The Potential Retailers See In Beacons — And Why They Need IT Solutions Providers To Help

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

It’s sometimes difficult to understand how the solutions you can provide can impact your clients’ day-to-day operations — and even the success of their businesses overall. Beacon technology is one of the latest trends coursing through retail as a means of connecting with and engaging customers.

“And it is not just hype,” Luca Criscuolo, head of mobile and Web product at Retale, a mobile destination application for shoppers, writes in his column for Luxury Daily.

He cites research that expects an estimated 3.5 million beacons will be in active use by 2018, with retailers projected to invest more than $2.5 billion on Internet of Things (IoT) technology.

A Beaconstac infographic titled Why Beacons Are The Future Of Customer Engagement shows half of the top 100 retailers in the U.S. were testing beacons in 2014 and projects by 2019, there will be 79 percent adoption.

The infographic also explains the interest in beacons: Shoppers who receive a beacon notification are 6.4 times more likely to keep a store app on their smartphones, in-store app use is 16.5 times greater for shoppers who have received a beacon message, and well-timed in-store messages can lead to a 20x increase in purchase intent. Simply put, beacons provide a way for merchants to engage shoppers in a way that gets results.

In his Retale column, however, Criscuolo states, “The technology is still limited and may prove difficult to scale.”

He list some challenges that you can help your merchant clients overcome with your technical expertise:

• Bluetooth Vs. Battery Life. Bluetooth has an impact on battery life. He points out, a 2014 AisleLabs study found than an iPhone 5S connected to a single beacon uses almost 6 percent of a battery’s total power in one hour.
• The Right Infrastructure Is A Must. Retailers that adopt beacon technology must decide whether to build their own Bluetooth infrastructure or join an existing one. Creating their own infrastructure allows retailers to have direct access to their own data — selecting the right hardware, installation and setup, and monitoring and maintaining the network could mean they need to rely on a solutions provider to provide the labor and resources for the task. Joining an existing network, although simpler at the outset, could result in less reliable data and an incomplete picture of customer behavior.
• Add Geofencing. As Criscuolo explains, “Beacons offer precision, while geofences can give context around engagement. The expansion of geofencing data to detect store visits could validate it as a secret weapon to generate an extraordinarily useful image of the cross-channel customer journey.”
• Add Other Insights. Retailers need insights from data derived online, in-store, via mobile devices, and through ad campaigns as well as through beacons. Criscuolo says to watch for retailers investing in data science and emerging technologies to try to get a complete picture from multiple data sources.