improvements in visual merchandising.
- Geofencing and Bluetooth beacons can both help drive foot traffic into a business. Geofencing works over longer distances, while proximity beacon marketing uses geofencing as part of its strategy - geofencing can attract app users near your store. In contrast, beacons use proximity marketing techniques to engage them when they enter.
Now is the time to use beacon technology in your retail business. Introduce beacon technology in your store and entice customers with special discounts or offers through signage in-store, emails sent out to subscribers or social media campaigns.
Make use of the examples cited above as inspiration when coming up with ideas for beacon campaign ideas. Test out various options and determine which works, then iterate accordingly.
Your campaign needs to evolve as customers adjust to beacon-triggered alerts and the capability of exploring your store with beacons to remain engaging and attract new customers.
Regularly refreshing content for different types of customers and beacons can keep customer engagement fresh while simultaneously drawing in new ones.
Beacon Marketing - Everything You Need To Know
Businesses investing in Bluetooth beacon technology understandably want to maximise their returns from this investment.
While most companies utilize beacon-powered technology for indoor positioning and other solutions, many also recognise its power for exciting marketing initiatives in retail stores. This guide will introduce beacon marketing, outlining its purpose and how it operates, with examples of successful campaigns as examples of beaconing efficacy.
Does Proximity Marketing Include Beacon Marketing?
Generalised proximity marketing and beacon marketing are synonymous. While beacon marketing technically falls within proximity, its only use may not be limited to proximity.
Infrastructure has developed to meet increasing Bluetooth positioning demand through lights that feature Bluetooth support and WiFi access points.
What Is Beacon Marketing?
Beacons are at the core of beacon marketing. Bluetooth technology -enabled smart devices for pinging mobile phones detect the user's location indoors using triangulation and other technologies; the Pointe Deep Location system offers additional precision by pinpointing precise details about the site, such as direction.
Guide to Store Mode will showcase how retail stores provide memorable customer experiences. Once a connected device has identified where a user is, an app can use its location data to send various marketing messages based on that location.
You have complete control of which areas within a store (for instance, an aisle in a retail store) you wish for these marketing messages to go out - perhaps an entire zone or region could receive one news?
Geofenced push notifications can be an excellent way to notify nearby offers or welcome or thank visitors to a store while at the same time being explicitly tailored for movement - for instance, triggering notifications if someone changes from one area (like push bikes ) into another ( such as bicycle helmets) where applicable.
Notifications can even be explicitly tailored by movement. Hence, users only receive them if something changes from that specific section, like browsing push bikes into cycling helmets, for instance).
What Brands Are Using Proximity Marketing Beacons For?
As beacon technology becomes more widespread and related technologies like Bluetooth-enabled WiFi access points and LED lighting become more mainstream, barriers to beacon-based marketing will continue to disappear.
On the other hand, consumers increasingly leave Bluetooth enabled on their smartphones so it pairs quickly with digital devices like in-car entertainment systems or headphones; it is, therefore, no surprise that some of the world's biggest brands now utilise beacon marketing strategies as part of their overall marketing strategies.
- Mcdonald's and other companies have used beacons as an attractive lure to draw customers in by alerting them about deals, offering discounts, or sending notifications when someone nears an entrance. It serves as an outstanding example of beacon technology's potential to target potential buyers at retail locations that already show some intent for purchase.
- Tesco employed beacons to notify customers when they entered a specific part of its stores; for example, shoppers entering its frozen food section might get an alert regarding an offer particularly generous on one ice cream brand.
- Beacon marketing is not limited to retail stores alone. Levi's Stadium in San Francisco - home of the San Francisco 49ers NFL franchise - installed beacons that not only provided positioning and navigation assistance for customers but allowed them to place food orders directly at their seats, leading to significant increases in concession revenue.
- Marketing with beacons doesn't just need to target customers or users directly. Woolworths uses proximity detection as part of click-and-collect; staff receive notification if a customer requests click-and-collect within certain store areas.
- Amazon Go stores are the premier example of beacon-powered retailing and
- Beacon marketing. Their cashier-less model monitors which products have been taken off shelves by users and bills accordingly.
- Nisa convenience stores in the US have taken full advantage of Beacon's analytical abilities by attaching trackers to shopping carts and monitoring underutilised spaces and bottlenecks within their stores.
Knock-On Benefits: Data Analytics
Beacon marketing benefits don't end after its campaign concludes; after this phase, beacons provide invaluable insights and data that are just as beneficial.
Beacon marketing data can provide invaluable insight. From discovering areas within an indoor space with low footfall to users taking unexpected paths through it, Beacon data reveals everything from which messages were most successful and those that failed.
These data can prove invaluable for businesses seeking to enhance not only their future marketing campaigns but also the design of their retail locations.
How To Run A Campaign And Reap The Benefits Of Proximity Marketing
Personalisation is at the core of successful digital campaigns and provides an enjoyable mobile app user experience.
In terms of advertising on mobile phones, proximity marketing may offer an edge that helps gain competitive advantages over its rivals.
What Is Proximity Marketing?
Nearby marketing refers to communicating with your customers at exactly the right place and time through mobile messaging to bridge online and offline marketing efforts.
Geofencing, push notifications, and beacons all play an integral part in proximity marketing campaigns. research proves the many advantages of proximity advertising can't all fit in one post; note its effectiveness is 16 times greater than Google Pay-per-click! You will feel drawn towards proximity campaigns, which include geotargeting, improved app engagement, and retention strategies that drive users in.
Geo-targeted marketing has long proven its worth; Dunkin Donuts sent coupons offering discounted coffee to Starbucks customers near them in 2014, resulting in higher redemption rates of those coupons than expected.
Burger King used relevancy and immediateness effectively by giving their customers something timely; their proximity promotion aimed to retain those customers rather than lose them to competitors while highlighting new features of its app.
Presence marketing benefits extend beyond retail stores: airports, events, and hotels all benefit from using beacons - they work anywhere there's an app on a mobile phone. Statista estimates that the global proximity technology market for contactless cards is worth $700 million.
Read more - Mobile App Development Trends
Before Embarking On A Mobile Proximity Campaign, Let's Review Its Potential Advantages.
- Geotargeting is Easy with Proximity marketing: Efficient geofence notifications simplify things: choose an exact location where a message should be emitted when someone enters. A geofence can send immediate or delayed notifications depending on its setting; alternatively, you could create channels or segments to send different messages depending on whether a customer enters or passes close by an area beacon; beacons also provide greater detail than GPS tracking or WIFI.
- Proximity marketing increases app engagement: Geotargeting and push notifications can ensure an app's success by keeping users engaged with its features, particularly those focusing on location-based elements such as geofencing.
- Beacons help to improve app retention: All businesses with mobile applications should prioritise increasing app retention. Utilise proximity campaigns using beacons to build brand loyalty and retain more customers. App analytics are invaluable for reporting engagement rates for push notifications and open rates for push notifications. Average clickthrough rates (CTRs) for beacon-based push notifications can reach over 80%, making it simple for businesses to understand how beacons enhance customer experiences.
- Proximity marketing helps you gain a competitive edge: Create an engaging experience for your clients to engage and retain them while giving you an advantage in competition. There's a fine line between providing excellent service to customers while doing something other than overdoing it with messages; make sure that when developing a mobile marketing strategy, you invest time analysing audience behaviour.
- Proximity marketing gives you immediate conversions: An engaging proximity campaign can increase app engagement and conversion rate by connecting directly with prospects when they are most likely to buy from you. Customers may receive attractive offers like push notifications for discounts at the right moment in their buying cycle.
- Proximity marketing = A personalised experience: Personalisation should be at the core of customer experiences. Retail, for example, can use targeted messages sent by the app to tailor messages specifically for app users...while store staff will also be alerted as soon as a familiar face walks through its doors so they can provide them with the optimal shopping experience.
Plan A Proximity Marketing Campaign
Planning a campaign requires many considerations, from identifying your target audience and content strategy to considering metrics to measure its success and metrics on which to base future planning efforts.
Ensure you consider all necessary digital technology as part of the evaluation.
Mobile app developers need to incorporate beacon services and push notification services. Select a provider that fits well for them and push notification services, in addition to beacon technology integration.
- Beacons: Apple introduced their iBeacon beacon technology in 2013, quickly making them a popular technology solution. The purchase of beacon hardware may only sometimes be the ideal solution since you will also require the services of an in-house developer with enough time and dedication. Businesses often opt for proximity marketing packages like those provided, which are cost-effective and integrate seamlessly with the Kumulos app performance management platform.
- Geofencing: Many businesses have adopted geofencing as an integral component of their operations, using this service to define virtual boundaries around specific locations. When beacon devices enter or cross these virtual perimeters, they alert an administrator and trigger SMS marketing and push notification tools so customers are reached when near any defined boundaries.
- Push Notification: Push notifications, regardless of their technology choice, form the center of any campaign. Delivering timely and relevant push notifications can have an enormously significant effect on customer behavior, scheduling them using an effective mobile marketing platform and setting geofences effectively; for instance, Kumulos mobile app performance platform or proximity marketing software are two robust solutions available to app developers for providing proximity advertising capabilities within apps for their app clients.
Start Your Beacon Marketing Campaign In Just Three Simple Steps
Deployment Beacons
Beacons must be strategically positioned to not interfere with adjacent products and to facilitate an enjoyable customer experience.
To optimise consumer interaction, beacons should calibrate their range appropriately to be inconsequent with each other and the consumer interaction pairing process. Consider, for instance, the deployment of beacons in an iPhone shop as one use case of a beacon use that aims to inform consumers about various features of each iPhone model.
Their range must be calibrated such that information about iPhone X only reaches within this distance range - for instance, if someone looks at an iPhone 7, they should only receive information related to it rather than iPhone X! Reconsider their placement, height and how their signals might interfere with other signals to achieve best practices regarding beacon deployment.
This should provide optimal results when installing beacons.
Make A Campaign For Proximity Marketing
Landing pages are vital to any campaign's success, providing an easy and affordable solution to creating markdown cards.
Please take one of our pre-designed templates, design one yourself without needing a programmer, or create fully functional forms to collect feedback from customers using the platform; you could even direct users back to a website or social media campaign already established! Your dashboard also makes it possible to monitor and optimize your campaign with its analytics engine.
Deliver Personalised Campaigns
As soon as a beacon campaign is assigned on the dashboard, consumers will begin receiving notifications via their smartphones.
Your customers must download an application powered by beacons to receive these alerts - for instance: Our DIY app maker makes building apps more accessible than ever! NearBee is an app that receives beacon notifications. In addition, its dashboard enables fine-tuning and measurement via an analytics engine.
App-Driven Beacons Can Enhance Customer Experience
Essential for successful campaigns is making sure users find them relevant, which can be tricky without an app; consumers could quickly become bombarded by irrelevant messages without choice or control over marketing material that does not resonate.
Apps give consumers control to choose whether or not they receive marketing material, with location being a key factor of relevance for 2/5 consumers (beacon apps from third parties are another form) receiving notifications about nearby businesses; users will enjoy more prosperous and more tailored experiences - 70 millennials download new apps monthly!
- Already have an App: offers an SDK - or Software Development Kit - which you can integrate into existing apps to display campaigns and scan beacon signals.
- Do you want to create an app with beacon-scanning functionality: an established DIY platform for building apps, has joined forces with Shoutem to offer an easy method of developing beacon-powered applications. Create stunning iOS and Android applications quickly by simply dragging and dropping. Plus, add beacon functionality easily using Extension!
- Would you like to use an app popular for beacons: NearBee provides proximity marketing without brand applications by displaying and scanning beacon campaigns regardless of whether beacons were purchased. NearBee is your app of choice when working from an office environment, automatically changing colours, logos and skins to represent your business best.
What Makes Beacon Technology So Effective? Why Does It Appeal To Marketers?
Bluetooth beacons present an exceptional alternative to traditional advertising channels, boasting an average open rate for push notifications of 7.8%.
In comparison, a 22.5% available rate has been seen with rich and targeted beacon notifications (open rates for brand app notifications are 30%, while a 15% open rate has been experienced for third-party reports).
As companies aim to deliver more targeted messages that resonate with audiences, more companies are turning towards solutions for proximity marketing.
- Beacon marketing provides for advanced personalisation. For example, when someone stands in front of an exhibit of beach and swimwear toys for children, their cellular phone may light up with information regarding an exclusive 20% coupon for today only on these toys or beach games nearby - providing high clickthrough rates while enriching customer experiences as well as yielding tremendous returns on investments (ROI).
- Marketing with beacons can be effective: Bluetooth-enabled beacons offer more precise location tracking than WiFi or GPS technology, and analytics enable marketers to measure campaign results and adjust them as necessary.
- Establish Long-Term Customer Connection: Bluetooth smart beacons allow marketers to forge closer ties with customers through Facebook retargeting or Google Remarketing ads, thus cementing long-term relationships between themselves and customers.
All Offline Businesses Can Benefit From Beacon Marketing
- Retail marketing with Bluetooth beacons: Beacon marketing can help retailers build customer loyalty and engagement within stores by communicating a relevant, timely offer or message - such as offers, promotions, or deals - at the right moment to shoppers. Many leading American retailers such as Macy's, Target, Urban Outfitters, and CVS already employ beacon technology - not to mention spas and salons which have achieved incredible success using it, as well as coffee shops, restaurants, car dealerships, supermarkets, pop retail shops, all using beacon tech successfully for marketing their stores or their products/ services too.
- Real estate beacon technology: Beacon marketing enables retailers to build customer engagement within stores by providing customers with relevant, timely offers or messages - such as offers, promotions, or deals - at just the right moment in stores. Major US retailers such as Macy's, Target, Urban Outfitters, and CVS already utilise beacon information technology successfully, not to mention spas and salons which have found incredible success employing it; plus cafes, restaurants, car dealerships, supermarkets, supermarkets, pop retail shops have used beacon tech successfully for marketing their stores or products/ services too.
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Conclusion
This strategy can assist in expanding your idea or business. It offers an approachable and distinctive process; users tend to favour this method.
If it proves fruitful, users often appreciate this strategy's success.