How Beacons (iBeacon and Eddystone tech) can help generate revenue and improve customer engagement

Using Beacons as an innovative marketing and communications solution is very cool and all, but they’d be kind of pointless as a marketing tool if they didn’t make you help generate revenue or improve customer engagement. Fortunately they do.

The power in this tech to bring the bacon, to win the bread, to make money, money, money is outstanding. And brands are only just getting started with it. There’s further potential to unlock.

Here are several ways you can increase your profits by using Beacons.

Up-sell and cross-sell
This is the most obvious way beacons help to drive sales. While people are in-store, you can send them all kinds of content that encourages them to buy more.

Exclusive discounts or feature products or recipe ideas or outfit suggestions or wine recommendations or when-bought-with promotions or deal highlights or brand and product stories or all sorts of other things. These can all help customers justify further purchases while they are in-store and in the mood to buy.

Get more repeat custom
Customer loyalty is a valuable thing. That’s why so many companies invest ridiculous amounts in loyalty card schemes and the like. After all, if you can get all your customer to shop with you just once more per year, that’s a huge revenue boost.

Using timely delivered digital content, you can improve your customer’s experience. A better experience means customers are more likely to keep coming back to you.

All the ideas above, such as offering discounts and promotions, can do this.

You could also provide interesting and entertaining content that helps pass the time during long queues. E.g. theme parks can send ride-themed videos and info to entertain people and build tension for the ride while they wait in those 2 hour queues…. and don’t forget to use the beacons to quickly help share these on social media to their friends and family.

Also, practical content could help too. e.g. a restaurant could use beacons to let people call the waiter over with their phone. Or let them pay without having to wait around for the bill.

Furthermore, you can use digital content to actually incentivise and reward customers every time they come back. A personalised “welcome back” discount is a lovely gesture but more importantly, it may be the tipping point in the customer’s decision whether to go back to your store/venue/location or go to a competitor’s.

Keep people around
Another benefit of improving your in-venue experience is that people will want to stick around for longer. This can increase your profits simply because people will often spend more the longer they stay.

Someone who spends three hours in your bar is likely to spend way more, buying more drinks and possibly food, than the person who spends just an hour there before moving on.

Increase ROI across all your media spend
Of course, this tech can be integrated with your other promotional campaigns. Like retargeting and affiliate marketing, beacons can act as a direct conversion point for all your other media channels.

Your TV ads might encourage people to stop by your store and check out your products, but with some strategic content, you can give them that last push to actually make a sale.

Never close
Chances are, your retail staff aren’t around 24/7 to make you sales. But now your shop can be staffed even when it’s closed or on their lunch break.

By being able to deliver digital content to people as they walk past, you can take full advantage of all foot traffic and always be closing sales whatever the time or day.

You could even adjust your content for late night passers by, tailoring it to their current moods and mindsets to further help them engage with your brand.

Monetize your digital content
Got some super special content? You can use beacons as a simple way to start earning some extra revenue for it. Do this either by collecting the payment, say at your checkouts, and giving customers a code to unlock the content on their phones or by collecting payment through your iBeacon content itself.

Venues and attractions that offer souvenir photos can make good use of this to give people digital copies of their photographs direct to their phones (rather than on clunky and almost uselessly small USB sticks). Art galleries could let people pay to take home digital copies of their exhibited work. For a fee, restaurants could offer the recipes of the dishes that their patrons ate, or even a full, branded recipe book. There’s loads of possibilities.

Free press (potentially)
This tech is still new and exciting. Use it to do something cool and it’s not unlikely that the tech media will be wanting to write articles about you, increasing your audience reach and frequency for free.

More and more brands are starting to use iBeacon, but if you’re quick, you can still benefit from first-movers advantage in your industry.

Create more, reactionary promotions
Promotional events can be expensive to implement, particularly if you have many stores around the country (just think of the posters and labels that have to be produced, printed, sent out and put up, not to mention the till set up). That means that you’re probably limited with the number of promotional events you can have each year.

Well not anymore. With iBeacon, you could effortlessly have in-store events every day. You could even react to current affairs, at the same speed provided by the likes of social media, with in-store events, discounts and messages that encourage more visitors and sale – not forgetting you could use different content for different audiences (customers in Birmingham may prefer X) or A/ B testing.

So that’s how iBeacon solutions in general make you money and improve customer engagement. Unfortunately, they’re often pretty costly and slow to set up, so it might be a while before you see those returns.

Live Beacon, however, is the an iBeacon solution that any brand can set up easily, quickly and very cost effectively. By getting it up and running so fast, you can immediately start reaping all the rewards above.