Hospitality Technology Feature: 6 Lesser Known Uses of Beacons in Restaurants

According to a recent mBlox survey, 80% of consumers prefer receiving personalized, context-aware branded content through their mobile app. Therefore, it is highly likely that merging your mobile marketing efforts with iBeacon technology could result in a higher click-through, quicker conversion, more sales, and greater loyalty.

For years, just like retailers, the restaurant industry too relied on customer check-ins to have a better understanding of the frequency of the visits and the range of social media shares offered by their customers. One of the many challenges faced by them then was the inability to connect with their customers and have meaningful interactions. Integrating beacons with your mobile strategy will help you level the playing field by responding to your customers’ timely contextual content needs.

Although beacons are popularly considered to be a retailer-focused opportunity, restaurants too have a lot to gain from this new proximity-detection technology, as it allows them to have meaningful, personalized conversations with their customers. We recently published a blog on ‘6 Lesser Known Uses of Beacons in Restaurants‘ on Hospitality Technology. It talks about how beacons can help restaurants have meaningful interactions with their customers with enhanced features such as order-ahead, digital scavenger hunts, and real-time analytics. Here are a few:

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1. Let your customers know how crowded the restaurant is before they arrive

Another way of allowing your customers to cut down on waiting time is to keep them in the know-how of how busy your restaurant is in real-time. This can be done by deploying beacons around your restaurant, which will in turn provide you with real-time information on how many people are actually dining at your restaurant at a given point in time.

PS – Make use of contactless solutions such as QR Codes for menus in restaurants, and to offer them a less crowded time for easy dining.

2. Push customized notifications with offers on your customer’s favorite dish

Beacons are best used for pushing contextually relevant notifications to customers. At the same time, you must ensure that you don’t overwhelm your users with notifications, as it could nudge them towards opting-out or uninstalling your app. The key here is to have a deep understanding of the value you can offer your customer and deliver it in the best way possible.

For example, you can allow your customers to bookmark their favorite dishes on the mobile app. This is so that,  when they walk by your restaurant any day, you can automatically push notifications with an enticing offer on the dish he/she bookmarked earlier.

3. Organize scavenger hunts

As in the case of events, gamification plays a crucial role in offering enhanced customer engagement at restaurants. This helps you prevent boredom by involving your customers in various events that are held at your restaurant, by delivering personalized deals and messages.

Image Source: essentialmac.co.uk

A few pubs in lower New York, for example, recently used beacons to gamify traditional pub crawl. As a part of Beacon Crawl, an interactive bar crawl event, beacons were installed in the sponsor venues and various other locations to guide crawlers to secret locations where they were greeted with welcome notifications and clues to unlock special drinks and offers via beacons. Further, they even enhanced engagement by awarding crawlers for completing tasks, such as sharing content via social media, meeting other crawlers, ordering food, etc.

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Read the full post on ‘6 Lesser Known Uses of Beacons in Restaurants‘ on Hospitality Technology to learn how beacons empower restaurants with the ability to engage customers better through a real-world experience while gaining a 360-degree view of their consumer’s needs and interests. The ideas mentioned above are sure to get you started in the right direction.

If you are planning a beacon pilot, take a look at Beaconstac, which includes everything you need to get started. Using Beaconstac you can set up your own campaign, without a developer’s help!

• Author Details

Author Details

Devika Girish

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