“Proximity marketing is about establishing a timely, relevant and personal communication with your customers.”

That’s what we hope you experience when you use Beaconstac. On our path to keep up with the mission, we have been working on a lot of things in the last month – based on the incredibly useful feedback we received from you. Here are the most significant changes in the month of November ‘17 –

Update #1: Scheduling of campaigns

Undoubtedly, scheduling of beacon campaigns is one of the most requested features of 2017.  We couldn’t be any more excited to finally launch this feature to give an edge to your beacon campaigns.

Before we get into the details of how to schedule campaigns, I thought it would be worth sharing more around why we added this feature and how we think this will impact your marketing campaigns.

Why did we add the feature of scheduling campaigns?

Beaconstac wanted to solve a very specific problem – being able to seamlessly unbox a beacon, create campaigns and have it up and running in less than 15 mins. These small devices once installed start sending messages and multimedia instantly.

And this idea of simplicity is what helped us establish ourselves as the only beacon solution that works straight out-of-the-box.

But now proximity marketing and Beaconstac have evolved a lot and adding some more key features to the platform made sense. And we thought that pushing notifications on a specific day and time had a lot of use cases now in proximity marketing. Now that Beaconstac is expanding, we thought it was an important addition to the mix.

You might be working with a marketing campaign, but want to pause it for the weekend and push more relevant festive campaigns for the weekend. This is just one of the amazing use cases you have been telling us about!

How to Schedule campaigns?

1. Simply hit the “Schedule” tab on the left navigation bar

2. Create a new schedule by clicking on “+Create” on the top right corner. Give it a title so that it can be easily identified from a list of schedules. Select your timezone. Assign the days and the time interval for which you want to activate your campaign. Before saving the schedule, you need to select the kind of campaign it is – Markdown card / Form / Custom URL.

3. Navigate to the “Beacons” tab and scroll down to “Eddystone Campaigns”. You can now select the type of campaign as “Schedule” and select the schedule you just created.

Update #2: Improved analytics

When you log in to your Beaconstac platform, you will find something that has significantly changed on your dashboard – the representation of the analytics summary.

Why did we change the chart representation?

Based on our research on human behaviour and charting data. Here’s what we learnt –

To make business decisions and iterate on the campaigns, we need to visualize “transition in data” rather than just data. When data points are connected to each other in line charts, it’s easier for the human eye to understand the trend of change as opposed to the bar or column charts where each data point is separate.

With this learning we changed how you absorb analytics on Beaconstac – you can now immediately see dips and flows in the traffic in a specific date range. Not just that we have also added the option of comparing data for 2 different data ranges.

Update #3: Enhanced card creatives

1. Recommendations for images in the markdown cards

According to a study by IAB and comScore, rich media ads result in higher user interaction rates (79% higher) and a higher message recall rate (23% more people remember media-rich ads). We want your marketing campaigns to leave an impact, and that’s why added recommendations for the image size in our markdown cards.

2. YouTube embed in markdown cards

Adding an extra layer of interaction for the user is never a good practice. We saw a lot of our customers were using links to YouTube and Vimeo videos on their markdown cards. To give a better experience to your users, we enabled YouTube to be embedded in cards.

3. GIF support for markdown cards

A GIF never fails to add the extra bit of WOW factor and catch the attention of the users. Marketers especially prefer GIFs when they are designing social media campaigns or proximity ads. To empower your marketing campaigns, we added the GIF support for the markdown cards.

Merry Christmas folks!

Wrapping up

In the last one year, we have been all ears for your feedback and have built multiple new features to accelerate your proximity marketing campaigns.

Here are few of the updates and revamps with had in the last one year

1. Beaconstac’s Eddystone dashboard gets a refresh!
2. Improved Card Creatives & Advanced Analytics
3. Notifications Chart, Multiple Cards and how you can Upgrade to Eddy

We are working round the clock to get more product updates this December. Stay tuned!

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 Basic subscription plan. You can have the campaigns up and running in less than 15 mins!