iBeacons are becoming more forceful as the future for traditional, brick and mortar retailers. In August, Macy’s, Inc. announced it would roll out the mobile technology in all of its stores, using push notifications powered by the iBeacon platform Shopkick. Locally, the iBeacon platform Swirl is used by retailers and brands like Lord & Taylor, Alex and Ani and Kenneth Cole.
With the iBeacon technology, the next time you’re out and about shopping, you could be receiving in-store promotions, rewards and discounts through your phone when you choose to opt in to the push notifications. It’s all part of the store’s efforts to fight back against the surge in online shopping – but how effective are beacons? The beacon platform inMarket performed a case study to find out.
The company launched their Mobile to Mortar platform Monday to find the best practices for consumer interaction fueled by technology. With this launch, inMarket also released the data from their case study that looked into the pros and cons of beacon technology.
From the study, inMarket derived one important takeaway: When used properly, beacons can be a pivotal tool in increasing and encouraging customer engagement, but if a brand or retailer abuses the use of beacon push notifications, customers are drastically repelled from the technology.
For the benefits of beacon technology, inMarket’s study found that they engage a 45 percent interaction rate, in comparison to the nine percent interaction rate achieved by regular push notifications that don’t correlate with customer location. Beacons can both guide shoppers to what they’re looking for, or capitalize on where they already are – for instance, a promotion for jeans may pop up as you browse the denim display of a store.
That customer engagement significantly decreases when platforms oversaturate, however, and over-saturation when it comes to mobile notifications is a slippery slope. inMarket’s study found that if a customer received more than one push notification from a beacon platform in the same store, app usage among existing users declines by 313 percent. The same goes if the notifications customers received were irrelevant: the beacon app gets deleted.
inMarket CEO Todd Dipaola provided insight to the study’s findings:
These stats clarify that beacons are a powerful tool that can alter the user experience depending on how they are deployed. Blanketing people with pop-ups on their phone is a sure-fire way to lose an audience, but reaching the right person with helpful info at the perfect time causes enormous lift. Simply deploying beacons is not enough, and misusing beacons can have the opposite of the intended effect.
While Dipaola’s condemnation of “real-life pop ups,” as he calls too many beacon notifications, is wholly justified, there are more benefits to beacon technology that the study uncovered. For one, branded content passed on through push notifications to a shopper at the right time led to customers being 7.5 times more likely to seek out that product in the store.
Additionally, 68 percent of the 1,500 customers that inMarket surveyed in September said that they found in-store notifications from shopping apps to be more effective than out of the store.
So, the takeaway for beacon platforms? Quality over quantity.
Image via inMarket Press
