In order to increase their bottom line, business heads need data that can generate information about their customers, both one-time and recurring. Information such as likes & dislikes, time spent at a particular store/point, and engagement with other recreational zones among others when gathered can then be used for planning an effective proximity marketing strategy.
What is Proximity Marketing?
Proximity marketing, the new wave for large facilities help communicate with their customers in real-time while personalizing notifications right to their Smartphones. It is a system that uses technology to directly communicate with customers via adaptable devices. This is the modern way of targeting the visitors and the best part of it is that it engages them as well.
Isn’t that a great news for large facility marketers?
How Does Proximity Marketing technology Work?
First of all, we need to understand the fact that this feature can be enabled with an indoor positioning platform only.
Once integrated into a Smartphone app, proximity marketing works to fine-tune the approach of the facility to improve customer experience and engagement.
Go through these points to know how it works:
1. Firstly, beacon technology is deployed within the facility, within the range of the store.
2. Bluetooth-enabled Smartphones detect these signals and send the ID number attached to these signals to the cloud server.
3. Now with the help of this ID number, the server responds accordingly and sends notifications to the respective customer in the form of discounts, new products, feedback, or even greetings.
Hence, proximity marketing works best for both entities, the customers and the management. This survey has more details.
Proximity Marketing with Beacons – The Fifth ‘P’ for Business Marketers
A renowned marketing professor Edmund Jerome McCarthy from America in his book titled Basic Marketing proposed this concept of 4Ps of marketing in the 1960s. The 4Ps being Price, Promotion, Product, and Place, the basic marketing mix.
Today, with rapidly growing market trends and indecisive customers, the need for the fifth P has evolved and, therefore, Proximity Marketing. Visitors in large facilities are looking out for something that can notify them with exclusive offers even before they explore the store.
Here it is then, with proximity marketing with beacons, facility heads can target their customers based on their previous interactions, and make them avail discounts, made exclusively for them.
Proximity marketing with beacons becomes very important in order to seek the attention of the digitalized masses of the 21st century.
Proximity Marketing with Wi-Fi
Ever heard of Wi-Fi being used as a proximity solution? No right! However, with the widespread usage of Wi-Fi among the masses, marketers are now using it to send notifications. With the help of Wi-Fi hosting website, managements of the facilities will be able to send location-specific content to the visitors. Technically, Wi-Fi is not the best fit for proximity based marketing though because of the less accuracy it provides.
Proximity Marketing with RFID Based Systems
The most common usage of RFID tags is to track store products and inventories in warehouses. After its introduction in 2003, it received great recognition from the masses, however, it was ephemeral.
The biggest challenge for the large facility owners in deploying this technology in their facilities was it required various components. Tags, readers, apps, and much more such hardware is required to setup an RFID technology.
In short, it needs a substantial amount of investment upfront as it does not inherit compatibility with mobile or other platforms.
So, proximity marketing with RFID is a costly affair and business heads have too many pockets to feed.
The traditional strategy of sending push notifications and discount coupons to visitors is long gone. It is time now for personalized content delivery. The role of modern proximity marketing is to enhance and attract the customers’ store experience and in the process build genuine loyalty and gather feedback as well.
With proximity marketing in industries such as shopping malls, aquariums, museums, convention centers, and warehouses among many others. the scope for enhancing their visitor experience and increasing in the bottom line is much more certain.
Additional Benefits of Proximity Marketing Solutions
Apart from notifications, enhanced customer experience, and customer personalization, it can offer benefits such as:
• Customer Engagement – It is already an observed fact that more than 75% of customers have associated themselves with a Smartphone app to avail the benefits of proximity marketing while they are shopping.
• Customer Insight – To know what your customer is looking out for is impossible but with proximity marketing, the entire purchase map of your customers can be gathered at the end of the day and, henceforth, you can drive your consumers in their future visits.
• Hyper Customer Personalization – Based on the data you gather on each customer, the mall heads can hyper customize the selected customers with much higher discounts as a token of gratitude. This will certainly double the visitor engagement.
• Higher Conversion Rate – The fact that your interaction within the facility is recorded and customized, the consumers are by nature motivated to buy. Therefore the conversion rate of engaging will convert to buying.
• Mass Personalization – Multiple customers at once can be personalized with each one’s data scrutinized digitally to avoid any form of miscommunication or confusion.
The leading retailing businesses across the world like McDonald’s, IKEA, Amazon Go Store, etc. have already integrated proximity marketing within their businesses and have improved their bottom line.
Proximity Marketing Will Create a Win-Win Situation for Businesses
Looking forward to the near future, business heads will use this technology to collect critical visitor behavior data and allow them to engage them in a better way which eventually will result in a healthy RoI.
However, proximity marketing is not confined to beacon technology alone. Depending on the facility and the services it demands and their budget, marketers will have to pick the relevant one and break the gap between online and offline customers to reach out to larger visitor segments