Beacon benefits for business. Why should employ them?
Having been appeared only a few years ago with major investment from retailers, marketers, and so on, beacons have already gained huge popularity.
They leverage this useful technology in a plenty of ways to add value to their mobile apps, provide customers with engaging shopping experience, and gather information about their buying habits.
Now beacons are expected to grow even more exponentially. Analysts predict that by the end of 2018 retailers will have more than 3 billion active beacons installed.
So, what are the beacons? What’s such a big deal about them? Which benefits beacon technology provides for businesses with? Which industries should consider beacon employment? Why Beacons are claimed to create the biggest revolution in retail, is one of the key mobile applications development trends for this year?
Beacons are small Bluetooth-enabled devices that can be attached to walls, counters, shopping carts in a store and so on. They use low-energy Bluetooth connections to send users messages directly to their smartphones or tablets.
Retail outlets integrate beacons to provide customers with valuable information, for example about flash sales, discounts, and shares, get deep insights into customer behavior, speed up sales processes, and more.
This technology opens a lot of possibilities for companies, and here are the main advantages of Beacon employment:
1. Beacons help to attract customers and retain the current ones
Beacon technology can serve for a variety of purposes, and one of the principal ones is customer attraction and engagement. The main way to do it are personalized messages you send to your customers or users of a certain mobile app on the smartphone.
It can be push notifications with a motive to make some purchase, a reminder about a coupon, or just notification about a particular discount or special offer.
Or guiding your visitors inside buildings, airports, and so on. Thus, such an efficient approach will allow you to engage customers, and make them returning ones.
2. Beacons help to provide customers with better shopping experience
One of the great advantages of beacon employment is the possibility to provide your customers with the engaging shopping experience. Placed around the store, beacons will automatically communicate to smartphones when a certain mobile app user appears near it (usually about 50-100 feet).
They can serve as support staff by helping customers to easily find necessary information about products, offers, discounts, services, and shops. Also, beacons can inform them about the ones that are of interest (based on purchases history, buying habits analysis, etc.) and moreover, create price comparison lists, and much more.
Beacon technology is the most efficient solution in indoor navigation: you can guide your customers inside shopping malls and supermarkets for their comfort and saving their time.
Why not GPS, you wonder? Yes, it could, but the result wouldn’t be so great as it doesn’t work well inside buildings. Indoor navigation is much more complicated and requires a more precise approach.
So, with the help of Beacon employment and its conjunction with mobile applications development, you will definitely enhance your customer service, providing them with the better shopping experience.
3. Beacons gather customer intelligence so you can analyze their behavior
One of the key tasks beacons can complete is gathering customer intelligence. While shoppers are walking around the store, they collect data about their behavior, buying habits, and so on.
It should be noted that beacons can be synchronized with CRM systems and customer loyalty programs.
It’s one of the main advantages of their implementation in your business, opening new opportunities for your company growth.
Their employment will help you to easily gain deep insights in customer behavior, see real-time data, define the target audience preferences, analyze purchases statistics, send personalized messages, provide more valuable and successful offers and discounts.
4. Beacons allow segmenting the audience
Beacons provide the opportunity not only to understand customers but also segment the audience. They offer a lot of useful information for businesses.
With their employment you will be able to track new customers, the returning ones, see the engagement rates with advertising (and other) campaigns, analyze buying tendencies and define customer audience needs and preferences.
From there you will get the possibility to tailor your message based on information about certain customers, determine successful offers and not such efficient ones. The result won’t slow to arrive: enhanced shopping experience, sales increase, and more returning loyal customers.
5. Beacons can support cashless online payment
Beacons applications can provide in-store retail and offline payments support. They enable customers to pay for all the purchases without having to wait in long queues.
All payments are made via a cashless payment system while all payment information is stored on mobile devices. Thanks to it, shop visitors save their time and your sales increase. Sounds great, doesn’t it?
So, mobile applications development implying beacon apps can become an efficient solution for boosting and speeding up sales as well as customer service improvement.
Mobile applications development and conjunction with beacons
A mobile app on a customer smartphone, Bluetooth, and Internet connection is everything you need to gain all the benefits from beacon technology employment.
Beacons can provide customers with information about prices and special offers, motivate them to make purchases, as well as guide app users inside buildings by sending necessary data right on their smartphones. There are a lot of possibilities and ideas for beacon employment.
You can learn more about them from our article about examples of their integration in business.