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.

What is CTR (Click-through rate) of beacon campaigns? How is it calculated?

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.

Factors affecting the CTR (engagement) of beacon campaigns?

As with any other marketing/advertisement channel, the average click-through rate of beacon campaigns depend on various factors such as –

1. The industry where the campaign is implemented (apparel store/ real estate/ travel and hospitality etc)
2. The awareness of beacons in your geography
3. The location at which the beacon is deployed – The footfalls passing the beacon and the average time a user spends in the proximity of the beacon.
   A lobby where the dwell time is higher than 10mins is bound to have a better CTR compared to a busy marketplace where people are quickly moving in and out of the beacon proximity.
4. Is the beacon campaign running on a brand app or without an app?
5. What is the range of the beacon broadcast?
6. The use case you are looking to achieve with beacons (send an offer/ push business cards/ inform about a new product/ ask for feedback etc)
   A notification about an offer will naturally have a higher CTR compared to a notification requesting users to fill a survey (or feedback).

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.

How to get a higher CTR (engagement) on beacon campaigns?

1. Beacon deployment strategy

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

1. Target the choke points, i.e., the entry and exit points. Broadcast your best offers at these locations as every customer will cross these points.
2. Figure out the busiest area of your business. Deploy beacons in sections that attract more visitors.
3. Target high wait time areas. Areas where users have to wait, for eg, waiting lobby in hotels, outside doctor’s chamber, inside real estate offices, traffic intersections, car mechanic waiting-areas, queues in retail stores etc.

For first time deployments, here are few factors that you should keep in mind –

1. Take note of the material that the walls at the deployment space are made of. This is highly critical given that any partitions or walls made of concrete or metal are nearly opaque to Bluetooth.
2. Look out for objects such as sculptures, fountains etc., that lie in the range of a beacon, as they might block beacon signals, resulting in a bad proximity experience.
3. Have a good idea of how crowded the deployment space could get, as even huge crowds can end up blocking beacon signals from reaching the users’ smartphones.
4. Place beacons above the crowd level (approximately about 4 ft to 7 ft above the ground) for maximum reach. Installing beacons on ceilings also work well.

2. Use the notification character limit effectively

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 –

1. The customer does not miss out on the offer because of the mobile screen size,
2. User experience research shows that most people scan as few as the first two words of a headline.

3. Use engaging images and inline videos

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

1. Video length: 15 – 30 secs

2. Video aspect ratio: 9:16

3. Advanced pixel size for smartphones: 1080 x 1920

4. Advanced pixel size for tablets: 768 x 1024

4. Encourage users to keep their Bluetooth switched ON

If you have a brand app integrated with beacon campaigns:

1. Educate users about the benefits of having their Bluetooth switched on, during the app onboarding
2. Educate users that turning Bluetooth ON won’t impact the battery life of their device

If you do not have a brand app,

1. Put up posters that educate users on how to go about setting up their phone to receive beacon notifications
2. Put up stickers around the store informing users that your store is a “beacon zone”
3. Inform users about the benefits of having Bluetooth on while shopping via the Facebook Page
4. Put up a banner ad on the free Wi-Fi login page

5. Get the campaign timing right

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.

6. Personalize 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 –

1. Send offers on products that complement their previous purchases (for eg, if Laura bought a white shirt during her previous visit to your store, offer her a discount on formal pants this visit)
2. Send notifications about trying the product added to the cart
3. Notify them about product availability based on their wishlists

7. Have a powerful call-to-action

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 –

1. CTA colour:
   The CTA colour should be the same as your brand colour. Users need to be guided by a special colour code through the whole path – starting from discovering your brand to, maybe engaging on Facebook, to the call to action to enter the store, purchase the product, etc. All those calls to action should be presented in the same style and/or colour so that users immediately know how to continue their journey.
2. CTA Position:
   It’s best to have a CTA that is visible right on the first fold of your markdown card. If you have a long markdown card, it makes sense to have a CTA at the end as well, but a CTA on the first fold is highly recommended.
3. CTA Size:
   When ‘tap’ is the primary input method for your mobile campaigns (which is true for most campaigns), Android’s Material Design principles recommend that touch targets should be at least 48 x 48dp. This is to ensure balanced usability and visibility. Markdown cards on Beaconstac have a default dimension that fits the standard.

Conclusion

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