Location based marketing has been a rapidly growing area for retailers and other businesses with a physical location.
One of the most exciting areas within the location based marketing umbrella right now has to do with beacons. Beacons are a low-cost, pinpointed location-based technology that uses low energy Bluetooth to communicate with beacon enabled mobile devices. Beacons offer a sizable step forward when it comes to a retailers ability to target an individual consumer at just the right moment. Brands have greater opportunity than ever before to extend their message past shelf and point-of-sale displays and deliver a personalized message to shoppers.
To utilize beacons you will need to integrate their use with a mobile app. The beacon simply triggers functions within your mobile applications. You will need to carefully plan how to integrate beacon use into your mobile app development and discuss the program with your iPhone app developer or Android app developer. Since beacons can be used to deliver personalized, relevant content at just the right moment, a solid beacon program can be a tremendous way to increase the utility and engagement with your mobile application.
Make sure your beacon triggered activities and messaging are relevant and will improve the user experience and not seen as intrusive or irrelevant or users will disable them or worse, delete your app. This is why data collection is so important today, as messaging can be personalized in order to increase relevance. Take the personalized delivery of content and add in precise contextual location based information of a customer in a retail store and you will have a highly effective messaging program.
Are beacons effective?
In a study conducted last year by inMarket, they found that interactions with advertised products improved 19X for users who received messages from beacons. Additionally their research found that apps were used in-store 16.5X as much for users who received message from beacons and that those customers were 6.4X more likely to keep a businesses app on their smart phone. Clearly these users are more engaged and likely to remain so.
Photo: Kārlis Dambrāns (Flikr) http://bit.ly/1D0oGK0