#netcinity proximitymarketing

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NETcinity Bluetooth Beacon Proximity Marketing

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NETcinity’s Pro Series Beacon - How Proximity Marketing Is Changing Retail

If you’re tracking recent business news, it seems like grim tidings for the retail industry as a whole. Retailers are closing stores or, just as often, closing shop. Once ubiquitous and profitable brands like Hastings, Circuit City and Radio Shack, have gone the way of dinosaurs, the dodo bird and F.W. Woolworth Co. While the Internet takes much of the blame, a closer look almost always shows a pattern of slow adaptation to technological change and unsustainable debt. Yet, there may be hope in retail’s jungle of despair by way of a little thing called proximity marketing.

The Tech

At the core of this hope are little boxes called proximity beacons, such as the NETcinity Pro Series Beacon. For practical purposes, the proximity beacon acts like a lighthouse signaling to customers. It uses Bluetooth or Wi-Fi signals to send push notifications out to customer phones. What do the notifications say? More or less anything you want them to, though typically something about what is on sale today in the store or a given department. Of course, customers need to opt-in to some form of location sharing to receive the notifications. What retailers should find encouraging is that 53% of customers will opt-in to get relevant ads.

The beacons themselves have a limited, but effective range. Most will transmit up to about 230 feet. Although some, like the NETcinity Pro Series Beacon, have pushed the range out to around 260 feet. This is more than enough to cover a substantial area of a parking lot near the front door of a retail outlet, not to mention much of the store’s interior. That means those passing by and customers inside the store get notifications as they happen.

The Benefits Now

The most obvious benefit is the volume of smartphone users. Approximately 77% of Americans use smartphones, which means that over 3/4s of your potential customers already walk around with the technology to receive proximity messages. You don’t need to convince them to buy new technology, just to download an app, which Apple and Android have largely trained customers to do already.

Once they install the app and opt-in, the beacon messages lead to a 19 times higher level of product interaction. Customers that interact with products are far more likely to buy them. For most retail outlets, even a small uptick in sales from a small percentage of customers can mean substantial revenue increases. If those customers then share information about the deal they just got, a common trend among Millennials, it encourages an uptick in sales from non-app users, further cementing the revenue increase.

Future Benefits

Proximity beacons allow retail outlets to function a little more like online shopping, where information is available on-demand. While the total information available via beacons is still limited to what you program in, or have programmed in, this is still a new technology. As beacon technology and APIs mature, it’s almost inevitable that automation will start making everything from the product specs to product reviews available at the point of contact with any given item on the shelf.

Closer than that is being able to target offers to customers based on their own purchase histories. This is similar to how Amazon pitches products to customers based on search and purchase history. This feature hinges more on developing the right algorithms for the right retail outlets than needing some significant breakthrough. The biggest question is whether individual stores will require custom algorithms or if industry algorithms will be able to do the job.

In the short term, though, any retailer with an existing suggested product algorithm ought to be positioned to use that in conjunction with proximity beacons very soon. Again, this is a matter of getting the right programming in place so that customer ID, purchase history and recommendations are connected via the application. Fortunately, this is a perfectly solvable challenge and will likely generate a healthy revenue boost once it’s in place.

Despite the dark tidings about the retail industry dying beneath the onslaught of online shopping options, proximity marketing is poised to help turn things around. The beacon technology takes advantage of the Bluetooth and app capacity already built into the smartphones that most adults carry. So adoption is far less of a challenge. It offers a way to help generate immediate upticks in consumer interaction with products with a predictable increase in sales volume. The real golden ticket lies with the near-horizon expansion of beacon features, such as customer-specific recommendations and automatic access to product reviews. These features will fundamentally bridge the gap between the online and in-person shopping experience, which will help draw customers back into stores.

Article Originally Appeared At: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/netcinitys-pro-series-beacon-how-proximity-changing-shawn-whitson