Umbel Feature: Beacons and Big Data: A Powerful Pair for Retail

Beacons and Big data are the latest buzzwords everywhere. Is it possible to use these together efficiently ? If yes, then how? And to what effect?

We all know about beacons. Every industry vertical right from retail to hotels, museums, theme parks and airports to stadiums etc., is looking to deploy beacons.

Businesses are fast realizing the importance of big data and are investing huge amounts of time and money to gather it. Retailers, for example, collect online sales data, mobile and apps data, and customer footfall data. Add to that, enterprise integrations for loyalty, CRM and ERP.

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Ideally such a huge repository of data should enable retailers to enhance customer experiences in a big way. But, that’s not the case. According to an IBM survey, seventy-one percent of chief marketing officers around the globe say their organization is unprepared to deal with the explosion of big data over the next few years. The reason for this is that all these pieces of data are in different silos and not easy to tie together.

To put these challenges in a nutshell:

-Offline customer behaviour is difficult and expensive to capture.
-Online behaviour is easy to capture but difficult to interpret.
-Mobile behaviour is tricky to capture, and normally difficult to interpret.
-Enter Beacons: Mobile enabled with location and context makes all the pieces fit together, seamlessly!

From our experience of deploying beacons for some famous retail brands, using our platform – Beaconstac , following are a few metrics that can be captured by integrating beacons, with your CRM system:

-Footfall, visits online, visits through apps
-Recency and frequency of visits, behavior and transactions
-Merchandising and marketing effectiveness
-Loyalty program utilisation
-Service quality, queue and abandonment
-Capacity planning and resource utilization through mobile in-store combination analytics

Read the full blog post on “Beacons and Big Data: A Powerful Pair for Retail” to learn how retailers can streamline customer experiences using beacons.

Some snippets from the blog are:

1. Personalize offers and suggestions to loyal customers

While beacons are popularly known for delivering contextual content, they also allow for a deeper understanding of your customers’ shopping behavior by providing analytics around online, in-app and in-store behaviors, brand affinities, favorite products, demographics, location and more.

This deep data helps you develop personalized initiatives to boost profits and retention.

A good example of how beacons can be used to leverage loyalty programs is the Bay Area’s popular quick service soup, sandwich and salad chain, San Francisco Soup Company.

Image Source: customerparadigm.com

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2. Optimize store layouts and product placement

Beacons help retailers find popular locations in their store, then optimize store layouts and product placement based on navigational patterns. By tracking customer dwell times at various sections and their entire path within the store, you can understand which sections are the most popular and invest in those sections to optimize your ROI.

Image Source: RFID Journal

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3. Help customers locate items in-store

Retailers can get customers’ shopping lists, wish lists and favorites from their app, and help them locate items that are available in-store and guide them to a particular aisle from where it can be picked up.

Tesco recently leveraged beacons to offer better in-store customer service.

Image Source: Twinkle magazine.nl

4. Empower sales associates

Stores today are looking to empower sales associates with a full view of every customer. This encompasses purchase history, location, shopping preferences and social profiles. Relaying such important information about your customer to sales associates will help them get a better idea on how they should approach the customer.

Read the full blog here to know how you can combine big data and beacons to devise a data-driven business strategy that is a win for your brand and a win for the customer.

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