If you are someone who has been following beacons and the recent Forbes articles, you would notice that they have outrightly talked about beacons as a trend that will be dead in 2017. However, many proximity marketing experts think otherwise.
For starters, one of the reasons why beacons are predicted to see a fall in 2017 (according to the Forbes article) is because of their dependency on app adoption. Those of you who follow news in the beacon world would already know that this dependency is something that Google’s Eddystone beacons have done away with. The second reason mentioned by Forbes is that, beacons provide micro-level data that retailers fail to benefit from these days. On the other hand, another Forbes article states that retailers who are able to tie online and offline consumer shopping journey will come out as clear winners in 2017. Now, if you are familiar with beacons, you would know that one of the technologies that is leading the front on connecting the offline world with the one online is beacons. Thus, when it comes to equipping retailers for success, beacons hold great potential as they can help brands gain deep insights on consumer preferences and behaviors.
Having noticed this growing trend, we at MobStac recently refined the advanced analytics features offered by our Beaconstac platform to equip retailers with everything they need to gain deep insights into the rising change in consumer behaviour. In this blog we will discuss in detail about how retailers can leverage the Beaconstac platform to employ a data-driven approach to measure the behaviour of their shoppers.
How retailers can leverage iBeacon tech to gain insights on customer behaviour
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Before we dig deeper, it’s important for you to know that the Beaconstac platform is compatible with both iBeacon and Eddystone beacon protocols. Based on the protocol that the beacons leveraged in a proximity campaign are compatible with, the metrics and analytics offered by the platform also differ. In this blog we will take you through the various advanced analytics offered by iBeacon protocol, in detail.
Retail analytics using iBeacon tech
Consider you are running a beacon campaign at ‘Fashion Store’, a retail outlet in New York. As a part of this campaign, 3 iBeacon compatible beacons have been installed at various sections in the store, primarily:
(a) Women’s Clothing Section (WC)
(b) Billing Section (Bil)
(c) Beauty Studio (BS)
These beacons are together leveraged to run 3 different kind of campaigns, primarily centered around sending targeted offers to customers in-store, sending proximity messages near mannequins and collecting valuable feedback. For example, the beacon at the:
(a) Women’s Clothing section is being used to push a notification that says – ‘Avail 15% off on Summer Dresses today’ – to push a customer closer to a sale when he/she is checking out the clothes/shoes/accessories on a mannequin
(b) Billing Section is being used to push a customer satisfaction survey form to collect direct feedback from customers
(c) Beauty Studio section is being used to push a notification that says – ‘Try a Mini Makeover for free today’ – to spread awareness about an event running in-store
Now let’s take a look at the various analytics provided by Beaconstac platform. It helps you:
(1) Monitor Beacon activity
This graph depicts the number of Camp Ons (which is the act of a visitor’s phone registering a beacon) made by beacons over a period of time. In other words, it is a measure of the number of notifications that have been sent by the beacons deployed at the various sections in the store.
For example, as per this graph, we can see a peak in number of notifications sent (230 notifications) at the Women’s Clothing section on 5th Dec, the day when the mannequins in-store were dressed to match up with the Christmas mood around the corner. This goes on to show that, dressing up the mannequins as per the latest season trends will help you drive footfall. Also we can clearly see that the beacon campaign that was run at the Women’s Clothing section with notifications informing customers about the clothes/shoes/accessories on a mannequin saw max traffic among other cards. This shows that customers generally prefer notifications that are contextually relevant and educational rather than promotional.
(2) Monitor Rules Performance
This graph depicts the number of times a rule has been triggered over a period of time. To get a better idea, it’s important to first understand what rules and actions represent:
(i) Rules – It allows you to define a set of conditions that have to be fulfilled for an action to be performed.
(ii) Actions – It is what you want Beaconstac to do when the conditions of a rule are met. You could think of it as ‘if conditions then action’.
In other words, this graph is a measure of the performance of a beacon campaign, as it is closely related to the number of times the rules that define the campaign are triggered.
For example, as per this graph, the campaign run around ‘Free Mini Makeover’ at the Beauty Studio section ranks second among the others, in terms of campaign performance. This goes on to show that such workshops also play a critical role in driving footfall.
How retailers can leverage iBeacon tech to measure the performance of a proximity campaign
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(3) Gather metrics around beacons, places, campaigns and visitors
This allows you to gain insights on visitor details such as the name of a visitor, the last time he/she visited your store and the location of the outlet that they paid a visit to (particularly useful if you have multiple stores at different locations). Adding on to that, it also gives you the total number of visits made by a customer at your physical store and the type of device that they use in-store.
Further clicking on a visitor’s name will take you to another chart which will help you gain insights on consumer behaviour.
For example, it gives you deep insights on when a visitor checked in at your store, the amount of time that he/she spent around various beacons and how long he/she stayed at various sections in the store.
Thus, if you are looking to leverage beacons and use the iBeacon or Eddystone protocol, take a look at Beaconstac, that includes everything you need to kickstart your campaign in under 15 minutes. Using Beaconstac you can set up your own campaign, without a developer’s help!