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.
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If you are like most smart phone users you have several apps on your phone and you use a handful of those regularly.
What makes those apps different?
Why do you keep coming back to them and not the others?
Those apps have succeeded in engaging your interest. You want to keep using it. Many of these apps have integrated themselves into your everyday life.
There are several ways you can improve engagement on your mobile apps to keep users coming back rather than having them sit unused on users’ phones. Make sure you evaluate which of these fits your business, mobile isn’t an arena where one-size-fits all. Your iPhone app developer or Android app developer can offer insights as to which is the best fit for your program and existing apps as well as helping you understand what is needed to implement each.
Collect Data
Whenever your users open your application they complete an action that can be tracked. This is just one type of action. Action taken within you application can be tracked using analytics. Understanding how your users use your app and knowing which features they utilize the most can be very useful information.
The cornerstone of any great engagement program will be allowing users to opt-in to data collection in order to improve their app experience. Not only will it allow you to focus your efforts for future app updates but the data will also allow you to create personalized, relevant messaging for your users.
Personalize Content
More than anytime in history there is data overload. Personalized content can cut through the clutter and be relevant to users.
To deliver content that matters to your users keep in mind their goals for using your app and then deliver information based on their user habits. As you can imagine, you won’t know those habits unless you have built a program to collect data.
Push Notifications
Customers regularly will opt-in for push notification programs (60% in some app categories). This is a huge opportunity for you and your business as push notifications are a great way to engage and retain app users.
The most effective push notification programs are offer value and are relevant to users.
Your app can improve its chances of a user giving you permission to send them push notifications if you let them know how push messages will add to their experience when asking for permission.
Mobile Only Rewards
If you have users that don’t use your app regularly, you can re-engage them by creating off mobile exclusive offers or a mobile loyalty program. Incorporate these offers with your push notifications and personalize them per the data you are collecting to maximize effectiveness.
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Regardless of the purpose for your app, it important that it be built to the highest possible standards if it is going to succeed.
Modern consumers are highly experienced with mobile apps and will quickly abandon apps that don’t meet their standards. This is exactly why you should hire a professional mobile app development company to build your application.
When you hire professional iPhone app developers or Android app developers you know that your project is in expert hands.
But beyond that, there are other benefits to working with a crack team.
Cost Savings
There can be a great deal of cost associated with hiring and managing the professionals you need to build a mobile application and do the necessary online programming. But hiring and training personnel is just the start of it, as this team will need software and other assets such as test devices to complete their job. It can be much cheaper to hire a professional team to build your project. If you move ahead with in-house development you will find that unless you choose to hire experienced designers and programmers to develop your project, you are likely to waste a great deal of time and money by choosing to develop your app in-house.
Leverage Experience and Resources
Professional app design and development firms are experienced with app development and can provide their experience to your organization’s app, thereby shortening your learning curve. Teams that have build hundreds of apps will understand challenges and will have the experience to address them. They will also understand trends as they work with many customers and generally keep a careful eye on industry innovations.
Expedite Development
Specialists that have build several apps will be able to complete your mobile app in a much quicker time-frame than hiring and bringing in-house new developers. Not only will a newly hired staff have to overcome start-up challenges once hired getting to speed in their new environment but the company will need to spend time on a lengthy recruitment process. Whereas, most professional firms can start your project right away and hit stride quickly on your project.
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