How is iBeacon Technology Flourishing Success of Retail Industry?

Benefits of Having iBeacon and its Future in Retail Industry

Among the early adopters of iBeacon technology, there is one sector which stands out- retailers. The iBeacons and content awareness platforms are on the lips of a lot of decisions makers in retail these days.

Since the invention of iBeacon in 2013, it has created a huge buzz in the market. With its adoption in, along with retail stores, businesses can target potential customers by utilizing it in malls, restaurants, museum, events, international conferences, and more. In fact, many mobile app development companies think that incorporating iBeacon will play a vital role in bridging the gap between online and offline retail stores thus improve the business sales and profits.

How Does iBeacons Work?

Beacons are small, inexpensive devices based on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) wireless technology that helps provide more precise location information with greater accuracy compared to GPS, NFC, and Wi-Fi. Generally, these devices help in transmitting small amounts of data using the BLE technology within the range of 50 meters. Beacons are different from other location-based services in that they are entirely a one-way transmitter and demand a particular app to be downloaded on the user’s phone to receive the transmissions. Precisely, “iBeacons” which you have probably heard of the most are Apple’s standardization of the beacon technology, and the most widely used in today’s market.

Advantages of iBeacon in Retail Industry

iBeacon holds a lot of promise for the retail industry by presenting a more customized approach to in-store shopping. Many ecommerce development firms think that personalizing shopping experiences begins at the point-of-sale through integrating loyalty programs, revolutionary payment methods like Apple Pay or Bitcoin and other emerging technologies and Beacon is not an exception for this. So here are some notable benefits of iBeacon in the retail industry.

1. Effective Advertising Tool

If you run a retail business, then utilizing iBeacon technology can greatly help in attracting the attention of many customers. It can serve your advertising messages straight to the user as soon as the user’s device comes within a beacon’s proximity within your store. These personal, tailored messages can not only assist in increasing up sell but also serve as a medium to improve the customer experience. In addition, Beacons, as well as loyalty apps, can be utilized together to offer customers a wide variety of location-based actions. Beacons also troubleshoot the intuitive physical limitations of brick and mortar stores by bundling extra product and services, resulting in expanding the potential for more purchases.

2. More Focus on the Personalization Factor

It has been largely observed that Beacon pays more attention to the personalization factor. This is certainly an important thing to boost your brand. This includes aspects such as sending discount coupons to product recommendations. It is like suggesting the customers buy a product based on their purchase history. The Beacon can also act as a salesperson for the consumer and assist them to find an appropriate product. But make sure that the messages you send via Beacons do not disturb the customers else it appears as a spam.

3. Provides Insightful Data

When it comes to evaluating customer behavior, online stores have had a notable advantage over brick and mortar stores due to their ability to utilize the web and mobile analytics. Now hopefully, with Beacons, retailers can better determine the behaviors of their customers within their physical stores. Beacon technologies allow a retail chain to set variables for analyzing consumer behavior and create a data inventory. For example, retailers can assess at what time and day in-store shoppers are most likely to download a particular coupon.

While large scale companies generally require Big Data to make particular decisions, small and medium size companies can most certainly make use of the Beacon technology for understanding users’ behavior patterns. That being said, even larger corporations can glean unique insights as well.

4. Boost Application Engagement and Retention

With online shopping and consumer mobile device increased usage, Beacons can act as the useful channel between the physical and digital retail space. Due to the fact that Beacons work through mobile apps, there is great future for mobile app development sectors to increase their user engagement and retention rates. By leveraging the Beacons, apps can establish themselves as an important tool for shoppers. Despite this awesome statistic, retailers should not be unconcerned about the user experience of their application. The positive potentials can be just as great as the negatives if their UX is not thoroughly tested and maximized.

5. Affordable and Easy to Adopt

Though it’s a wireless technology, it is pretty much affordable to install. For example, a set of three to four transmitter and a CMS, on average cost around $100. Moreover, setting up iBeacon is also very easy and contains UUID (Universally Unique Identifier).

Panacea Infotech has already started exploring more about iBeacon app development. If you want more information about iBeacon or want to develop an app, be sure to contact us to get in touch with our expert application developers.