How to keep your Customers Happy using Beacons 1. Beaconstac

Transcription

1 How to keep your Customers Happy using Beacons 1 Beaconstac

2 Contents: Why beacons hold the key to enhanced customer engagement verticals that are benefiting from beacons (other than retail!) Restaurants Theme parks Conferences and Events Education Airlines...9 Improving customer engagement with beacons Making beacons part of your marketing strategy:...10 A. Ensure that you have a sturdy app in place...10 B. Ensure that your app is secure Employ impactful beacon marketing techniques:...11 A. Integrate with your customers wishlist and social-networking accounts...11 B. Add some utility to your app...11 C. Set a threshold time for messages to be triggered via your app Integrating beacons with your customer loyalty programs:...12 A. Deliver time-sensitive geo-targeted offers with greater precision...12 B. Send customized notifications on offers to patrons when they are closeby.12 Tipsheet on how to plan effective beacon marketing campaigns How to keep your Customers Happy using Beacons 2

3 How to keep your Customers Happy using Beacons Why beacons hold the key to enhanced customer engagement Great customer experiences are born from deep insights about the customer and their context, be it a physical or digital environment. Beacons with their capability to bridge the physical and digital brand worlds, have the potential to transform customer experience, for the better. According to a recent study by inmarket, a company that helps brands implement beacons, customers who receive beacon offers and promotions are 19 times more likely to interact with the advertised product, than others who do not. However, for this new proximity-detection technology to be successful, it will be critical for brands to create contextually relevant content and interactions whilst recognising the privilege of being given access to customers location data. This can be done by combining the microlocation capabilities of beacons with other information gathered from the customer s personal interactions, to deliver personalized offers and messages that further drive productivity. This ebook offers some simple tips on how brands across various verticals can enhance customer engagement and customer loyalty programs by integrating beacons into their mobile strategy. How to keep your Customers Happy using Beacons 3

4 5 verticals that are benefiting from beacons (other than retail!) Though beacons are popularly touted as a retailer-focused opportunity, of late these new proximity detection devices have stimulated an appetite from various verticals such as malls & museums. One of the main factors that drew their attention, is the ability to help them gain deep insights on customer behaviour intelligence, effectively forecast staffing needs, and evaluate how various other factors such as promotions and merchandising impact sales conversions. If you are a retailer looking to bridge online and offline channels by integrating beacons and indoor location technology in-store, our previous ebook titled How brands and retailers can go omnichannel using beacons is a good place to start with. Meanwhile, here s a look at five other industry verticals that are currently using beacons to create more engaging customer interactions by gaining real-time access to customer behaviour intelligence. 1. Restaurants When it comes to restaurants, an uplifting customer experience can not only help draw in new customers through word of mouth publicity but also enhance customer loyalty. Beacons can help you drive engagements by easily intertwining your customers needs and preferences with discounts on frequently ordered items, offers on free drinks etc. Mook, a German restaurant group, recently deployed beacons to reward their customers for spending time at the restaurant. These tiny devices are used to keep track of the amount of time spent by customers at the group s establishments. The app then uses this information to How to keep your Customers Happy using Beacons 4

5 assign ratings such as addicted connoisseur, and guest based on time spent at the restaurant. Customers with higher ratings are rewarded with offers such as a free drink or a quick table allotment on their arrival. Lesser known uses of beacons in restaurants 1. Let your customers know how crowded the restaurant is, before they arrive: This can be done by deploying beacons around a restaurant. These devices can then be used to track how many people are actually dining there at a given point of time. 2. Let your customers order ahead: To keep your customers from waiting for long even after having ordered earlier, you can just install a long-range beacon, that will send an alert to the kitchen staff once the customer is close by. This helps ensure that your staff has the order ready. Read more about using beacons at restaurants 2. Theme parks Most zoos and theme parks are embracing beacons to offer their visitors a more seamless and personalized experience. For example, beacons are used to provide visitors with easy access to details about the specific exhibit that they are currently looking at, without having to fight through crowds. The Los Angeles Zoo and Botanical Gardens, drawing 1.6 million visitors each year, recently deployed beacons to revolutionize the way visitors interact and learn about animals in How to keep your Customers Happy using Beacons 5

6 How to keep your Customers Happy using Beacons 7 Beaconstac

7 their natural habitat. They leveraged their mobile app named Rainforest of the Americas to unlock interactive content in a diverse range of formats, including detailed animal and habitat information, audio, and high-resolution images as the visitors move through the zoo. Moreover, the app also allows visitors to take the content home with them, thus creating a strong customer relationship with the zoo that extends beyond their visit to the park. 3. Conferences and Events In the case of trade shows and conferences, networking is one of the primary reasons why people attend events. The event app can use beacons to take the participation level of your attendees to a whole new level. Most apps use visitor self-tagging or LinkedIn integration to match profiles based on user s interests to send them notifications when they are in close proximity to a match. The Cannes Lion Film Festival 2014, for example, leveraged beacons to make it easier for attendees to instantly spot, connect and message influential industry targets around them using the Around Me feature in the official event app. When a visitor entered a room at the venue, they could immediately check-in by connecting their iphone with an ibeacon nearby. The Session Live feature within the app allowed them to take part in real-time polls and participate in in-app discussions. On top of this, the app even provided attendees with more information on the campaigns and producers behind the festival. How to keep your Customers Happy using Beacons 7

8 How beacons are transforming the event management industry 1. Frictionless Registration: You can speed up the registration process by deploying beacons at the entrance of your exhibition or conference venue and using them to send QR codes to the attendees for easy registration. 2. Content Delivery: This can be done by using beacons to recognize attendees at the session and automatically deliver slides, ebooks etc during or immediately after a session. Read more about using beacons at events 4. Education World class lecture rooms and amphi-theatres within university campuses can now leverage beacon technology to allow staff and students to control and interact with the physical space around them, using smartphones. Image Source: proxima.io The new TAFE Tonsley Park campus in South Australia, for example, tightly integrates Estimote beacons with a beacon platform to make controlling in-room lights, projectors and screens an intuitive user experience. With around 200 beacons installed all over the campus, the platform triggers lights and systems in the classrooms to be activated as soon as staff and students walkin. These beacons detect staff/students smartphones and give them instant access to the lights and projectors in the room. How to keep your Customers Happy using Beacons 8

9 5. Airlines When it comes to airlines, one of the best uses of beacon-enabled mobile apps is floor maps. Beacons help airlines enhance their revenue potential by gaining better insights on navigational patterns of passengers within the airport, and finding the most popular locations at the airport by tracking the areas with maximum customer dwell time. You can then use this information to optimize dining, retail and entertainment layouts in those popular areas according to the needs and interests of your passengers. Image Source: Virgin Atlantic Virgin Atlantic, recently deployed beacons in the Upper Class Wing at Terminal 3 of the Heathrow airport, to allow premium passengers to receive personalized notifications and offers via their iphone. Passengers who use the service at the main area of the airport, will receive special partner offers, such as commission-free currency exchange as they pass the MoneyCorp currency exchange booth. Using beacons to provide connected travel experiences Personalize your drive: This is particularly useful when it comes to car-rental services. You can also use the ability of beacons to recognize a traveler and store data on his preferences such a favourite radio stations, places he has checked into the GPS etc., to personalize his drive. Enhance public transport services: This can be done by delivering messages on any delay in arrivals and other real-time schedules such as information on incoming vehicle and its location with respect to the traveler. Read more about beacons in travel How to keep your Customers Happy using Beacons 9

10 Improving customer engagement with beacons With so many industries trying to get a grip on the technology behind beacons, customer opinion indicates that these low-cost pieces of hardware have a huge potential to revolutionise experience across industries. According to a recent study by edigitalresearch, 78% of customers agreed that they would be happy to receive personalized messages from retailers. At the same time, too many irrelevant push notifications or overload of messages can nudge customers to uninstall your app. A recent inmarket study reported that, with every other push notification that is delivered per store visit, marketers risk a whopping 313% drop in app usage. Thus, in today s age of never-ending struggle to boost loyalty and enhance customer engagement, marketers and customer service professionals are left with no one size fits all solution. The only way towards gaining maximum impact, involves leveraging beacons, context and content in such a way that the customer tends to derive a benefit from the engagement. Here are a few tips that will help you enhance customer engagement over time: 1. Making beacons part of your marketing strategy: A. Ensure that you have a sturdy app in place To reap the benefits of ibeacon technology, you need to have a mobile app with which the beacon can communicate and interact with. If you already have an app in place then you can enhance your customers experience by adding location-based elements such as indoor navigation & contextual notifications to it. You can also choose an existing generic app that is optimised for your target market say museums or stadiums, and then use dedicated tools provided by them to customize the app to your needs. On the other hand, if you don t already have an app in place, then it is best to integrate with an existing sales app such as PowaTag, a mobile commerce app with 240 leading retail brands on board or Vente-Privee, a leading mobile commerce app in the European market. You can also tie up with Passbook, an existing utility application on Apple devices. B. Ensure that your app is secure When it comes to beacons, privacy has long been a major concern among customers. This, however, is a misconception about beacons. These proximity-detection devices by themselves, cannot track or collect data about customers. They re only capable of identifying a particular mobile device s proximity and any notification triggered is done by the app and not beacons. Therefore, it is highly crucial that you test your app for such security vulnerabilities. How to keep your Customers Happy using Beacons 10

11 How to assess beacon security 1. Each beacon should have a unique password: In order to avoid security breaches it is best to avoid allocating same or similar passwords to different beacons. Another important point to note is that, companies must take care to avoid deploying beacons using the default password provided by vendors. 2. Encrypt the major and minor numbers (payload) frequently: When it comes to advanced beacon solutions, in addition to encrypting the major and minor values frequently on a timely basis, you will need an enterprise caliber software platform to simultaneously change the value of the UUID. Read more about beacon security 2. Employ impactful beacon marketing techniques: A. Integrate with your customers wishlist and social-networking accounts Most customers often tend to forget about items that they liked on a facebook page or added to their online wish list, when they shop in-store. Beacons can help you bridge online and offline shopping, by syncing your customer s online wish list or social-networking accounts in real-time with the app. For example, as soon as a customer enters the store, you can send an image of the product in their online wishlist, reminding them of it s availability in-store. You can even use beacons to direct them to a particular aisle where they can touch and feel the product. B. Add some utility to your app Image Source: techcrunch.com How to keep your Customers Happy using Beacons 11

12 When it comes to beacon marketing, one of the most crucial aspects is that it requires retailers to understand each step in the customer journey and accordingly provide notifications that customers are likely to benefit from. For example, Epicurious, Condé Nast s 19-year-old recipe warehouse, recently leveraged beacons in-store to push notifications on recipe suggestions to shoppers apps letting customers buy all ingredients necessary for the recipe by just tapping the notification. C. Set a threshold time for messages to be triggered via your app Beacons can help you detect the threshold time for each section at your store, by tracking customer dwell time at different sections. The average dwell time spent by customers at a particular section of that store, when they are interested in buying products from that section, is then termed as threshold time. For example, if a store has set two minutes as the threshold time, it indicates that there is a higher chance of a customer buying a product, if he or she spends more than two minutes in a particular aisle. This approach will help you ensure that you trigger interest-based messages only to customers who are ready to buy and not spam everyone with offers. 3. Integrating beacons with your customer loyalty programs A. Deliver time-sensitive geo-targeted offers with greater precision You can leverage ibeacon technology to detect your customer s precise location in an enclosed space (i.e. a resort or a retail store) and accordingly send personalized deals that are specific to the action the customer is expected to perform next. The two main advantages offered by this technology are as follows: It allows marketers to target customers with greater precision and this helps them ensure that the number of wasted impressions are kept low. It allows marketers to gather massive amounts of untapped data on customer behaviour and use it to deliver offers and deals to customers to whom they are the most relevant. This way marketers can help raise ROI by driving up customer response. B. Send customized offers to patrons when they are closeby According to a recent survey conducted by Research Now, 41% of smartphone users in the US reported ignoring push notifications that weren t relevant to their preferences. Therefore, when it comes to location-based marketing using beacons, it is crucial for marketers to have a deep understanding of value that they can offer their customers. For example, say you run a restaurant, you can integrate beacons with your mobile strategy to track the favourite dishes of your customers on your app. That way, when they happen to walk by your store, you can immediately push a customized notification with an enticing offer on their favourite dish. How to keep your Customers Happy using Beacons 12

13 Tipsheet on how to plan effective beacon marketing campaigns Choose between building an app or not: If you already have a branded app that is used and valued by your customers, then you can easily build upon it by adding locationbased elements to the app. On the other hand, if you do not have an app, you can simply integrate with an existing sales app or Apple s Passbook. Focus on your campaign s specific objectives: For example, if your objective is to generate new business, then you could push special offers to first timers, and also try up selling other products. On the other hand, if your objective is to encourage repeat business, then you could just start a customer loyalty program or even offer season specials to existing customers. Focus on delivering value through content: While pushing relevant content helps boost sales, ensure that you don t overwhelm your customers with notifications, as it may cause them to delete the app altogether. Arrange for remote beacon management: If you need to deploy beacons on a large scale at multiple branches across the country, then it is best that you leverage a beacon platform to simplify remote beacon management. Use multiple beacons for improved accuracy: While deciding on a multi-beacon solution, consider the level of accuracy in mind. The more accurate positioning you require, the more the number of beacons that need to be deployed. Ensure that your app is secure: Although, privacy has long been a major concern among beacon customers, beacons by themselves can not track or collect data about customers. It s the app that holds the power. Therefore, it is very important that you test your app for such security vulnerabilities. Integrate with your marketing strategy: Ensure you drive more app downloads for your beacon-enabled proximity marketing strategy to be effective. Plan your promotional campaigns in advance to increase your ROI. How to keep your Customers Happy using Beacons 13

14 About Beaconstac Beaconstac enables businesses to deliver superior customer experiences through the use of Beacons for engagement, messaging, and analytics API-driven platform with fully native ios and Android SDKs Integration with CRM, Content management, Ecommerce backend through webhooks Beacon-agnostic software platform For more information, visit: To the Beaconstac blog: Follow us on How Copyright to keep 2014, your Mobstac Customers Inc. All Happy rights reserved. using Beacons 14