By Daniel Dreymann, Mowingo
While beacons are providing a better way for marketers to engage customers in their local stores, there are a few important things to consider that will enhance results.
For one, sometimes the best course of action is no action. There is no question that beacon technology has great potential to revolutionize in-store retail. But just because you can use beacons to push offers or remind customers of sales, doesn’t mean you should right away.
Sometimes the best course of action is none at all. Instead of leveraging beacons to immediately push offers — and prematurely engage customers — you could start by using the beacons to gather customer foot traffic data, and learn which displays people linger on and which they pass by. This gives you a cache of business intelligence data to help direct your future mobile sales and marketing efforts.
Advertisement
For example, you may realize that a display at the front of the store isn’t receiving nearly as much foot traffic as a display near the cash wrap, and can adjust your items accordingly.
Context Is Everything
Next, it’s important to remember that when it comes to proximity marketing, context is everything. Beacons alone aren’t smart, so leveraging CRM data to push relevant offers based on past purchase history is critical to your success.
In addition to incorporating consumers’ personal tastes, past behaviors and purchase histories, you also should take into consideration their in-store foot traffic patterns.
If Julie, a regular customer, enters your department store and the beacon near the entrance registers her presence, but no other beacon throughout the store has registered her after 15 minutes, we know that Julie is lingering near the front section. Based on purchase history and her tastes, we also know that she has a history of purchasing handbags. We can leverage a pre-configured rule in the system to push Julie a message inviting her to find a surprise in the handbag department, thus leading her to a preferred department, and further down the path-to-purchase.
Secure Your Beacons
Beacon security is not something that immediately comes to mind when thinking about implementing beacons, but it should be. As a quick reminder, beacons transmit three pieces of information at a time, a UUID, a Major ID and a Minor ID. The UUID is the unique string of characters that identifies the beacon as a particular brand’s (like Macy’s or KFC), while the Major ID might denote the specific store’s address, and the Minor ID broadcasts the location within the store.
If you have the same UUID for every beacon in every store and you never rotate it, you could be allowing competitors to learn your UUID. Because beacons are constantly transmitting the same information, it’s not that difficult for a competitor to figure out your UUID, and perhaps have a rule on their mobile app that looks for your beacons. Then, a competitor could push offers to a customer when they enter your store.
One solution is to rotate your beacons UUID regularly. Secure beacons prevent your competition from stealing your customer data — and your customer.
Beacon Marketing Is Not The Same As Email Marketing
Finally, once you’ve made the decision to incorporate beacons into your mobile engagement strategy, you should create messaging that leverages the potential of this medium effectively.
Too many retailers are simply using beacons as another channel for the same messaging they use via email, through banners on web sites, and even on social channels. Once you’ve bombarded your customer with the same message of “20% off!” over and over again, when they receive it in-store, it won’t mean anything, and they’ll simply ignore it like other messaging. They won’t miss that you have a sale, but they will avoid any opportunity to interact with you if you keep overwhelming them.
Instead, leverage the data from your customer profiles and combine them with pre-configured rules for beacon engagement to push truly personalized messaging to your customers.
If Robert enters the store and your customer profile indicates he rarely visits your store and your app hasn’t registered a beacon’s presence in two months, you can push a more attractive welcome offer to him to motivate him to purchase today.
Furthermore, should Robert make a purchase, you can send him another notification inviting him to join the loyalty program and receive yet another offer for next weekend. This is a personalized method of communication designed to boost your sales and your customer’s satisfaction.
When used properly, integrating beacons into your overall mobile and omnichannel strategy can produce significantly better sales results. But if misused and treated like any other messaging channel, beacons can backfire and actually detract from your in-store marketing programs.
Hopefully, these tips can help you avoid some of the pitfalls and put best practices in place. If you have any tips that you have found useful, please pass them on by commenting on this blog.
Daniel Dreymann is Co-Founder and CEO of Mowingo, which helps brands engage with customers using targeted offers and time-sensitive notifications in combination with GPS and iBeacon geolocation technology.
