www.toushay.com 613 . 271 . 8314

Beacon Marketing for Retail

A guide to launching and managing your Beacon marketing campaigns.

www.toushay.com 613 . 271 . 8314

Beacon-powered in-store mobile marketing offers

retailers and brands a valuable opportunity to engage

with shoppers at the precise moment and place they

are making a purchase decision. Being able to deliver

highly relevant content and offers to a shopper’s

smartphone based on his or her shopping activities

and in-aisle location provides an unprecedented ability

to engage shoppers and influence their purchasing

behaviors. But successfully implementing this new

capability requires a well thought out plan and careful

execution. This Guide was created to help marketers

design effective beacon marketing programs that

enhance the consumer shopping experience while also

driving measurable business results.

Beacon Marketing for RetailA guide to launching and managing your Beacon marketing campaigns.

3

1. Define Your Goals

Before launching a beacon marketing program or

taking that first step by deploying the first beacon, it is

important that marketers have a clearly defined set of

business goals and key metrics that they want to track.

In-store mobile marketing is powerful and can greatly

influence consumer behavior right at the decision

point in their path to purchase, but in order to drive

meaningful business results, marketers need to target

behaviors with specific goals in mind.

• Increase overall purchase rate

• Increase average basket size

• Increase department-specific traffic

• Increase category purchase rates

• Increase customer activation

• Introduce new products/categories

• Cross-sell products/services

• Measure footfall traffic

• Identify retail “hotspots”

• Drive repeat store traffic

• Increase mobile engagement

• Increase brand loyalty

• Enhance shopping experience & customer satisfaction

While the goals may vary from retailer to retailer here are some examples of common

goals that can be used to guide and measure beacon-marketing campaigns:

4

Specialty retailers with small

store footprints may only need

one or two beacons per store,

while larger multi-brand retailers

typically start with beacons in 3-5

different areas/departments.

2. Start Small - But Start Now

While the initial reaction is to scatter beacons over

every square foot of their retail space, retailers should

consider taking a more measured approach to beacon

deployment.

With beacons, more is not necessarily better. Too many

beacon-triggered events, offers or messages and you

run the risk of annoying customers and alienating

shoppers.

As a general rule, retailers should only deploy

beacons in areas of the store where a meaningful

digital experience would be valuable for shoppers.

For retailers who are new to the technology, it’s a

good idea to start with a small number of beacons in

each store in order to gain practical experience and

information that can be used to optimize larger-scale

deployments.

Deloitte Global Powers of Retailing 2014 Study

eCommerce represented only

5-15% of revenue for many big department

stores and specialty apparel

retailers.

5

3. Location, Location, Location –Where To Place Your Beacons

Retailers typically install beacons

on ceilings, above doorways or

at the back/underside of the

highest aisle display shelf. Before

installing beacons, you should

test the cellular reception in

the desired area to ensure that

shoppers will have reliable and

consistent mobile experiences.

Now that you’ve defined your business goals and

determined the number of beacons for initial

deployment, you need to decide where to place

the beacons within the stores. Common beacon

placements include store entrances (where you can

attract and entice customers to enter your location

with welcome messages, offers or prompts to visit

specific departments), checkout areas (to trigger

loyalty program usage), and major merchandising

areas within the store (where you can deliver product-

relevant content and offers).

Once you’ve decided on the best areas of the store

where you want beacons, it’s time to install the physical

devices. Consider placing beacons in such a way

that they are out of plain sight, beyond the reach of

shoppers and have an unobstructed broadcast path.

6

4. Put the Customer First

Consumer smartphones are inherently personal devices, and marketing to them carries potential

risks. While the delivery of highly relevant, location-specific mobile content has the ability to

create unheard of levels of shopper engagement, irresponsible or irrelevant beacon messaging can

be a source of dissatisfaction for shoppers.

77%

of smartphone users are willing to

share their location as long as they

receive enough value in return.

a) Be upfront and transparent

Beacon marketing requires the use of a smartphone’s

location. In order to ensure a positive experience for

consumers, marketers should develop clear opt-in

processes that allow users to control permission for

beacon-triggered messages. Be sure to maintain

transparency by clearly communicating the value they

can expect to receive by opting in. Give them a sneak

peek of the value they’ll receive from beacons, how the

triggered app relates to the shopping experience so

that the customer isn’t left questioning why that app is

engaging with them while they are in the store.ResearchNow

b) Be relevant.

Smartphones are inherently personal devices and

consumers have little tolerance for marketers who

invade their private space with unwanted messages

and interruptions. A shopper’s in-store location

provides incredibly valuable insight into a person’s

interests, but in order to create a truly positive in-store

mobile experience, marketers need to carefully

leverage the opportunity to deliver valuable, relevant

and timely content. Sending hair and makeup trends

to a male shopper who is only quickly passing

through the cosmetics department on his way to the

electronics department is a sure fire way to get your

app deleted from a shopper’s phone. With advanced

beacon marketing platform capabilities such as dwell

time triggers, marketers can fine-tune their message

targeting to ensure relevance.

7

• Will it help my customer make a buying decision?

• Will it save my customer time or money?

• Will it improve the overall shopping experience?

c) Create value for shoppers.

A study by ResearchNow found that 77 percent of

smartphone users would be willing to share their

location information as long as they received enough

value in return. A good rule of thumb is to create a

set of questions against which you can evaluate your

beacons marketing campaigns. If you can’t answer

“yes” to at least one of them, then you should rethink

your campaign.

d) Real-time Marketing

When designing beacon-triggered campaigns, keep

in mind that the consumer’s primary goal is shopping.

Marketing efforts should enhance that experience, not

detract from it. In-store mobile marketing campaigns

should take their cues from social engagement

platforms and focus on creating easily digestible

content and immediate value for shoppers. General

guidelines for this type of media include:

• One message per screen

• Visual design

• Limited text

• Large font size

• Limit content files to <300MB

8

While delivering special offers or highlighting existing

sales, provide clear value for shoppers, beacon-

triggered messages do not have to focus exclusively

on discounts. Sharing timely advice on style trends,

delivering buying tips or offering access to product

reviews are also ways to create value and enhance the

in-store shopping experience

If you are a retailer adding beacon-triggered

experiences to your own mobile app, you’ll want

to create awareness and educate shoppers on the

program. In addition to driving higher app engagement,

promoting in-store mobile experiences is a great way

to stimulate mobile app downloads for shoppers

who don’t yet have your app. Use in-store signage

and bag inserts to encourage app downloads and

updates. Exclusive offers can be used as an additional

incentive to encourage first-time use. And don’t forget

to encourage sales associates to promote the app at

checkout while they’re ringing up customers.

5. Leverage Existing Touch Points

In addition to in-store merchandising opportunities,

retailers should also tap into other existing customer

communication channels to promote app downloads

and in-store mobile usage. Your website, customer

emails and social media channels are all places where

you can let customers know about how your mobile

app is enhancing the in-store shopping experience.

In addition to all the external channels you should also

look to integrate other digital touch points within your

stores that can complement your beacon triggered

content and help to create a seamless experience.

For example, use existing digital signage screens to

promote your mobile app, coordinate beacon locations

with interactive kiosks to enhance the experience,

and integrate handheld devices used by your sales

9

• Continues to provide consumers the information they want, when and where they want it.

• Unifies the consumer experience from web to mobile to on-premises, taking advantage of digital media and applications as part of that.

• Creates greater balance in the seller/buyer dialog, including two-way interaction.

• Provides sellers with deeper, accurate information about their consumers in order to better personalize the relationship they offer.

associates so that they are well informed and able to

offer premium service to your customers. When all

of the digital touch points come together to create a

consistent and seamless shopping experience we call it

a system of engagement. Using a platform like Toushay

you can then manage your Path-to-Purchase marketing

campaigns across every device at every stage of your

customer’s journey.

6. Test, Measure and Learn

Marketers launching their first beacon marketing

campaign should focus on generating rapid learning.

Once initial performance benchmarks have been

established, campaign variations can be developed and

tested. In addition to offer, messaging frequency and

content testing, marketers should also begin planning

for more sophisticated and targeted campaigns based

on factors such as:

10

Contact us

When do we get started?

Now that you have all the basics covered to launch

your first beacon campaign, it’s time to get started.

By experimenting and optimizing in location

engagement in a way that is fast, measurable scalable

and repeatable you can get to know customer behavior

through a controlled, low risk process.

By taking the time to know you customers you can

develop stronger relationships by presenting them

with offers and products that they find valuable and

relevant.

Toushay is the perfect platform to perform agile

testing for in location pilot projects to quickly

determine engagement effectiveness through A/B and

multivariate testing and optimize the user experience

using real world data.

About Toushay

Toushay is a cloud service platform that allows forward thinking retailers to use networked in store touch points, like iBeacons, kiosks and mobile applications, to manage and measure the effectiveness of in store engagements.

It’s a way for retailers to influence customer purchase behaviors within their brick and mortar locations through real-time content delivery and management.

@toushay

toushay.com

linkedin.com

info@toushay.com

Request a demo of the Toushay platform