Home Improvement
A customer enters a home improvement store and receives a welcome message on his smartphone. The message asks if he needs help shopping today. He taps 'not now' and heads to the washer/dryer section. His phone interacts with beacons and detects that he's been dwelling in the section for 15 minutes. The phone also detects that he's launched Yelp and Consumer Reports mobile apps.
Armed with this circumstantial knowledge, the store sends a price matching notification to his device, offers free delivery on washer/dryer combos, and asks if he needs assistance from a home appliance expert. The customer taps 'yes,' gets the details he needs, and decides to make his purchase in store that day.
In this example, the customer isn't just offered a discount, he's offered customer service at the right moment, from the right person, and reminded of the advantage of taking home what he wanted on the same day.
Even without any notifications sent to the device, these contextual insights of dwell time and app usage would help to identify showrooming behavior, allowing stores to plan better staff coverage on the floor.
Use Mobile DNA to Build Better Relationships with Customers
Use Mobile DNA to Build Better Relationships with Customers
As the competition to capture consumer attention on mobile devices grows, marketers must know their customers inside and out, in order to effectively engage with them. To do this, mobile cannot be treated as simply a channel, but as a relationship and an ongoing, ever-changing one at that.
If you're always talking and never listening, observing and remembering what people like, what they do, and where they go, you won't keep relationships very long. Given this, loyalty apps need to be smarter - they need to observe more than location, and they need to combine a series of events over time to understand consumer context, preferences and intent, in order to open the door to real engagement.
Relevance is key as each individual and their device are personal. Each individual has a unique way of wanting to relate to and interact with brands and retailers. If location is the only criteria triggering an offer, brands run the risk of annoying consumers much like the guy handing out lewd postcards on the Vegas strip. Just because you walk by doesn't mean you're interested.
Wireless industry leader Smith Micro asserts that retailers must ask themselves how each individual consumer wishes to interact with them via their mobile device. Once brands evaluate preferences, circumstances, patterns and history over time, they begin to map their customers' unique mobile DNA and build a genuine, mutually beneficial relationship.
The following are hypothetical scenarios that model ideal mobile marketing instances that successfully personalize their offerings and take a positive first step at mapping their customers' personal mobile DNA.
