Though it’s not quite over yet, 2016 has been one of the best years for the proximity marketing industry till date. While year 2015 saw brands hold discussions around beacons, geofencing and other location-aware infrastructure, this year saw brands come forward and discuss tips around developing a beacon-enabled app, the promises that Eddystone holds in the world of proximity marketing and insights into successful beacon deployments. According to a recent forecast by Research and Markets, proximity marketing market is expected to be worth USD 52.46 Billion by 2022 at a CAGR of 29.8% between 2016 and 2022.

With the industry progressing at such a great pace, it is highly critical for brands to measure the impact of their proximity marketing campaigns. While most businesses continue to stick by traditional methods that primarily revolve around metrics such as foot traffic,click rates and impressions, it is important to note that these metrics don’t provide insights on ROI in terms of customers acquired and products sold.

Therefore, in order to come up with new and more concrete ways of measuring the impact of proximity campaigns, it is important that we start looking at them in a different light. In other words, you need to keep an account of the impact that the campaign has had on consumer engagement, revenue and consumer retention in order to measure the value of proximity marketing efforts. To give you a better idea, here are a few questions that you need to ask yourselves:

a) Did this campaign help you drive long-term consumer engagement?

b) Did you end up turning off your customers or users?

c) Were you able to convert your users into customers? If so how many of them did you convert?

d) Did this campaign help you drive consumer spend over time?

Summing it up, one of the most effective analysis techniques that can help marketers track down measureable ROI is called ‘Sales Lift Analysis’. Here are 5 ways in which you can put this technique to use:

1) Define the criteria that you plan to follow to measure sales lift

Few of the basic metrics that most businesses follow to measure lift percentage over time include impressions, units sold and revenue generated. One important thing to note here is that when it comes to timing, the more granular you are about it, the more effective your proximity marketing campaigns will be. For example, being able to identify the days of the week and time of those days that drive the most purchases will help you maximize your campaign ROI.

2) Setup test and control stores to measure impact on buyer behaviour

Let’s say you have a total of four stores or branches selling the same items. You can deploy beacons and run proximity marketing campaigns at say two of these stores (test stores). At the same time, you can use the remaining two stores (control stores) to enable you to make comparison of analytics metrics in order to measure impact on buyer behaviour. Few of the conditions that you need to consider while choosing the locations of test and control stores include population density, weather, demographics, seasonality and economics. This way you will be able to directly compare consumer engagement, revenue and consumer retention at the two sets of stores with ease.

3) Use historical sales data as a benchmark to measure the effectiveness of the campaign

This method totally depends on whether you are trying to leverage beacons to sell an existing product or a new one. For example, if it’s an existing product, you can just take note of the timeframe, geography and stores where it has been available in the past. This can then be used to capture the historical unit and sales revenue data that can be used as a benchmark or baseline to measure the effectiveness of your proximity marketing campaign. On the other hand, if it’s a new product, you can compare the unit and sales revenue data across stores in various regions.

4) Track products to identify trends in product sales

Let’s say, you are promoting a brand with several individual sub-brands and specific UPCs (Universal Product Codes). Tracking products down to the UPC level will help you identify how specific products drive customers to purchase other items in combination, resulting in additional sales. For example, say you are a CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) brand and you recently introduced 4 new flavour of fruit drinks. You can employ beacons and work alongside an Ad-tech partner to determine which of the new flavors are doing better compared to the others. Adding on to that, you can also employ sales lift analysis to measure the impact of that campaign on the overall sales of the CPG brand.  

5) Assess campaigns in real-time and gain access to crucial metrics

Sales lift analysis can be used by marketers to assess campaigns in real-time and make quick adjustments that could in turn drive revenue and greater customer retention. Adding on to that, it can also help reduce overall costs as you turn campaigns on or off, thereby providing you greater control over things like ad spend. You can also use this analysis technique to garner knowledge on the kind of messages and techniques that command highest engagement and sales conversion rates with respect to specific customer segments across various regions and time frames.

Thus, putting the sales lift analysis technique to practise will not only make you a smarter marketer but also help you deliver on the expectations of your proximity marketing campaigns.

If you are planning an Eddystone beacon pilot, 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!