Last Updated: April 24, 2019
Marketers are adopting beacons at an exciting rate. While some of them have established what beacon strategies work best for them, some are still in the early stage of crafting a beacon marketing strategy. Irrespective of which stage you are in, the primary goal is to increase the click-through rate (CTR) and engagement of their beacon campaigns.
In this blog, we will talk about ways to increase the performance of your beacon campaigns. Also, we have recommendations on size, language, character limit etc based on our experience, research and statistics. These tips and recommendations are pretty universal, so no matter what your business is about, you can be sure they’ll boost the performance of your campaigns.
Click-through rate = Engagement with your campaigns
The click-through-rate is a percentage of how many successfully delivered campaigns were clicked at least once.
Click through rate = (Views / Notifications) x 100%
Since you have beacons deployed at various places, the dashboard displays the individual CTR for each place.
As with any other marketing/advertisement channel, the average click-through rate of beacon campaigns depend on various factors such as –
Big brands like Coca-Cola who run beacon campaigns on their own app have witnessed CTRs in the double digits. That’s undoubtedly impressive but not typical. Most SMBs running campaigns without an app, see a CTR of ~4% for their beacon campaigns, which is about 80 times the average CTR for a banner and online ad.
The CTR and engagement with the campaigns have a lot to do with the position of the beacon. A campaign notifying about an open house event right in front of the house is much more relevant than near a real estate office. This requires a lot of testing and it only gets better with every experiment.
Strategic places for beacon deployment
For first time deployments, here are few factors that you should keep in mind –
Notifications nudge the customers to click on your campaigns. However, it’s important that your customers do not see the truncated view of the notification. Although Nearby notifications allow 49 characters for the title and 149 characters for the description, it often truncates the message depending on the size of the mobile screen.
This means that customers with smaller screen devices might miss out the ending call-to-action or the best part of the offer. To ensure this doesn’t happen, we recommend you to keep to character limits suitable for the smallest screen sizes.
We figured out the best character limit combinations for different screens on an Android phone. Since the same notifications are sent across devices, it is best to create notifications keeping the smallest screen size in mind.
We recommend you to have titles which are 25 characters long and descriptions which are 35 characters long.
Bonus tip: Appealing part of the offer closer to the beginning of the notification has more impact on the customers. This takes care of two things –
Rich media campaigns creatively engage with users to generate high conversions. Engaging images, GIFs and videos capture customer attention.
IMAGES
When you consider that 65% of people are visual learners, 90% of information that comes to the brain is visual, and presentations with visual aides are 43% more persuasive, it makes sense to use content types which people have an innate psychological resonance with.
Based on research and reports from IAB, we recommend using images with dimensions – 300 x 250 pixels for markdown card.
VIDEOS
Videos require a substantial budget but offer a high level of user engagement. There are numerous types of videos that can enhance your business – how-to videos, testimonials, 3D tours etc.
Tip: People usually hold their phones in an upright position. So it comes naturally that a video should play in a vertical.
Our recommendations for the video
Video length: 15 – 30 secs
Video aspect ratio: 9:16
Advanced pixel size for smartphones: 1080 x 1920
Advanced pixel size for tablets: 768 x 1024
If you have a brand app integrated with beacon campaigns:
If you do not have a brand app,
Scheduling notifications for the perfect time could have a huge impact on your campaign. While the weekend is clearly preferred compared to the work week, that does shift slightly depending on the kind of campaign and the industry.
To get the time right, individual businesses have to observe their customers’ behaviour on different days and time. Targeting based on time only gets better with analysing CTRs for your campaigns.
Brands and businesses that run campaigns on their apps, should include elements of personalization to grab customer attention. Broadcasting campaigns with a customer’s purchase history, satisfaction score and previous orders makes the offer highly relevant and targeted in nature for them and hence receives more click-throughs.
According to Lytics marketing report, two third of the customers say that offers they receive via email, display ads, social networks and mobile devices are sometimes or rarely relevant to their interests.
This clearly explains the need for personalization and the effect it can have on your campaigns.
Listed below are few examples of how you could personalize your beacon campaigns in-store to get higher CTR –
CTA is the final instruction to your customers and this has to be really powerful. This is what drives customers to you or away from you. The copy of the CTA is the most important element of a CTA. It should be crisp and at the same time create a sense of urgency. However, the elements are equally important.
25 words you should use in your CTAs
Here are few recommendations for your campaign CTAs –
These are simple tips and recommendations that you can implement in almost no time at all. And if you do implement any of them, it’s really important that you monitor and measure the success of what you’ve done.
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!
I am fascinated by tech-driven marketing. Love to read & write about entrepreneurship and tech-driven business strategies for B2B and B2C companies. Have b(e)acon and eggs for breakfast and always up for doughnuts!
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This blog was originally published on March 9th, 2018 at 12:22 pm