Almost five years back, hundreds of websites related to technology had been overwhelmed by titles such as why beacons are the future of customer engagement. In the event of you being missed, the beacons are small, wireless battery-powered devices which send Bluetooth signals to the nearby smartphones. We finally found the secret sauce for the proximity marketing, thought marketers of retail. The proximity of marketing means location-based marketing efforts that enable companies to communicate hyper-localized messages without employing staff personally.
The tide switched, however. Unfortunately, beacon technology had severe constraints. According to the statement of Alex Porter, "the beacon hype cycle has declined, and the distributors have made little profit from heavy investments." In short, beacons are dead entirely, and the reason is that most of the companies have either struggled with the deployment of technology as well as the use of information produced from it or understand how it can benefit their company. Does it mean the book has closed on proximity marketing for retail? Obviously not!
It is set for achievement with the development of deep learning and face recognition technology. There are three reasons why marketing programs in proximity fail and how you can achieve success for your local marketing now and in the future.
More than five years after the use of beacons, existing technologies for the marketing of proximity just don't go the wrong way. Boston Retail Partners have indicated that 12-14% of retailers are able to identify their customers when they go into a store, with another 8-10% at checkout. By contrast, more than 55% of distributors recognize their customers when it comes to buying online.
One of the main factors is that beacon technology requires that customers turn on Bluetooth. Beacon programs also often lack the correct application to be downloaded and activated by customers. It is no surprise if beacons are still transforming customer experience in-store - despite initial optimism.
The study shows that 20-25% of distributors believe that beacons are more likely to lead to sales in shops. In reality, beacon programs regularly do not provide customers with the value needed. It would be wildly understated to say that customers today are over-saturated with marketing. As a consequence, customers become more capable of tuning marketing, except for tangible value. The commitment of proximity marketing is capable of providing not only hyper-personalized messages but value too.
Consumers often exchange their phones - most probably every 2-3 years, according to studies. They change their MAC address too when switching phones. When this occurs, distributors immediately lose insight into the historical behavior of that individual. That introduces issues with application-based proximity marketing programs. And if people change phones, apps they don't use are simply not likely to maintain.
Although historical constraints have been established - but it is not just evolving. On the question of the future, specific sources indicated that retailers are going to use neural networks and learning devices to connect more. To generate experiential Shopping Destinations for customers, analysts will use customer traffic and behavior information.
The help of AI-enabled face recognition will allow retailers to acknowledge instantaneously when people enter a shop. As customers frequently modify their phones - but their faces are unchanged. Thus, it will enable distributors/retailers to collect information from behavior without the use of lighting technology.
Facial recognition can also help to eliminate friction throughout the purchasing process via seamless face-to-face payment, checking the age and participating in loyalty programs. We predict that face recognition will be the cornerstone of not only effective proximity marketing but SMS marketing system as well, today and beyond.