While most marketers connect beacons with in-store coupons or notifications, retargeting is quickly emerging as a compelling use case in the the proximity marketing space. According to Proxbook’s Q4 2016 report, at a growth rate between 14-15% throughout the year, driving advertising campaigns through online retargeting was one of the primary value-adding factors last year.

Not surprising, given that over the past few months we have seen an increased demand for offline-to-online retargeting services among our customers. Well, the good news is that the long wait is now over. We at MobStac are thrilled to announce that you can now leverage Beaconstac, our proximity marketing and analytics platform to retarget your customers based on their offline actions.

While ad retargeting in the earlier days of digital advertising allowed businesses to target consumers based on their internet history via cookies, the advent of beacons and an advanced understanding of historical geo-data, has now made it possible for businesses to retarget shoppers with advertising based on their physical actions in the real world.

If you are new to the concept of beacon-based retargeting, you could go check out our recent blog to learn about why this marketing technique is of utmost importance in today’s age. In this post, we will talk about how you can easily create a campaign using Beaconstac to retarget shoppers online on Facebook, based on their interactions at your retail store, earlier that day.

Campaign Objective

Let’s say you recently launched your all new women’s spring wear collection at your retail store. The objective of this campaign is to help you retarget shoppers who happened to drop by your store earlier and demonstrate an interest in your spring collection by engaging with the contextually relevant beacon notifications that you send them.

Step 1: Add Beacons to the dashboard and install them at your retail store

Before we begin, the first thing to do is to purchase two beacons. You can take a look at our Beaconstac platform, that includes everything you need to get started. Using Beaconstac you can set up your own Eddystone campaign, without a developer’s help – in less than 15 minutes!

Once you have purchased the beacons, their details such as the UID-Namespace, UID-Instance and URL, will be fully set up automatically before we ship the beacons to you.

You can name the beacons for easy identification. For the purpose of this campaign, we have named the beacons accordingly:

(a) The beacon placed at the women’s clothing section as ‘Beacon_Women’

(b) The one near the fitting room in-store as ‘Beacon_ Fitting Room’

Once the beacon details are added, they are ready to be installed.

Step 2: Set up the notification or card that is to be displayed

After installing the beacon, all you have to do is create a card that shoppers will see on their device. Cards are basically creatives that show up as a notification on visitors’ mobile device once they are in the range of a beacon. Using Beaconstac, you can create cards dynamically, using simple markdown language. It thus saves you the trouble of having to first create a webpage or a card, host it and then post the URL. Here’s all you need to do:

(i) Go to ‘Cards’ and click on ‘Add Card’.

(ii) Type in a title to identify your card with ease. For the purpose of this campaign, I have titled the card ‘Spring Collection’.

(iii) Type in the text (in simple markdown language format) and add an image that you want to display to your visitors. You can even preview it on the platform. Once you have finalized on the look and text displayed on the card, save it for later use.

(iv) Next, click on the ‘Beacon_Women’ beacon and choose ‘Card’ as the type of campaign that you plan to run. You can then go ahead and choose ‘Spring Collection’ from the drop-down menu.

This card will be sent to all the customers who are within the range of the Eddystone beacon that has been deployed at the Women’s Clothing section.

(v) Similarly add the ‘Spring Collection’ card to the ‘Beacon_Fittting Room’ beacon as well.

Step 3: Integrate this card with your digital advertising platform

Once you have set up the card, scroll further down the page or navigate to the section that lists out ‘Facebook Pixel ID’ and ‘Google Conversion ID’. Now, you may already know that there are multiple platforms out there that empower businesses to leverage the actions people take on their website across devices to inform more effective advertising campaigns. Two such popular platforms being Facebook Business and Google AdWords.

For this purpose of this campaign, we will be leveraging Facebook Pixel, a piece of code for your website that enables you to measure, optimize and build audiences for your ad campaigns. Once you have created an account for yourself on Facebook Pixel, you will be allotted a Facebook Pixel ID. This tool allows you to run highly effective Facebook advertising campaigns targeting specific audience segments based on their interactions with your website across devices.

Once you have typed in this ID, you can even go ahead and define an event that interacting with this card could signify from the user’s perspective. For example, say the user is directed to this card after she makes a purchase at the store, then the card could be defined under the event titled ‘Make purchase’. In this campaign, the user is directed to the card that you created earlier to just engage her with content on the new spring collection n-store. Hence, the card here could be defined under the event titled ‘View Content’.

(4) Create a custom conversion on Facebook to target a specific list of users

Next, you need to create a custom conversion on your Facebook Pixel dashboard. Since this given campaign is aimed at retargeting customers who visited your store and engaged with the beacon notification there, you can define a category titled ‘View content’. This way you will be able to retarget users who have triggered this event (i.e view content event) earlier in-store.

And we’re all set! A customer who has checked out the Women’s Clothing section or has tried a few outfits in the fitting room at your store will see the following screen on her device.

On engaging with this beacon notification, your business will now be provided deep insights on consumer behaviour in the real world with the same granularity and precision that was previously possible using online data.

Once the same user goes online on Facebook during the latter half of the day, she will be retargeted with ads based on the Facebook ad campaign that you just set up. For optimized conversion, these ads should ideally be on the same products that she displayed interest in at the store. In fact, it is this granularity and deterministic nature of the proximity data that makes it easy for businesses to gain an in-depth understanding of the what users have been doing inside stores, in specific departments and the kind of products they have interacted with.

You can also check out the Facebook Pixel dashboard to view entire customer lifecycle and the various points of interactions that they had with your brand over a period of time. This will help you measure the effectiveness of these retargeting campaigns by analyzing the correlation between the beacon notifications and Facebook ad views.

Do try this out and let me know your thoughts about this campaign. If there a specific campaign you would like to read about, I’ll be more than happy to share how you can get it done using Beaconstac. 

If you are looking to get started on a short pilot, head to our Beaconstac store page and invest in a set of beacons and our Premium subscription plan. You can have the campaigns up and running in less than 15 mins!