How Samsung’s CloseBy Will Hasten Beacon Adoption Across the World

Beacons entered the marketing landscape a few years ago, with splashy headlines touting large nation-wide deployments and the opportunities that it provided brands with when it came to engaging their customers at the right time and place. In spite of these humongous opportunities, the pace of beacon adoption across verticals in the proximity marketing industry was slower than expected. One of the primary reasons behind this was the need for businesses to have an app in place in order to interact with beacons.  

While the launch of Eddystone by Google, solved this critical problem to a great extent, one of the limitations that most businesses continued to face was that Eddystone limited their reach to users who employed the Google Chrome browser. In fact, two of the most frequent questions that we are faced with in our client conversations are:

(i) Does Eddystone support Safari browser?

(ii) How can Eddystone help businesses in areas where Google is banned?

Turns out Samsung’s CloseBy might just be the answer to all those questions. For those of you who are new to it – CloseBy is a service that brings the Physical Web to Samsung Internet – the default browser on all Samsung devices.

We at Beaconstac pride ourselves on providing our customers with the best of tools to make the most of the proximity marketing opportunity. We are more than excited to announce that your most trusted beacon platform, Beaconstac now supports Samsung’s CloseBy. And we can’t wait to see how businesses across various verticals will put their innovative ideas at customer engagement to practice using our platform.   

In this blog, we will discuss in detail about how Samsung’s CloseBy can help businesses widen their reach and engage users in areas that don’t support the Google Chrome browser.

But first things first.

What is CloseBy?

Late last year, Samsung announced an early preview of CloseBy, a service that supports Physical Web URL detection on Samsung Internet browser. It allows users to interact with beacons without having to download any separate apps by activating an extension directly on their browser. This will enable delivery of notifications on the user’s Samsung device when he/she are in the proximity of an Eddystone beacon. Upon tapping on any of these notifications, the user will then be taken to the corresponding webpage within the Samsung Internet browser.

How do you set up a Samsung device to receive CloseBy notifications?

Here’s what a user needs to follow in order to receive CloseBy notifications on his/her Samsung device:

(i) Enable Bluetooth

(ii) Enable Location

(iii) Go to the Extensions menu and enable ‘CloseBy’.

Once all of this is done, the user will receive CloseBy notifications when he/she walks by an Eddystone beacon.

What does a CloseBy notification look like?

When the user is near an Eddystone beacon, he/she will receive a notification saying ‘CloseBy found new content’. Once he/she clicks on that notification, he/she will be able to view the entire list of URLs that are being transmitted.

Each of these URLs is accompanied by some metadata that is attached to this URL (currently, the Meta: Title tag) just like it appears in Google search results. Clicking on any URL of choice will direct the user to the corresponding website on the Samsung Internet app.

How will Samsung’s CloseBy help businesses widen their reach?

(1) Samsung devices continue to dominate the global smartphone market

According to a recent report by IDC, with a total 79.2 million shipments in Q1 2017, Samsung’s market share jumped to 22.8%, while Apple, with a total of 51.6 million shipments saw its market share sink to 14.9%.

Samsung continues to lead smartphone sales in other leading mobile markets such as India. For example, at 22% of the market, Samsung accounted for a major portion of smartphone sales in India in Q4 2016, according to a recent report from an analyst firm Canalys.  

(2) Samsung Internet browser is there by default on most devices

With a little over 500 million active users globally, Samsung Internet definitely opens doors to a huge untapped audience. Especially in countries such as China, where Google is banned. What’s more? Samsung Internet comes pre-installed as a default browser on most Samsung devices, thus allowing businesses to widen their reach without having to lure their users to download the Samsung Internet app.  

Thus, businesses can now leverage CloseBy to reach out to their targeted audience at areas which were earlier off the limits due to the banning of Google Chrome in those countries. CloseBy empowers them to reach out to their users at the right time, at the right place via Samsung Internet browser.

Already excited about CloseBy? Here’s more good news

Is your business looking to tap into proximity marketing in markets where Google is banned? Does leveraging CloseBy to engage with your audience at the right time and place excite you? Well, you have come to the right place for Beaconstac now supports Samsung’s CloseBy. Having been in the proximity marketing space since the early days, Beaconstac couldn’t wait to jump on the opportunity and offer our customers the golden chance of widening their reach.

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!

• Author Details

Author Details

Devika Girish

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