With the rise of mobile applications, the use of beacon technology is also becoming more and more widespread. Beacons are small, impressive devices with a huge potential to transform the business world and how stores interact with their visitors. If you are planning to supplement your business with a mobile application, beacons can take this endeavor a step further and help your company grow.
What is Beacon Technology?
Beacons are compact transmitters that use Bluetooth to connect to nearby devices. The typical range of beacon technology is 300 feet (about 90 meters), which makes them suitable for usage in stores. Modern beacons typically react to specific applications installed on the smartphones of people who pass by. This way, these transmitters can detect customers with the store’s application and connect to their devices, sending relevant information.
The signal broadcasted by each beacon can differ by the functions that it has to trigger. For instance, beacons can send push-notifications to buyers’ phones at specific aisles, alerting them of sales and product offers. Beacons can also be used to trigger the location finding services through the store’s application, providing companies with useful statistics and data to analyze.
How Do Beacons Work?
Beacons use a simple structure consisting of a power source, a CPU, and a transmitter. They can also have additional functionality, such as motion and heat sensors, accelerometers, light sensors, and other add-ons. Beacons are activated when a device with a particular application emerges in their range of action.
Since beacons rely on Bluetooth, they can provide a much more precise position of each phone inside a building than Wi-Fi or GPS services do. Also, since the transmission channel only goes one way, users don’t need to spend battery power to pair their devices with the transmitter.
How Can Beacons Help Your Business?
Beacons can greatly enhance businesses in multiple ways. This technology can be used for analytics and communication with customers alike, ensuring the best user experience and increased profits.
Enhanced Marketing
One of the primary usages of beacon technology is utilizing it to improve the existing marketing strategies and get insights into the best approaches for future campaigns. Beacons are incredibly powerful in proximity marketing. For instance, these transmitters can send alerts to your customers’ phones when your store is nearby. Beacons are also incredibly useful inside shops, where they can send notifications and alert visitors about discounts, promotions, and product recommendations based on each visitor’s location.
The precision in determining where a phone with the store’s application is located enables marketers to gather more valuable data on their customers’ behaviors and shopping practices. For instance, beacons can show how much time a person spends at a certain aisle or looking at a particular item. Analysts can use this data to determine how successful their company’s strategies and ads are and refine them.
When the beacon technology is combined with software for analytics, it can grant insights into customers’ offline behaviors and how they correlate with purchases. For instance, a company can use beacons to track whether a person decided to visit a store after seeing a particular advertisement. This way, beacons can also help optimize the out-of-store side of marketing. If you are not proficient in mobile development, you’d better refer to a seasoned software development company for assistance. To learn more, go to https://litslink.com/services/app-development and discover the range of mobile development services.
Improved Customer Experience
Beacons installed inside shops, airports, and hospitals can help people navigate. Combined with augmented reality, this technology can guide people to the required products and locations. In museums, beacons can enhance audio and virtual tours, showing each person personalized routes and information depending on their location.
In shops, beacons can enable purchases without the check-out procedure. Amazon stores serve a great example of how wide the applications of this technology are. To enter the store, visitors need to have a specific app installed on their phones. Then they proceed with selecting items, which are automatically added to their virtual cart. The person can walk out of the store as soon as they finish shopping, and the bill will be sent to their Amazon account.
Beacons Help with Logistics
Beacons can also affect how companies function beyond the interaction with their customers. When beacons are installed in warehouses and stores, they can be used for indoor navigation. Managers and delivery employees can use beacons to easily track where particular products are at any time. The technology also helps keep consistent logs of deliveries and extract information about shipments from previous days or weeks.
Beacons can also be used for tracking people. In healthcare, this technology can help determine where particular patients and medical staff are at any given point. In a standard office setting, beacons can send signals to employees during emergencies, alerting them of danger and directing them to safety, developing individual routes depending on each worker’s location.
Beacons technology is incredibly suitable for the discussed purposes not only because it is more accurate but because it’s also easily installed and managed. Beacons have lower maintenance costs and extended battery life, which improves their reliability.
warehouse digital tracking -DepositPhotos
