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Beacon-powered in-store mobile marketing offers
retailers and brands a valuable opportunity to engage
with shoppers at the precise moment and place they
are making a purchase decision. Being able to deliver
highly relevant content and offers to a shopper’s
smartphone based on his or her shopping activities
and in-aisle location provides an unprecedented ability
to engage shoppers and influence their purchasing
behaviors. But successfully implementing this new
capability requires a well thought out plan and careful
execution. This Guide was created to help marketers
design effective beacon marketing programs that
enhance the consumer shopping experience while also
driving measurable business results.
Beacon Marketing for Retail
A guide to launching and managing your
Beacon marketing campaigns.
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1. Define Your Goals
Before launching a beacon marketing program or
taking that first step by deploying the first beacon, it is
important that marketers have a clearly defined set of
business goals and key metrics that they want to track.
In-store mobile marketing is powerful and can greatly
influence consumer behavior right at the decision
point in their path to purchase, but in order to drive
meaningful business results, marketers need to target
behaviors with specific goals in mind.
• Increase overall purchase rate
• Increase average basket size
• Increase department-specific traffic
• Increase category purchase rates
• Increase customer activation
• Introduce new products/categories
• Cross-sell products/services
• Measure footfall traffic
• Identify retail “hotspots”
• Drive repeat store traffic
• Increase mobile engagement
• Increase brand loyalty
• Enhance shopping experience
& customer satisfaction
While the goals may vary from retailer to retailer here are some examples of common
goals that can be used to guide and measure beacon-marketing campaigns:
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Specialty retailers with small
store footprints may only need
one or two beacons per store,
while larger multi-brand retailers
typically start with beacons in 3-5
different areas/departments.
2. Start Small - But Start Now
While the initial reaction is to scatter beacons over
every square foot of their retail space, retailers should
consider taking a more measured approach to beacon
deployment.
With beacons, more is not necessarily better. Too many
beacon-triggered events, offers or messages and you
run the risk of annoying customers and alienating
shoppers.
As a general rule, retailers should only deploy
beacons in areas of the store where a meaningful
digital experience would be valuable for shoppers.
For retailers who are new to the technology, it’s a
good idea to start with a small number of beacons in
each store in order to gain practical experience and
information that can be used to optimize larger-scale
deployments.
Deloitte Global Powers of Retailing 2014 Study
eCommerce represented only
5-15%of revenue for many big department
stores and specialty apparel
retailers.
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3. Location, Location, Location –
Where To Place Your Beacons
Retailers typically install beacons
on ceilings, above doorways or
at the back/underside of the
highest aisle display shelf. Before
installing beacons, you should
test the cellular reception in
the desired area to ensure that
shoppers will have reliable and
consistent mobile experiences.
Now that you’ve defined your business goals and
determined the number of beacons for initial
deployment, you need to decide where to place
the beacons within the stores. Common beacon
placements include store entrances (where you can
attract and entice customers to enter your location
with welcome messages, offers or prompts to visit
specific departments), checkout areas (to trigger
loyalty program usage), and major merchandising
areas within the store (where you can deliver product-
relevant content and offers).
Once you’ve decided on the best areas of the store
where you want beacons, it’s time to install the physical
devices. Consider placing beacons in such a way
that they are out of plain sight, beyond the reach of
shoppers and have an unobstructed broadcast path.
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4. Put the Customer First
Consumer smartphones are inherently personal devices, and marketing to them carries potential
risks. While the delivery of highly relevant, location-specific mobile content has the ability to
create unheard of levels of shopper engagement, irresponsible or irrelevant beacon messaging can
be a source of dissatisfaction for shoppers.
77%of smartphone users are willing to
share their location as long as they
receive enough value in return.
a) Be upfront and transparent
Beacon marketing requires the use of a smartphone’s
location. In order to ensure a positive experience for
consumers, marketers should develop clear opt-in
processes that allow users to control permission for
beacon-triggered messages. Be sure to maintain
transparency by clearly communicating the value they
can expect to receive by opting in. Give them a sneak
peek of the value they’ll receive from beacons, how the
triggered app relates to the shopping experience so
that the customer isn’t left questioning why that app is
engaging with them while they are in the store.
ResearchNow
b) Be relevant.
Smartphones are inherently personal devices and
consumers have little tolerance for marketers who
invade their private space with unwanted messages
and interruptions. A shopper’s in-store location
provides incredibly valuable insight into a person’s
interests, but in order to create a truly positive in-store
mobile experience, marketers need to carefully
leverage the opportunity to deliver valuable, relevant
and timely content. Sending hair and makeup trends
to a male shopper who is only quickly passing
through the cosmetics department on his way to the
electronics department is a sure fire way to get your
app deleted from a shopper’s phone. With advanced
beacon marketing platform capabilities such as dwell
time triggers, marketers can fine-tune their message
targeting to ensure relevance.
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• Will it help my customer make a buying
decision?
• Will it save my customer time or money?
• Will it improve the overall shopping
experience?
c) Create value for shoppers.
A study by ResearchNow found that 77 percent of
smartphone users would be willing to share their
location information as long as they received enough
value in return. A good rule of thumb is to create a
set of questions against which you can evaluate your
beacons marketing campaigns. If you can’t answer
“yes” to at least one of them, then you should rethink
your campaign.
d) Real-time Marketing
When designing beacon-triggered campaigns, keep
in mind that the consumer’s primary goal is shopping.
Marketing efforts should enhance that experience, not
detract from it. In-store mobile marketing campaigns
should take their cues from social engagement
platforms and focus on creating easily digestible
content and immediate value for shoppers. General
guidelines for this type of media include:
• One message per screen
• Visual design
• Limited text
• Large font size
• Limit content files to <300MB
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While delivering special offers or highlighting existing
sales, provide clear value for shoppers, beacon-
triggered messages do not have to focus exclusively
on discounts. Sharing timely advice on style trends,
delivering buying tips or offering access to product
reviews are also ways to create value and enhance the
in-store shopping experience
If you are a retailer adding beacon-triggered
experiences to your own mobile app, you’ll want
to create awareness and educate shoppers on the
program. In addition to driving higher app engagement,
promoting in-store mobile experiences is a great way
to stimulate mobile app downloads for shoppers
who don’t yet have your app. Use in-store signage
and bag inserts to encourage app downloads and
updates. Exclusive offers can be used as an additional
incentive to encourage first-time use. And don’t forget
to encourage sales associates to promote the app at
checkout while they’re ringing up customers.
5. Leverage Existing Touch Points
In addition to in-store merchandising opportunities,
retailers should also tap into other existing customer
communication channels to promote app downloads
and in-store mobile usage. Your website, customer
emails and social media channels are all places where
you can let customers know about how your mobile
app is enhancing the in-store shopping experience.
In addition to all the external channels you should also
look to integrate other digital touch points within your
stores that can complement your beacon triggered
content and help to create a seamless experience.
For example, use existing digital signage screens to
promote your mobile app, coordinate beacon locations
with interactive kiosks to enhance the experience,
and integrate handheld devices used by your sales
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• Continues to provide consumers the
information they want, when and where
they want it.
• Unifies the consumer experience
from web to mobile to on-premises,
taking advantage of digital media and
applications as part of that.
• Creates greater balance in the seller/buyer
dialog, including two-way interaction.
• Provides sellers with deeper, accurate
information about their consumers in order
to better personalize the relationship they
offer.
associates so that they are well informed and able to
offer premium service to your customers. When all
of the digital touch points come together to create a
consistent and seamless shopping experience we call it
a system of engagement. Using a platform like Toushay
you can then manage your Path-to-Purchase marketing
campaigns across every device at every stage of your
customer’s journey.
6. Test, Measure and Learn
Marketers launching their first beacon marketing
campaign should focus on generating rapid learning.
Once initial performance benchmarks have been
established, campaign variations can be developed and
tested. In addition to offer, messaging frequency and
content testing, marketers should also begin planning
for more sophisticated and targeted campaigns based
on factors such as:
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Contact us
When do we get started?
Now that you have all the basics covered to launch
your first beacon campaign, it’s time to get started.
By experimenting and optimizing in location
engagement in a way that is fast, measurable scalable
and repeatable you can get to know customer behavior
through a controlled, low risk process.
By taking the time to know you customers you can
develop stronger relationships by presenting them
with offers and products that they find valuable and
relevant.
Toushay is the perfect platform to perform agile
testing for in location pilot projects to quickly
determine engagement effectiveness through A/B and
multivariate testing and optimize the user experience
using real world data.
About Toushay
Toushay is a cloud service platform that allows forward
thinking retailers to use networked in store touch points,
like iBeacons, kiosks and mobile applications, to manage
and measure the effectiveness of in store engagements.
It’s a way for retailers to influence customer purchase
behaviors within their brick and mortar locations through
real-time content delivery and management.
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