Have you ever been to an all-you-can-eat buffet? Giant appetizer platters, vats of soup, an endless selection of meats and veggies and desserts…it’s tempting to load your plate up with items that don’t even sound that appetizing. “It’s right in front of me—why not?” is the prevailing mentality (at least for gluttons like me). Of course, by the time the meal is over, you might as well roll me out of there. I will have eaten too much—without even enjoying a lot of it.

Right now retailers are at their own all-you-can-eat buffet of sorts. They have more options to engage customers than ever before. They have an array of technology tools they hope to use to nail marketing personalization once and for all, driving conversions and setting them apart from their competitors. There’s the standard fare, of course (email marketing, direct mail, PPC, etc.), and a few new gourmet options as well (native app push notifications and SMS alerts, geo-targeting, etc.). And retailers are pigging out.

They’re trying everything on the menu to deliver targeted offers to consumers, hoping to catch them at the right moment with the right message to make them to open their wallets. They’re sampling everything in the buffet…and leaving with nothing to show for it. In fact, over 60% of retailers say they expect ZERO ROI from so-called personalized messages they’ll be sending this holiday season. Talk about empty calories!

If the majority of retailers have no confidence in the return they’ll get on one-to-one mobile push marketing, we’ve got some work to do as an industry. Fortunately, through their loyalty programs, many retailers have access to the detailed shopper data that can make personalized marketing personalization effective. Add that to the data from consumers using the retailers’ branded mobile apps, and they have what they need to paint a pretty complete picture of their customers.

So what should retailers be doing with that data? Let’s start with the basics.

Bad Mobile Marketing Personalization: What Not to Do

A personalized offer can surprise and delight a customer (“Wow, this brand really gets me!”), or it can completely freak a customer out. Avoid creepy “I know what you did last summer” personalization.

Example: Customer has purchased two bottles of wine every night for the past three nights.

Not cute.

Also, if you’re going to use one-to-one marketing, make sure it’s actually personalized—not obviously programmed. Consumers catch on when they receive marketing messages from brands at the same time every day or week, and they learn to tune them out.

Example: No data collected.

This offer may as well say “Click here for something boring.”

Good Mobile Marketing Personalization

Good personalization leverages user data and context to deliver messages and offers that benefit users in some way—educating them, informing them, giving them discounts and promotions, or simply entertaining them. Segmenting app users and personalizing content according to the specific characteristics of each segment is a powerful way to keep users engaged.

When you layer this segmentation with location targeting capabilities, you’ve got the magic sauce. One location targeting tool is the geo-fence—a virtual GPS boundary used by marketers and advertisers to trigger campaigns and measure activity. To put it very simply, when someone with your brand’s app on their phone crosses through a geo-fence you have drawn around your store location (for example), it might trigger a message or promotion. Here are some examples of the types of high-converting mobile marketing messages you could deliver:

Example: Getting Creative with Geo-Fences
Data trigger: User has crossed through a pre-established geo-fence…

In-the-moment, contextually triggered marketing outreach like this just feels more relevant to the user—because it is—and it may even be welcome. (After all, who doesn’t love turtlenecks?)

Download our eBook, Capitalize on Context: The Savvy Retailer’s Guide to Location Marketing, to learn more about how mobile technologies help you understand and predict consumer context behavior.

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Measuring the Effectiveness of Personalization

Some users are always going to be creeped out by personalized marketing and will resist the urge to share data with you in exchange for a more tailored marketing experience. That’s ok. You’re marketing to the users who do want personalization, and the only way to figure out what works is to test it.

An important indicator of good personalization is the number of users who re-engage with your app after receiving personalized communication from you. Whether your outreach is via push notification, email or something else, make sure you have a clear and succinct call to action that draws them back into your app. Tracking how many users take that call to action will validate that your messages were user-centric and not generic or irrelevant.

Tailoring push notifications and other marketing messages to your app users is not only about personalized content—it’s about the right context, too. Analytics are your best weapon for defining the best time, place and message to engage your app users. Keep in mind that the right context will vary from app to app, and will ultimately be decided by the users anyway.

The moral of the story: if you don’t want to end up among the 60% of marketers who expect zero ROI from their mobile marketing, don’t pig out at the all-you-can-eat mobile marketing buffet. A carefully planned, data-backed personalization strategy is your best bet for recouping that marketing investment—and then some!

Want to take the guesswork out of calculating ROI? Use our free Marketing Automation ROI Campaign Calculator to find out how much automation can save your team.

Take Me To The ROI Calculator

The post “Click Here for Something Boring”: When Marketing Personalization Falls Flat appeared first on Phunware.

Amazon’s forays into brick-and-mortar stores are all over the news lately, with many analysts predicting doom and gloom for traditional retailers across the country. While retail brands are wise to be concerned, we’re here to point out that this turning point actually represents a big opportunity.

By embracing mobile in a whole new way, traditional retailers can expand their business models and change the game on Amazon. Mobile’s unique location technologies can turn local brick-and-mortars into hyper-personalized and highly nimble distribution centers for customers’ online orders. With the right mobile solutions, local stores can deliver faster and better than Amazon—and customers will reward them for it.

Mobile Can Turn Local Stores into Faster and Better Distribution Centers

We’re all accustomed to using location-based services for mapping and navigation. Warehouses and large distribution centers commonly use real-time location systems to keep track of inventory. Mobile gives retailers the power to combine navigation with the ability to find and track individual pieces of merchandise—within the footprint of a local store—and puts it all right in an associate’s pocket. As you’ll see, this enables local stores to deliver for local customers, faster and better.

What you need is an associate-facing mobile app with the following features:

• Barcode scanning that integrates with your inventory system
• Mapping and wayfinding with indoor blue dot navigation

This mobile app would interact with an in-store Wi-Fi network or beacon system to locate products and streamline operations, so the store can put products in customers’ hands as fast as possible.

DOWNLOAD THE RETAIL STRATEGY KIT

Use Case: BOPUS (Buy Online, Pick Up at Store)

Shopper Jane purchases an item online that is available at her local SportzStuff store. She decides to pick it up on her way to work, rather than wait for delivery. Associate Bob uses the associate app to locate the item, then navigate the quickest route to collect the item and return to the stockroom for packaging. When Jane arrives at the store 15 minutes later, everything’s ready for her—that’s faster than Amazon.

What’s more, if the retailer’s app also has a customer-facing side, Associate Bob can receive an alert the moment Jane approaches store (mall, parking lot, etc.). That alert enables Bob to greet Jane by name at the door or even curbside, so he can present Jane’s purchase to her personally.

Not only is this approach faster, it also provides a more satisfying customer experience. Shopper Jane got exactly what she wanted with VIP treatment and little to no hassle, the same day she wanted it. If she wanted to try on the item in-store for size, she could do so quickly and make any necessary return or exchange conveniently—instead of having to find and schlep to UPS or an Amazon vault. Plus, stopping by the store gives Jane a chance to make an impulse buy or two.

Use Case: BOSFS (Buy Online, Ship from Store)

Shopper Latrelle also purchases an item online from SportzStuff. It turns out that item is available at the store just across town, so Associate Jeff uses the store’s app on his phone to locate the item in the right color and size, then navigate by the fastest possible route to collect the item and return to the stockroom for packaging and shipping. Because Jeff got the product out as fast as possible—and it was sent locally instead of from a regional distribution center—SportzStuff can beat Amazon again.

Use the Advantage You Already Have: Proximity

Think about it: As Amazon rolls out its brick-and-mortar strategy, it will have to procure space, build out, stock and staff stores across the country. Thousands of retailers already have those physical stores, close to their customers. Unlocking their potential with a mobile app can take as little as a few weeks—and Amazon can’t hope to beat that.

Mobile has so much to offer retailers. Want to learn more about leveraging a mobile app to improve the customer experience and drive sales? Download our Retailer’s Mobile Strategy Kit. And if you’d like to talk about challenging Amazon by expanding your business model, contact retail@127.0.0.1.

WATCH THE ON-DEMAND WEBINAR

The post How Retailers Can Use Mobile to Out-Deliver Amazon appeared first on Phunware.

But AR is just one interesting technology. Shopping isn’t the only use case for mobile retailer tech. And a smart mobile strategy isn’t purely about the app. So what is it about then?

Smart mobile strategy is goal-oriented.

If you start by selecting your favorite shiny mobile use case, you’re putting the cart before the horse. Instead, you must start with your business objective in mind. For example, if you want to improve the shopper experience, there are multiple mobile use cases that can enable you to do so—and some of them are actually driven by mobile capabilities built to empower store associate’s, not the shopper’s.

How can both customer- and associate-facing apps enhance the shopper experience? Download our on-demand webinar, “Redefining Retail: Surprising Mobile Use Cases Keeping Retailers Competitive” to find out.

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Smart mobile strategy is platform-based and user-agnostic.

When it comes to mobile retailer tech, Software-as-a-Service mobile platforms provide strong, scalable backbone that is flexible enough to support a wide range of use cases for many different kinds of users, from customers to store employees to warehouse teams and even back-office staff. The app experience and capabilities may be different for different users—obviously, shoppers aren’t going to have the same mobile needs as store associates—but the underlying platform can and should be the same. This synergy enables integrated data collection and reporting across all user groups, rather than creating another set of silos.

Smart mobile strategy is integrated throughout the business.

When e-commerce first started, it was on its own little island, separate from the rest of store operations. Eventually, retailers realized that e-commerce had to be central to the business. More recently, many brands have thought of mobile as a channel, primarily residing under marketing’s umbrella. That’s starting to change as savvy retailers recognize that the best mobile approach eliminates siloes and affects every aspect of the business.

Roughly half of the retailers surveyed in Boston Retail Partners’ 2017 Digital Commerce Survey reported that they are aligning digital commerce initiatives with the store organization, overseen by a C-level exec who manages anything and everything affecting the customer experience. Because mobile uniquely affects not just marketing and revenue teams but also operations, facilities, fulfillment and even product, Phunware CEO Alan S. Knitowski would take this a step further. As he outlined last year, the companies seeing global success with mobile align their mobile application, media and data science teams under one leader who is responsible for all digital transformation across the organization and manages all of these groups as an integrated unit.

Retail’s mobile-first transformation is a marathon, not a sprint.

By taking an iterative, lifecycle-based approach to mobile, retailers can initiate a continuous cycle of positive change that moves them closer and closer to achieving their business goals.

Phunware has helped many of the largest brands in North America develop smart mobile strategies all across the app lifecycle, and retail is just one of our areas of expertise. Want to learn more? Check out our case study of a Fortune 500 department store to learn about how Phunware’s solution helped expand their use of mobile solutions to improve store productivity and employee performance.

DOWNLOAD THE CASE STUDY

The post Mobile Tech in Retail: Shiny Objects vs. Smart Strategy appeared first on Phunware.

But what about environments where people want to explore—such as resorts, casinos or theme parks? In these environments, mobile wayfinding really shines. It puts a personal explorer’s guide right in the user’s pocket, helping people discover new points of interest and make the most of their stay. And while enhancing the guest experience, mobile wayfinding can also help drive incremental on-property spend and improve guest services’ efficiency and performance.

5 Reasons Mobile Wayfinding Is a Smart Investment for Hospitality Brands

A recent article in Techzone360 describes how mobile and location technologies are powering the smart hotel of the future, yet the hospitality industry as a whole seems confused about how to start or where to go next. According to Econsultancy’s Digital Trends in the Travel and Hospitality Sectors, mobile experiences and analytics represent the top priority for tech investment in 2018. However, another survey—The 2018 Lodging Technology Study from Hospitality Technology—declares that just 26% of hoteliers plan to upgrade their guest-facing mobile apps in 2018, while 22% plan to add or upgrade location technology.

Confusion aside, mobile-first digital transformation is coming to the hospitality industry, and large properties stand to benefit significantly. Whether it’s added to an existing app or anchoring a new one, mobile wayfinding is a strategic way to gain quick advantages now, while building a scalable foundation for your mobile-first future.

Here are five reasons mobile wayfinding is ideal for large-property hospitality brands:

1. It personalizes the navigation experience. People carry their smartphones with them everywhere these days and they’re used to relying on mapping apps to navigate when traveling. Mobile wayfinding brings that convenience to app users when they’re on property, even indoors. Digital signage and paper maps just tell people where things are. Mobile wayfinding tells app users where they are in relation to every point of interest on your property and provides turn-by-turn navigation anywhere they want to go.
2. It streamlines the necessities for your guests. By helping app users find their rooms or parking spots quickly, you’re reducing frustration and speeding them towards the enjoyment (and hopefully spending) part of their stay.
3. It facilitates discovery. As users explore their interactive map of your property, they discover points of interest along the way and can quickly and easily tap or swipe to get more information. Push notifications also invite further exploration—for example, as an app user passes a particular shop or spa, a push notification could be triggered to entice or incentivize a visit. (Mobile engagement also opens up potential revenue-driving partnerships with retailers and food service concessionaires.)
   Learn more in this eBook: Mobile Marketing Automation: Why It Matters and How to Get Started

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4. It can be built on a scalable and flexible foundation. Because the most advanced mobile wayfinding works with a wide range of sensor and location technologies and at different levels of granularity, you can start with the most affordable approach and expand your investment and use cases over time. For example, you can lay a foundation with static wayfinding, enabled by GPS and your existing Wi-Fi infrastructure, then move to real-time “blue dot” wayfinding with more extensive beacon, vBLE and/or smart lighting implementations as your roadmap extends. Increasing beacon density enables greater precision and accuracy and, as you expand, also enables you to use those beacons to trigger more use cases. For example, increasing beacon density on a casino floor might enable app users to navigate directly to their favorite slot machines or tables, or enable a virtual treasure hunt experience for resort patrons with kids.)
5. It’s attractive to multiple target audiences.
   • For vacation travelers, mobile wayfinding offers an added convenience, intriguing technology and a more personalized experience.
   • For meeting planners, it’s a way to help attendees reach specific events and locations relaxed and on time, navigate complex floor plans and even attract conference partners by extending wayfinding to the booth level on a convention floor.
   • For large group travel, mobile wayfinding offers a way to keep large groups connected with tour leaders, find each other easily and navigate to specific meeting points and events with ease.
   • For online travel agents, it’s an added proof point that your property is staying on top of consumer technology trends and ensuring an ideal guest experience.

Use Cases for Enhancing the Guest Experience

With a personal explorer’s guide to your property, guests will be able to:

• Find their rooms quickly and with less frustration
• Discover new points of interest on every journey—including retail and food services, entertainment venues, rides and experiences, etc.
• Locate empty parking and find their cars later (with parking system integration)
• Take the fastest route to amenities and points of interest (especially useful when running late to a show, for example, or hurrying to get to a specific ride or spa appointment)
• Use location sharing to find friends and family anywhere on property or to locate the nearest staff member

Use Cases for Improving Operations and Driving Revenue

Mobile wayfinding isn’t just for guests. By adding wayfinding to employee mobile apps, you can empower even temporary staff to be more efficient and productive while gathering valuable contextual data about both employee movement and guest behavior on property.

With mobile wayfinding in guest and employee apps, your organization can:

• Integrate with RFID or use beacons to track luggage or cleaning carts and more
• Utilize location sharing between staff and supervisors to help optimize headcount at key locations and times
• Share staff member locations with guests to facilitate order delivery, first aid and general guest support
• Add analytics to track guest traffic patterns and help alleviate bottlenecks
• Integrate with your guest management platform to personalize staff touchpoints, push notifications and more
• Collect contextual data on app user behavior while on-property—where they go, where they don’t, frequency of visits, times of day, etc.—then integrate with your guest management platform to better inform your profiles.
• Improve productivity by optimizing employee routing for room service, food and drink order delivery and more.
• Partner with retail, food / drink, entertainment and other guest-service concessions for special location-triggered offers, etc.

Among hotel execs, managers and staff:

• 91% think it’s important to generate insights from guest data to improve the guest experience
• 86% agree that all hotel employees require mobile access to be most effective in their jobs

Source: The 2017 Smart Decision Guide® to Hotel Guest Experience Management

Choosing a Mobile Wayfinding Partner

Mobile changes fast. Even if you have a digital team that’s familiar with mobile strategy, they may not have the necessary skills or bandwidth to enable mobile wayfinding. That’s why it’s usually best to seek an experienced development partner with a licensable wayfinding solution.

If you need to build a new guest- or employee-facing mobile app, look for a provider with a complete, brandable solution and/or custom development program. If you’re just adding mobile wayfinding to an existing app, look for a provider that offers easily integrated mobile building blocks (known as SDKs, or software development kits) that enable indoor and outdoor mapping, routing, and blue-dot navigation and can be customized for your needs.

In addition, look for a mobile wayfinding partner with:

• The flexibility to use your choice of enabling technologies (or a combination), as mobile wayfinding can work with GPS, Wi-Fi, physical beacons, virtual beacons and even smart lighting
• A user-friendly interface that allows you to change maps and points of interest (POIs) easily
• A proven track record of success with mobile wayfinding (ask for case studies)
• Experience working in today’s sprawling hospitality and entertainment environments with super-high ceilings and tight corners, huge indoor / outdoor spaces and labyrinthine corridors
• A lifecycle approach to ensure your mobile presence is built for scalability, expanding use cases and interoperability with myriad mobile technologies

Phunware has been at the forefront of mobile wayfinding for years now, helping organizations across multiple verticals guide and delight app users with personal mapping and navigation tools. Our experience extends from luxury residential to retail and mixed-use properties, large entertainment venues, hospitality environments and more. To learn more about our approach, check out our wayfinding solution videos or download our Hospitality Solution Overview.

WATCH THE VIDEOS

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There’s another small-seeming mobile feature that is super helpful in multiple scenarios: location sharing. App giants like Google Maps, Snapchat, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger all allow users to share their location with one another—it’s a great way to coordinate with friends (and get advance notice when somebody is definitely going to be late for the movie).

If, like many retailers, stadiums, hospitals and other physical venues, you have an app for the on-site customer experience, consider adding location sharing capabilities to it. This seemingly small feature provides convenience and social connection by helping people find each other within your campus or facility. Here are some examples of how location sharing comes in handy—useful information if your organization is looking for new ways to enhance the customer experience.

5 Places Location Sharing Really Shines

1. Healthcare: Hospitals and Medical Centers

Patients can share their location with hospital staff so they’re easy to locate in appointment waiting areas or anywhere in the facility. Critical physicians and nursing staff can share their locations with administrators so they can be found in an emergency. Staff can even share their location with patients or colleagues when en route to bring extra blankets, medicines, etc.

2. Hospitality: Hotels, Casinos and Restaurants

Guests can share their location and order details with staff, ensuring seamless delivery. Staff members can respond with an order receipt and the delivery location.

3. Theme Parks and Large Entertainment Venues

Visitors can create location sharing groups with each other, making their friends and family easy to find, even in crowded conditions. In a first-aid or medical emergency scenario, visitors can share their locations with the appropriate staff, who can use navigation to reach them as quickly as possible. Other staff, such as lifeguards or ride attendants, can share their locations with managers, helping to ensure coverage at all times.

4. Retail

Store associates can share their location with app users so they’re easy to locate via in-app mapping and navigation. Alternately, shoppers can request customer service and share their location, enabling associates to navigate directly to them.

5. Airports

Families or groups traveling together can create location sharing groups to stay connected throughout the terminal before, between and after flights. Baggage-handling and flight prep staff can share their location with administrative staff to help orchestrate and coordinate flight transitions.

Adding Location Sharing to Your App

If you’re considering enabling use cases like the ones above, Phunware offers licensable location sharing functionality as part of our Location-Based Services platform module, which also powers indoor mapping and wayfinding. To learn more about the power of location-based technology, watch our webinar:

WATCH THE ON-DEMAND WEBINAR NOW

For more information about location sharing, download our Location Sharing feature sheet or reach out to me anytime. I love talking about new ways to make apps even more functional and valuable for businesses as well as people.

Download our eBook Location Technology 101 to learn more about the types of location technology and how they work together—so you can start envisioning the possibilities.

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The post “I’m Here. Where Are You?” How Location Sharing Comes in Handy appeared first on Phunware.

Retail’s New Playground: a Guided Tour of the Cisco Toy Box

Welcome to the Toy Box

At check-in, you receive an empty shopping basket and an iPhone 8. This being a convention, of course you need caffeine, so you stop at the Coco Café. The friendly staff greets you and introduces the café’s MenuPad, which presents the available fueling options. You opt for a large mocha latte and use the iPhone you were given to buy your drink via Apple Pay, directly on the menu board. Well, that was easy.

Let’s Go Shopping

You fire up the ToyBox app on your iPhone and got to your shopping list. If this were a real-world shopping experience, the store app would be integrated with your customer profile, so everything you’ve searched for online or added to your online shopping cart would appear in your list when you arrived at the store. Here at the Toy Box, your shopping list shows all the retail technology “toys” you expressed an interest in.

You choose your first item and select “Route.” Using Phunware’s real-time indoor navigation, the Toy Box app gives you turn-by-turn directions right to that item inside the store. (Imagine you’re in a large hardware store, looking for a new flathead screwdriver…. How great would it be to have clear, accurate directions to the right spot on the right aisle, right in the palm of your hand?) You head out towards your first item in the Toddler Toys section of the store.

But Wait, There’s More

As you navigate to your first item, a push notification pops up on your iPhone—”New Item Has Arrived!”—showing you a featured product along your route. You can choose to see more information about that product, but you decide to stay focused. You find your item in Toddler Toys and choose “Scan with MishiPay” to purchase. The Toy Box app opens to the scanner screen in the MishiPay app. You scan the item’s barcode and get details on price, name and brand, then add it to your cart. Behind the scenes, the store inventory automatically adjusts to reflect your purchase.

Not Just for Shoppers

The Toy Box wasn’t only about helping store shoppers explore and navigate from item to item smoothly and seamlessly. The same technology that powers these shopper experiences can supercharge associate productivity related to stocking, restocking and completing Buy Online, Pickup In Store (BOPUS) orders. It can also help store associates navigate to shoppers requesting assistance and even notify them if VIP customers arrive.

Smart, integrated store experiences like the one offered at the Toy Box may seem futuristic, but they are rapidly becoming the norm. Learn more about how some retailers are using mobile to maintain a competitive edge in our webinar:

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The post Exploring the Toy Box at NRF 2018 appeared first on Phunware.

The latest cool tech making new experiences possible in the mobile space is virtual BLE beacon technology, which essentially “virtualizes” physical beacons. Mobile platforms like Phunware use beacons as sensors to trigger all kinds of cool mobile experiences—from providing indoor blue dot navigation to sending you a personalized push notification with 25% off those boots you’ve been wanting when you’re just outside the shoe department.

A virtual BLE beacon is essentially an imaginary beacon that can do the same job as a real one. From a tech standpoint, the virtual beacon works differently than the physical one. From the marketer or user perspective, they’re the same. They can both be used to trigger engaging mobile experiences and to gather location, time and other contextual data that marketers can use to understand and target their audiences.

To learn more, check out the eBook Location Technology 101.

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Virtual Beacon Systems Are Easier to Install, Maintain and Manage

Physical beacons are awesome. They’re small and affordable, and they can be placed discreetly in any number of locations in a given environment. But like any physical device, they have to be installed and maintained by a person. Someone has to put them in place, change the batteries and move them around when needed.

Because multiple virtual beacons are enabled by one piece of hardware, however, they require installing and maintaining far fewer devices. The vast majority of the management and maintenance happens through a simple software dashboard. That saves time and hassle.

Virtual Beacon Systems Are Incredibly Flexible

You may not be able to stick a physical beacon on an incredibly high ceiling, but you sure can slap a virtual beacon up there. They can be added easily to an existing Wi-Fi infrastructure or physical beacon implementation. You can even create a hybrid solution that combines physical and virtual beacons to help balance costs.

Making Location-Enabled Experiences More Attainable and More Awesome

Flexibility and easy management mean that virtual BLE beacons bring location-enabled experiences within reach of more organizations—and more people. These same qualities make it viable to install more virtual than physical beacons in any given space. As a result, you get much greater accuracy and performance. And thanks to machine learning in the software backbone, the more a virtual beacon system works, the smarter and more accurate it becomes.

It’s Exciting Here at the Tipping Point

When people first got smartphones, nobody really imagined all of the different ways we’d use them—and there are still possibilities to uncover. As technology matured, use cases grew exponentially, and suddenly we don’t know what we’d do without our smartphones.

Virtual BLE beacon technology is poised to be the innovation that makes location-enabled mobile experiences ubiquitous. But for the average Joes and Janes among us, it might be hard to imagine all the ways organizations can use vBLE technology. Let’s take a look.

• A hospital nurse administrator could monitor and track every piece of valuable patient-care equipment that moves around departments—IV pumps, patient beds and more—right from her phone. She could know exactly where Doctor Adebayo is and how many minutes it’s going to take for her to get from the patient floor to the ICU. She could get an instant alert that Mr. Davis has been in recovery by himself for too long, and speed an assistant to make sure he’s all right.
• A regional outdoor store manager could quickly and easily move beacons around to gather data on shopper dwell time near a new display. When a seasonal summer department goes up, store marketers could install virtual beacons in the area to trigger highly targeted “Happy Camper” messages to shoppers right when they peer into that cool new tent, and trigger the mobile app to change over to a camping theme throughout. In the stockroom, temporary employees could use mobile to guide their re-stocking efforts, getting turn-by-turn navigation through the store and precisely to the exact rack where that flannel shirt needs to hang.
• An airport could install a dense array of virtual beacons to collect highly granular traffic data in baggage claim areas, leveraging all of that information to understand passenger traffic patterns in detail before a planned remodel. During the holidays, the airport could expand its beacon system throughout the terminal, enabling multiple marketing partnerships with retail and food / beverage concessionaires—and delighting app-using passengers with seasonal savings, or even a holiday-themed app scavenger hunt to help keep weary traveling families entertained.

These ideas are only a jumping-off point. As mobile continues to evolve and mature, location-enabled experiences and use cases will continue to expand. Personally, I can’t wait.

If you’d like to learn more about how connected mobile experiences are going to transform operations, management and the customer experience across verticals, watch our on-demand webinar “Mobile at the Intersection of Hardware and Software.”

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The post The No-Geek-Speak Lowdown On Virtual Beacons appeared first on Phunware.

So what steps can retailers take right now not just to survive in 2018, but to thrive?

1. Put Digital Front and Center

Your digital and mobile identity are now (or should be) integral to your brand. During Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2017, mobile (smartphones and tablets) made up 53.3% of traffic and 39.7% of revenue, according to Adobe. And Salesforce found that mobile accounted for 64% of shopping visits and 43% of sales orders the weekend after Thanksgiving, up from 54% and 33%, respectively, in 2016.

Despite these undeniably mobile-centric numbers, Boston Retail Partners (BRP) found in its 2017 Digital Commerce Survey that only 14% of North American retailers report having a mobile app that is working well, and a hefty 39% report having an app that needs improvement. BRP notes that “A customer’s smartphone is also the key to customer identification and personalization of the in-store shopping experience.” More than ever, today’s retailers can’t afford to sit on the sidelines and ignore the mobile app lifecycle.

To learn more, check out the eBook Mobile First: Harnessing the App Lifecycle For Transformative Business Success.

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2. Engage Shoppers with Better Context and Personalization

As BRP points out, “Expansion of mobile capabilities represents a huge customer engagement opportunity for retailers.” Adding location-aware mobile engagement or analytics to an existing app (or integrating them from the start) is one of the best ways to expand engagement opportunities.

With a mobile app and location-based technologies, retailers can:

• Personalize the in-store experience and give customers the VIP treatment
• Engage shoppers with strong offers in real time based on who and where they are
• Guide shoppers through stores with an indoor GPS-like experience
• Target shoppers with messages delivered in the relevant context of their daily lives—even at a competitor’s door
• Leverage location data to build more granular customer profiles and target or segment ads more effectively

To learn more, check out the eBook Mobile Marketing Automation: Why It Matters and How to Get Started.

DOWNLOAD THE EBOOK

3. Use Mobile to Improve Efficiency and Empower Store Staff

Shopper engagement isn’t the only way mobile can help retailers compete. Mobile technology can help retail staff work more efficiently and get products in customers’ hands with the least amount of labor.

For example, some stores are testing location tech to speed restocking. Mobile indoor mapping and navigation can guide employees on the most efficient route to the proper location for restocking each item. This solution is particularly useful for seasonal workers who are not as familiar with store layouts and where products belong on store shelves and racks. In recent trials, store associate efficiency increased a minimum of 8%. Companywide, this efficiency increase result in significant payroll savings over time. And in the arms race against Amazon, every competitive opportunity counts.

As we recently explored, mobile is driving the transformation of physical stores into distribution centers, enabling highly efficient performance for options like “Buy Online, Ship from Store” (BOSFS) and “Buy Online, Pickup In Store” (which some writers are calling “BOPUS” or “BOPIS”). If 2 out of 3 shoppers have used BOPUS, it’s safe to say it’s more than a fad.

In retail, perhaps more than any other vertical, adopting a mobile-first mindset for digital transformation it critical for success. It’s time to harness mobile’s central role in consumers’ daily lives and take advantage of its hybrid digital / physical nature. Mobile can function as both a customer experience tool and a multifaceted business solution. Exciting times, to be sure!

If you’re planning for a more competitive 2018, come see us at NRF in January! We’ll be in Cisco’s booth (#2052), powering an on-site smart store they created for the event.

The post 3 Ways Retailers Can Act Now for a Stronger 2018 appeared first on Phunware.

Making Strides with Digital and Physical Feedback

Neil Blumenthal, Co-CEO of Warby Parker, told The Wall Street Journal back in January: “I don’t think retail is dead. Mediocre retail experiences are dead.” Elevating the retail experience to meet the demands of today’s on-demand and omnichannel consumer, however, requires understanding the digital and physical feedback that tells you what they want. In other words, it takes data—and lots of it.

In her Internet Trends 2017 report, analyst and author Mary Meeker spotlighted men’s shirt retailer Untuckit, which creates a synergistic digital / physical feedback loop between advertising, in-store and online interactions. The company reports a more than 2.5x increase in website visits from 2015-2016. Meeker also pointed to women’s professional-wear retailer MM.LaFleur, which is combining its data-driven, online styling / e-commerce site with a new high-touch, appointment-based, brick-and-mortar experience. Presumably, an individual’s online data is leveraged for the in-store personal styling session and vice versa. According to Washington Post, MM.LaFleur has experienced 300% year-over-year growth since 2013.

Both Untuckit and MM.LaFleur are clearly innovators, yet they lack a dedicated mobile app solution. That means they’re missing out on leveraging the vast amount of uniquely contextual user insights a mobile portfolio can deliver. This “daily digital trail” could give them a more detailed and personal understanding of their best customers than ever, enabling more relevant engagement at every touchpoint—whether it’s online, in person or via mobile app.

Where Retailers Are Missing the Point

The fourth-annual CEO Viewpoint 2017: The Transformation of Retail survey from PwC and JDA Software Group, Inc. indicates that 85% of global retail executives said they are investing in mobile-enabled applications (or plan to) over the next 12 months. 86% reported current or planned investments in big data. And overall, the survey found that a digital transformation strategy is the #1 priority for 2017.

Many U.S. retail execs…still have not defined or begun implementing digital transformation strategies, and some of them appear to be really struggling.” – Retail Dive

Yet, Retail Dive’s analysis of CEO Viewpoint 2017 noted that “The more interesting thing is that many U.S. retail execs, according to the survey, still have not defined or begun implementing digital transformation strategies, and some of them appear to be really struggling.” Digital transformation, as Retail Dive sees it, is about getting the organization on the right footing to compete at the highest level. This seismic shift needs to happen before adopting new technologies or ingesting huge new volumes of data. All the new toys in the world will do retailers absolutely no good if they’re not positioned to take full advantage of them.

Are you ready for a true digital transformation but not sure where to start? Download our eBook, Mobile First: Harnessing the App Lifecycle for Transformative Business Success, to learn what steps to take.

DOWNLOAD THE eBOOK

So What’s the Remedy?

Retail Dive says it’s likely that “retailers need to do their best to transform themselves from digital immigrants to full-fledged digital citizens, or they need to hire more digital natives to show them the way.” Actually, they need to do more than that.

Retailers, like all brands today, need to recognize and accept that they can’t treat mobile like a bolt-on to their larger digital strategy, because mobile drives the in-demand experience and customer journey. It’s time to build smarter strategies around the mobile application lifecycle and adapt organizational structures accordingly to achieve the digital transformation that’s necessary now.

Circling back to Amazon / Whole Foods implications, Bain & Company’s Darrell K. Rigby echoes the theme, noting that traditional retailers have got to relearn how to innovate and move to adaptive, agile and multidisciplinary teams (like software dev teams—there’s that mobile app lifecycle again!), all of which takes a deep commitment and a significant financial investment. As cited by Rigby, Amazon spends more than 11% of sales on “technology and content.” This past January, IHL Group reported that top retail CIOs were increasing their IT budgets by 4.7% in 2017. Yet those same CIOs said they’d need to increase their budgets up to 236% to compete effectively against Amazon.

They may be right, and yet that giant forklift isn’t likely to happen soon. What can happen is that retailers find a mobile partner who deeply understands mobile application lifecycle management and can help digitally transform in a stepwise, cost-effective way. With an integrated mobile solution, retailers can continue to iterate and expand their mobile strategies in a nimble way that moves towards their overall business objectives, gaining momentum as they go. Sometimes transformations are “overnight;” sometimes they’re gradual. The important thing is to begin with a partner who can help you succeed, every step of the way.

Wondering how to integrate an authentically mobile-first solution to your retail strategy? Drop us a line at sales@127.0.0.1 and let’s talk.

Learn more about how the latest mobile technologies are redefining retail in this on-demand webinar: Redefining Retail: Surprising Mobile Use Cases Keeping Retailers Competitive.

WATCH THE WEBINAR

The post So Amazon Gobbled Up Whole Foods. Here’s How to Cure Retail’s Heartburn. appeared first on Phunware.

That’s why we recently conducted a national survey of daily smartphone and tablet users to find out what mobile means to them now and what they want from mobile in the future.

In the 2017 Mobile Future Survey, we learned that daily mobile users are more—and more deeply—intertwined with their devices, with 82% reporting that having their phones with them makes them feel “safe and secure.” Three out of five admitted feeling anxious without their devices. And a few even admitted checking their phone during sex!

But it’s no real surprise that users are device-obsessed—on a daily basis, it’s likely that you unlock your own phone to interact with it tens (if not hundreds) of times. That’s why we used this survey to dig deeper into the types of apps daily mobile users turn to most often, what drives downloads and the truth about app dormancy. We also investigated what mobile’s biggest fans want from their devices moving forward. And finally, we explored the types of personal information daily mobile users will share with brands and app developers—and why.

As our CEO Alan Knitowski put it, “This study proves that mobile is no longer simply about competitive differentiation—it’s about survival.” Want to learn more? Download the full survey report and keep an eye on our blog and social media profiles in the coming weeks for a series of infographics featuring data from this survey.

DOWNLOAD THE SURVEY REPORT

The post Data Download: Phunware’s 2017 Mobile Future Survey appeared first on Phunware.

Businesses don’t ask for proposals for point solutions or products they can buy off the shelf. By their nature, RFPs are strategic—they’re for finding custom, long-term solutions that fit in with the soliciting company’s larger vision and goals. If you’re structuring an RFP, do it thoughtfully and carefully. The requirements you put forth can significantly impact the quality of the mobile solution (and partner) you end up with.

I have already discussed the importance of understanding mobile as an iterative cycle and suggested ways to structure your org and team for success across that cycle. Given that branded mobile application portfolios tailored to richly defined mobile application experiences have the power to drive enterprise-wide digital transformation, let’s discuss how your procurement group can structure RFPs to facilitate that transformation.

If you plan for the full mobile lifecycle at the RFP stage, you will be able to find a mobile partner who doesn’t just build your app, but can help you acquire, engage and monetize your mobile audience in line with your business goals.

Mobile RFP Requirements for the “Strategize” Phase

In the mobile application lifecycle, the “Strategize” phase involves defining the amazing experience you want users to have with your app, then outlining use cases and feature sets.

If your project is complex enough to necessitate an RFP, it’s important to select a partner with proven success in similar, equally complex projects.

To uncover indicators of a bidder’s experience and capabilities, ask for examples of:

• Custom flagship applications / application portfolios for known brands. This demonstrates credibility, along with creative and technical expertise.
• Live event applications supporting live-streaming video and other real-time content. This demonstrates that the bidder has robust, stable technology and the ability to integrate with third-party providers.
• Successful in-venue mobile experiences at stadiums, hospitals, etc. This demonstrates the technical capabilities required to integrate with a host of hardware providers to create a seamless, engaging mobile user experience. Bidders should be prepared to support location technologies including high- and low-density Wi-Fi and both physical and virtual beacons.

You will also want to define functionality and feature set requirements in this part of your mobile RFP. As applicable, request the following:

• Simple app content management
• Context-triggered user engagement via push notifications and mobile engagement
• Indoor wayfinding and navigation
• Video streaming
• Campaign and app analytics
• The flexibility to integrate with multiple third-party software providers (such as customer relationship management [CRM] platforms, electronic health record [EHR] systems, loyalty, commerce, etc.)

Mobile RFP Requirements for the “Create” Phase

During the “Create” phase of the mobile application lifecycle, you bring your app to life in the way that makes the most sense for your budget, timeline and in-house capabilities. Depending on your unique timeline and goals, you can expect a mobile solution to cost anywhere from $100K to $500K (if you’re licensing software), or $1M to $5M (if you’re building a completely custom application).

If these numbers seem high, think about how much you allocate to other channels (email marketing, field marketing, etc.). Now think about how much time your target customers spend in those channels relative to how much time they spend on mobile. This simple exercise in perspective will help you see how worthy of an investment you’re making.

A word to the wise: avoid the temptation to go with the cheapest technology option, which may come disguised as a so-called “write once, run anywhere” codebase. Non-native development is a shortsighted non-solution to a very real problem, and bidders who propose HTML-based or other non-native development will not be equipped to support you through the mobile lifecycle. Look for a bidder who proposes a native mobile solution, built to the design standards of each platform and leveraging the uniquely mobile capabilities of each operating system and device. (Here are those design standards, if you’re interested: Apple Human Interface Guidelines, tvOS Human Interface Guidelines, Google Material Design, Android TV Guidelines.)

Mobile RFP Requirements for the “Launch” Phase

During the “Launch” phase of the mobile app lifecycle, you work to get your app noticed and build the audience that will use it. This requires a partner with robust performance marketing and data science capabilities. Make sure that your RFP requests detailed information on how the bidder will support app discovery and user acquisition, backed by real-world examples of launch and audience building success with other apps.

Also make sure to request a thorough explanation of the bidder’s customer support approach during and after the launch period. The more complex the project, the more support you should expect and request.

Mobile RFP Requirements for the “Engage and Monetize” Phase

In the “Engage and Monetize” phase of the mobile application lifecycle, you map out how you intend to keep app users engaged and drive revenue through your mobile efforts. There are many options—from a simple download charge or subscription model for your app to in-app purchases, in-app advertising, driving sales and foot traffic via contextually relevant messaging and more. And all of it generates troves of valuable data that you’d be foolish not to leverage.

To identify a prospective partner who can appropriately support this phase, your mobile RFP should ask that bidders describe their background in supporting:

• In-app monetization with various ad formats as well and a top-quality network (if relevant)
• In-app purchases and loyalty program integrations
• SMS-based marketing campaign planning and execution, as well as the features and capabilities of any contextual marketing tools offered
• Leveraging contextual data to impact marketing, operations and other business-critical initiatives

As you can see, the earlier you start planning for all phases of your mobile application lifecycle—particularly by addressing them up front in your RFP—you not only streamline the process, but increase your chances of driving real returns on your mobile investment.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this series on how to position your organization for success across the mobile application lifecycle—in essence, get your head right, get your team right and get your RFP right so you can find the right mobile partner. The mobile space is inherently partner-driven and collaborative, but there’s nothing worse than being stuck with a mobile provider who can’t (or won’t) act as a strategic partner.

For more tips and insights, feel free to get in touch. In the meantime, why not learn about the ins and outs of the mobile app lifecycle? Download our eBook on the subject below.

DOWNLOAD THE eBOOK

The post Best Practices for Writing a Mobile RFP appeared first on Phunware.

Brands like Ikea, L’Oreal and McDonald’s have seen amazing results from their mobile-first strategies and continue implementing innovative ways to engage their audiences. Ikea uses augmented reality to help shoppers visualize how items would look in their home. L’Oreal uses advanced facial mapping technology to turn customer smartphones into a virtual mirror so they can “try on” various beauty products before making a purchase. And McDonald’s recently used geolocation functionality by sponsoring a Pokestop at the height of the Pokemon Go craze. Combined with new ways to capture, process and analyze data, these authentically mobile technologies don’t only deliver the experience users want—they help brands keep improving their products, solutions and services.

Let’s take a look at some of the other “authentically mobile” trends that will shape 2017 and influence which brands come out on top.

Apps Continue to Bring Home the Bacon

Back in 2014, Gartner predicted over 268 billion app downloads generating approximately $77 billion in revenue for the year 2017. And market researcher App Annie projects that by 2020, gross revenue across all app stores could exceed $101 billion.

While some sources have warned against the death of the app, it’s clear that apps—and app revenue—aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Video is on the Rise

Mobile video has grown faster and bigger than expected! Variety notes that today, more than half of all video viewing is happening on mobile, representing a whopping 233% increase since Q3 2013.

Of course, the growth of mobile video wouldn’t be possible without the growth of data usage. Initiatives like T-Mobile’s Binge On are doing away with mobile data limits for streaming video so users can binge to their hearts’ content. Good thing, because 70% of Americans (and over 80% of Millennials!) are binge watching, according to Deloitte’s 10th Digital Democracy Survey.

The rise of video autoplay is another signal that video will be a force to reckon with in 2017. Apps like Facebook now start playing videos instantaneously—no play button clicking required. Although video autoplay is still in its infancy, it’s clear that companies are eager to to remove obstacles to higher data usage so video, the new king of content, can reign supreme.

Location Tech Makes Mobile Smarter

GPS and beacon technologies continue to evolve and will invade diverse industry segments in 2017. Last November, to coincide with the eagerly anticipated reboot of the TV show Gilmore Girls on Netflix, Connecticut’s board of tourism launched a major marketing campaign with a “selfie map tour,” successfully integrating social media with location-based mobile tech. This year, we’ll see more examples of how location-based solutions can replicate the successes that the retail sector has already seen. Retailers like Macy’s and GameStop have already undertaken high-profile experiments with location-triggered messaging, and brands in the personal care space, like Nivea, have even begun to add location awareness to their apps.

As location technology continues to proliferate and become more sophisticated (see: the advent of virtual beacons), we can expect additional industries to start leveraging the power of location to engage users.

Mobile UX Design in 2017

User experience is one of the major driving forces in the mobile space. Today, brands must focus on providing users with visually appealing apps. In 2017 we’ll see more creative mobile design elements, like splash screens, parallax graphics, split screens, micro interactions and grid-based design. But the best UX design must integrate with technology that creates a seamless, intuitive, and enjoyable experience for users. That’s why many brands are demanding custom design services and working with UX design expert partners to create a distinctive look and feel for their mobile solutions complemented by back-end technology that powers the UX flow.

Security and Privacy

Despite sensational headlines about information security and hacking, consumers express ongoing concerns about their privacy but do not always act on those concerns. According to 2016 findings from AARP, nearly 30% of US adults access the internet via public Wi-Fi once a week or more—even though only 4.8% rate public Wi-Fi as “very safe” (with another 39.1% giving it a tepid “somewhat safe” grade).

This isn’t to say Americans are reckless with their privacy online, however. A recent McKinsey survey of car buyers and users of shared-mobility services showed that Americans are more sensitive about their data sharing when compared to their Chinese or German counterparts. But for all locations, users were increasingly willing to share their personal data if they saw value in return.

The main takeaway: as long as users get something significant in return (Wi-Fi access, an app that provides tons of utility, customized notifications and promotions, etc.), they are willing to share their data. To learn more, download our eBook, Mobile Data: The Missing Link in Your User Acquisition and Engagement Strategies.

DOWNLOAD eBOOK HERE

Something for Everyone: SMB Mobile Adoption

The introduction of standalone app modules and template-like app framework structures now provides quick, effective and budget-friendly ways for small businesses to launch their own mobile strategies. That’s one reason small business trend forecasters now estimate nearly half of small businesses will have a mobile app by 2017. More affordable pricing and increasing competitive pressure are sure to encourage small businesses to incorporate mobile into their marketing initiatives as one of their top New Year’s resolutions.

Brands are aware of what we expect as consumers. In 2017 they just need to exceed all our expectations and use the power of mobile to really wow us.

Consumers have already shown a clear preference for accessing the internet via mobile devices rather than desktop computers, and in 2016 mobile internet consumption increased around 28%. Brands that launched mobile-first initiatives must now focus on authentically mobile experiences, which don’t merely prioritize mobile over desktop experiences, but go above and beyond to harness the characteristics and technology unique to mobile devices to deliver something truly new and awe-inspiring.

As for brands who have yet to dip a toe into mobile? Well, the timing couldn’t be better.

CONTACT US

The post 6 Mobile Trends to Watch in 2017 appeared first on Phunware.

Mixed-use properties usually center around a common theme, gaining cohesion from branding as much as geographic location.

These days, there’s another way to gain cohesion among residents, property management staff, retail tenants and the shoppers and restaurant-goers you want to attract. We’re talking about mobile apps.

A mobile app platform, like a multi-use development, can be built to serve multiple purposes. Just as your development combines live, work and play, your mobile app can and should address the needs of all stakeholders in one solution.

1) Attract and retain residents by empowering their mobile lifestyle management.

We’ve said it before and it bears repeating here: Millennials and the upcoming Generation Z run their lives via their omnipresent mobile devices. By providing a comprehensive community mobile app, you can empower residents to manage everything they do around the property in the same way—tracking package deliveries, scheduling amenities, submitting maintenance requests, etc.

The same app can extend outward into the retail space with seamless navigation to nearby restaurants and other points of interest, updates on sales at favorite stores, information about upcoming festivals and concerts, and so on. With a next-generation app, residents can manage everything they want or need to do within their community from a single interface, quickly and conveniently. It’s a compelling and useful amenity as well as a competitive differentiator.

2) Streamline resident communications and property management tasks.

A community mobile app with staff dashboard frees up the residential management team to maximize sales and keep everything running smoothly. Built-in communications tools make it easy to get the right messages to the right residents, the way they want to receive them. Contextual data helps uncover usage patterns around property amenities, maintenance performance trends and other valuable operational insights. Package tracking and notifications reduce the front desk workload. All these features and functionality help the property run better, which makes life easier for staff and residents alike.

3) Attract shoppers with wayfinding and personalized engagement.

For many large mixed-use developments with multiple buildings and plazas, physical signage isn’t enough to help shoppers and visitors find the stores and amenities they’re looking for. A community mobile app with advanced wayfinding and navigation can guide users from wherever they are, right to the closest parking lot—then step-by-step through the development to their chosen store or restaurant. Along the way, personalized push notifications can welcome the app user by name, entice her to stop at another store by offering a special sale or prolong her visit to the retail area by suggesting other venues she might enjoy.

4) Support your retail tenants through partnership programs, promotional communications, etc.

A community mobile app opens up all kinds of partnership opportunities with your retail tenants and nearby businesses. Your app users represent a unique and valuable audience that these retailers want to access. Team up to spotlight various stores and restaurants as part of your ongoing app content. Work together to send promotional push notifications about sales, special events, store or restaurant news and more. You can even develop exclusive rewards and offers just for app users. In this way, your mobile app becomes one more incentive to attract and retain your best tenants—both individual and commercial.

Download our eBook to learn more about how you can use location marketing to better engage users by personalizing their mobile app experience.

DOWNLOAD THE eBOOK

5) Save time and money by serving both retail and residential needs with one solution.

By addressing all of the above with a single mobile app platform, you eliminate the cost of purchasing multiple tools—not to mention the friction and inefficiency caused by switching back and forth. And because mobile devices and apps are nearly ubiquitous, you’re gaining efficiency by engaging with residents, property staff, shoppers and retail leasing tenants in familiar and convenient ways.

Want to see how our mobile solution can help your multi-use development? Download our case study of Brickell City Centre to learn about how Phunware’s solution has met the varied needs of residents, shoppers, office workers, retail partners and property management.

DOWNLOAD THE CASE STUDY

And, as always: please feel free to get in touch! Contact a specialist today at residential@127.0.0.1.

The post 5 Reasons Your Mixed-Use Development Needs a Multipurpose Mobile App appeared first on Phunware.

“Surveyed and interviewed marketers seem to agree that the ability to personalize customer experiences at numerous touchpoints will become an essential feature in future marketing departments.”

—The Economist Intelligence Unit

We couldn’t agree more. True contextual personalization, as enabled and delivered by mobile devices and location marketing, may well be the most powerful development to hit retail marketing in a generation.

In the chart, you’ll see that context can be lots of different things—from where users are to what you know about them and even what they might be doing. Location marketing gives you access to more of that contextual information, which retailers can use to unlock multiple new touchpoints AND capitalize on them with personalized engagement.

For example, any and all of these potential touchpoints can be opportunities for compelling personalized engagement:

• A customer who frequently purchases fishing tackle enters the parking lot of a local lakeside park
• The competition opens a huge new outlet three miles from one of your brick-and-mortar stores
• Heavy rain is forecast for the day of a big local event, sponsored by your brand
• A member of your loyalty program enters a different mall than her usual, but you also have a store presence there
• A power shopper approaches the dressing room in your store — and your associate knows she left items in her online shopping cart

And that’s just for starters. As The Economist Intelligence Unit put it, “Engaging customers with compelling, contextually relevant experiences is the new competitive high ground.”

Download our infographic Who, What, Where? Location Intelligence Boosts Offers and Engagement to learn more.

Download Infographic

The post How Retail Marketers Can Unlock More Touchpoints with Location Marketing appeared first on Phunware.

Loyalty doesn’t mean what it used to.

As part of its 2016 Omnichannel Report, MasterCard took a hard look at loyalty, finding that the qualities that make shoppers sign up for loyalty problems are not the same qualities that drive repeat business.

MasterCard points to affinity as the key factor in driving repeat business—not loyalty. Affinity is defined as a higher level of trust in the brand and an emotional concept of personal value, built around relevance and resonance. David Rosen, writing for the TIBCO Software blog, tends to agree: “The realization that emotional (elated) relationships are not limited to a few fashion brands, luxury automobiles, and Apple, is leading to an expansion of how brands engage with their customers. Achieving this higher level of bliss has profound impact on customer value.”

How can retailers deliver on the need for deeper, more meaningful customer relationships?

Mobile technologies give retailers an unprecedented ability to create rich experiences that deliver on genuine customer needs, build trust and engagement, and go beyond transactions to generate real brand affinity.

Whether as a stand-alone loyalty program app or as complete mobile brand experience (we’d argue for the latter), a branded mobile app is the ideal platform for connecting with your most engaged customers—and truly delivering personalized value. TIBCO‘s David Rosen echoes this idea, saying “Rewarding with a compelling experience (no doubt) has a deeper and longer-term impact than [rewarding with a] discount or coupon.”

By harnessing location-based technologies like GPS and beacons, retail mobile apps can recognize who and where customers are in their stores and in the wider world. This visibility empowers retailers to personalize their engagement, optimize in-store experiences and deliver previously impossible benefits.

For example, a retail mobile app with location-enabled features can identify customers when they enter the store—enabling staff to personalize their interaction and triggering personalized greetings and special offers on the customers’ smartphones. According to the Boston Retail Partners special report, 53% of retailers plan to implement this capability within the next five years. Yet the technology to do it now—and do it easily and cost-effectively—already exists.

Download our eBook to learn more about how retailers can make the most out of location marketing to drive foot traffic, influence shopping behavior and ultimately generate more sales.

DOWNLOAD THE eBOOK

These gaps between what customers want and what apps can currently deliver represent key opportunities for retailers to differentiate themselves and build genuine trust and affinity. The smart retailers will close these gaps ASAP.

“When executed appropriately, real-time personalization provides retailers the ability to deliver a better brand experience, which encourages ongoing customer engagement, sustainable loyalty, and sales uplift.”
—Boston Retail Partners, “Loyalty Programs—Rewarding the Customer Experience”

Next-generation retail apps take loyalty to the next level.

The majority of North American retailers are making mobile a top priority for 2016. Yet, according to the Boston Retail Partners special report, 73% of retailers did not offer mobile access to the features of their loyalty programs. 56% of retailers said they planned to take their loyalty programs mobile within the next 5 years. That’s moving in the right direction, but perhaps not quickly enough.

Watch our on-demand webinar to learn more about how embracing mobile in a new way can help brick-and-mortar retailers become more effective and change the game.

WATCH THE ON-DEMAND WEBINAR

We’ll be watching the evolution of loyalty and the intersection of loyalty programs with mobility. Stay tuned for more!

The post Beyond Loyalty Programs: Tracking the Future of Retail Customer Relationships appeared first on Phunware.

With marketing automation (MA), your brand can take targeting and personalization to a whole new level, leveraging consumer behavior and smartphone capabilities out in the real world.

What sorts of goals can you achieve with location-based marketing?

• Driving new and repeat foot traffic
• Increasing brand awareness
• Boosting the value of your mobile app
• Encouraging loyalty program sign-up
• Pushing sales with coupons and promotions
• Promoting an event, such as a store celebration, charity event or a sponsored community event such as a 5K or carnival
• Enhancing the customer experience and relationship

Want to deliver an amazing connected mobile experience? Check out this on-demand webinar: Mobile at the Intersection of Hardware and Software to learn how to engage with users where and when it matters most.

WATCH THE ON-DEMAND WEBINAR

How does marketing automation work?

Essentially, you build a strategic message plan around specific information about where your mobile app users are and what they are doing. By taking advantage of built-in technologies on the user’s smartphone—as well as intelligent analytics—you can understand your users better and reach them more effectively.

• Location-aware technologies such as geo-fencing, beacons and GPS can tell you where your mobile app users are—whether that’s your store, your competitors or anywhere that might be relevant to your brand
• Push notifications send relevant messages right to the lock screen on the app user’s phone
• Analytics provide a wealth of data about customer behavior, such as:
  • When they visit a specific location (your store, the competition, etc.)
  • How long they stay
  • Where they go before and after
  • How frequently they visit and at what intervals

By combining location insights with your back-end customer information systems, you unlock a deeper understanding of your customer than ever before. You can use this understanding to personalize very specifically—you can even target just a single person with a highly specific message. This gives your marketing much more relevance and a stronger chance to succeed.

More and more consumers are demanding a personalized experience—online, in-store, and on mobile. “Consumers want more than just an experience—we want a personal connection that identifies with who we are, our interests, expectations and abilities.” (CMSWire)  Marketing automation can help make your app super-important to your users, even as it makes their shopping experience more pleasurable and useful. And all of that helps increase customer loyalty and sales.

Want to a more in-depth look at marketing automation and insights on how different industries are using it? Download Mobile Marketing Automation: Why It Matters and How to Get Started.

DOWNLOAD THE eBOOK

The post What Can You Do with Mobile Marketing Automation? appeared first on Phunware.

People are digital-dependent in almost everything they do, and that’s not much of an exaggeration. If you have brick-and-mortar stores and you do nothing to tap into digital experience capabilities, you risk losing market share.

Perhaps you’re already offering digital experiences to your brick-and-mortar shoppers, like email-based promotions or a mobile-optimized website. That’s multichannel marketing, and you’re on the right track.

The next step is to move toward omnichannel marketing, which focuses not only on accessibility via any channel consumers might use, but on offering a seamless experience for customers. There should be as little separation as possible between shoppers’ activity in your online store, on your branded app, and inside one of your physical store locations. If a shopper was looking at a particular coffee maker in your online store but didn’t buy it, you can prompt that shopper with a promotional offer on that coffee maker the next time he enters one of your locations—a seamless digital/mobile/physical transition that is entirely personalized to that shopper and highly effective as a sales tool.

How do we reach shoppers in so many ways?

Short answer: mobile apps and location-enabled marketing tools. By tapping into location technology such as GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth, you can target customers using geo-fencing near your business locations and inside your stores. You can even know when customers who use your app go to competitors’ stores or visit nearby partners, which can be invaluable data for future campaign planning.

Learn more in this eBook: Location Technology 101: Understanding Bluetooth, Blue Dot, Beacons, Geo-Fencing and More.

DOWNLOAD THE eBOOK

We made an infographic that shows how the omnichannel purchase cycle might play out for a customer in your store. Take a look to follow along with Sue’s interactions with a retailer like you.

Download Infographic Here

The post Omnichannel Marketing for Retailers: Yes, It’s Within Reach. appeared first on Phunware.

Right now, organizations are bringing their departments together to reflect on the holiday season’s successes and failures. And the smart ones are learning from 2014 to become bigger and better over the next 12 months.

In spirit of this aspirational time of year, below are five mobile resolutions for the retail industry. Keep in mind that these are just high-level concepts for you to mull over as you finalize (or get started on!) your strategies.

When it comes to mobile (or any investment), there is no universal strategy. The unique goals and target audiences of each organization are what ultimately drives their approach to mobile.

1. Make mobile experiences seamless and easy to shop.

Research from Apigee indicates that by the end of 2014, 63% of U.S. smartphone owners used apps at least once a month, up from 56% in 2013. Moreover, 20% of smartphone owners said they plan to increase how much they spend via apps this year.

To keep pace with this surge in demand, retailers need to create streamlined app experiences that are organized, intuitive and easy to browse. After all, when the user experience is clunky, disorganized or otherwise unpleasant, users are more likely to get frustrated and abandon the shopping experience altogether. Supporting this point, research from Contact Solutions found that 51% of consumers abandon their carts and close apps when they have a poor experience. Up to 20% stopped using the app entirely.

2. Personalize the app experience.

Beautiful UX is only the first step in a long journey to app optimization. Today’s empowered consumers expect anytime / anywhere access to information, content and services that enrich their shopping experience. Loyalty programs play a major role here.

For example, beauty retailer Sephora’s app integrates with its Beauty Insider loyalty club. Once logged in, club members receive a personalized experience that tracks their loyalty points, sends them unique rewards and offers and monitors their Beauty Bags (records of past purchases and “Loves”). How can you create a similar user-focused experience?

3. Use push notifications to drive foot traffic.

Hyper-precise targeting by user location, demographics and loyalty is what makes push notifications so powerful. But there’s a fine line between being engaging and annoying. Walgreens is one retailer that does it right. The pharmacy retailer uses Passbook to send notifications when consumers are in close proximity to a store, encouraging them to stop in and take advantage of timely coupons and deals. Integration with the Walgreens app and loyalty program also allows consumers to receive more personalized messages, and even receive notifications when their prescriptions are ready for pickup.

4. Guide customers through the store.

Recent success stories from top retailers like GameStop and Lord & Taylor are helping to accelerate adoption of beacon technology. These two retailers take different approaches to beacon engagement:

• GameStop allows consumers to use their smartphones to “activate” beacons on shelves. Once they do, they can access complementary content, such as video game videos, ratings and reviews.
• Lord & Taylor embeds beacons in different store departments to trigger alerts as app holders move throughout the store. Retailers can build on Lord & Taylor’s strategy and personalize beacon-triggered alerts. That way, users would receive offers tailored to their unique tastes and preferences. This approach keeps shoppers engaged, surprised and delighted by the mobile brand experience.

5. Turn associates’ mobile devices into their little black books.

For decades, associates who work in department and luxury stores have relied on their little black books. These handy resources hold invaluable information about clients, past purchases and preferences. With tablets and smartphones, associates can access this same information with far more detail and context.

This year, consider how mobile can act as your hub for associate engagement and empowerment. How can you integrate associate apps and resources with enterprise information such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems and sales data?

Does your retail organization have any mobile resolutions in place? Share your thoughts in the comments section below!

The post 5 Retail Mobile Strategy Resolutions for 2015 appeared first on Phunware.

New Strategies for Attracting Shoppers

By embracing mobile in a whole new way, some retailers, like a national department store (which happens to be one of Phunware’s customers), use a slightly different strategy. They use push notifications to deliver shoppers. How do they do it? Most recently, they sent a push notification to 1 million mobile devices users who downloaded their app. What did the notification say? It simply told users about an offer of 20 percent off in-store purchases.

Of course, with traditional marketing, it would be very difficult to prove the ROI of a single outreach campaign and to track who engaged with that campaign. With a mobile app, however, this kind of direct attribution becomes easy.

When tapped or swiped, the notification took the user to an offer wallet containing a coupon with a unique barcode. When the user made a purchase in-store and presented the barcode for scanning to ensure the discount, the store could attribute the purchase to the notification. Additionally, because the purchase was tied to an individual app user, the retailer gained an opportunity to learn more about its individual users—and how to market to them.

The Results Speak for Themselves

Click to view the full infographic.

So what happened when the department store sent this coupon to a million users? Within three days, 14.2 percent of the recipients went to one of the store’s physical locations, resulting in $500,000 of revenue directly attributable to the campaign. Not bad for one push notification.

Who’s on Board with Push?

Most retailers avoid push notifications, even though studies indicate that 68 percent of consumers enable push notifications and 50 percent say that they intentionally download an app to get access to special or exclusive offers.²

When you develop a push notification strategy, you must prioritize the customer experience—and their preferences—above all else. Blindly pushing notifications is a proven path to marketing failure. What’s evolving, slowly but surely, is a recognition among marketers that tailored, optimized push notifications boost response levels. The days of “spray and pray” are fading—it’s critical to create push notifications that matter to your users.

If you’re a marketer working for a brick-and-mortar store, and you’re looking for additional foot traffic, Phunware has worked with many retailers to implement push successfully (and profitably). Download the full infographic to see how we helped our customer conquer revenue goals with relevant and timely targeted messages.

DOWNLOAD THE INFOGRAPHIC

The post Can Push Notifications Boost Retail Foot Traffic? appeared first on Phunware.

To take advantage of these buying patterns this year, best-in-class retailers invested in creating apps that are entertaining, enjoyable and make consumers’ lives a little bit easier. While some released completely new apps, others refined their features and capabilities to appeal to holiday shoppers. Here are a few to note:

1. Target

This big box retailer implemented a few different mobile initiatives for the holiday season. For one, the company partnered with Google on the Art, Copy & Code project to create a holiday-themed game experience in stores. In its brick-and-mortar locations, Target rolled out tablets where consumers can play Bullseye’s Playground, which includes a variety of games and activities. For every game played, Target donates $1 to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

But that’s not all. Target also launched its Wish List app for parents and kids. As kids add items to their lists, parents can share them with friends and family. An augmented reality feature also helps make the Target Kids’ Gift Catalog more fun and compelling.

Finally, the retailer re-launched its mobile and tablet apps specifically for the holidays. New indoor wayfinding enhancements allow consumers to locate items in stores more easily using interactive store maps and shopping lists. (At least they do in theory. It’s often easier said than done—even for Target.) And of course, Target ramped up its Cartwheel experience by offering daily deals and holiday exclusives.

• Key takeaways: Target took a variety of different approaches to mobility, adding utility and fun to its overall brand experience. When you develop your mobile strategy, it’s paramount to consider what your customers want out of the shopping experience (both online and in-store), and what you can do to make their lives easier. You will be able to develop a solid foundation of features and capabilities from there.

2. Walmart

Although Walmart’s Savings Catcher app was popular long before the holiday season, the retailer tailored the mobile experience to align with consumers’ browsing and buying behaviors during this time of year. Consumers use the Savings Catcher app to scan their receipts. The app then aggregates prices from local competitor ads. If a competitor has a lower price, Walmart will give shoppers the difference on an eGift card. Funds can either be accrued and saved or spent immediately.

While this feature of the app is normally used for grocery items, Walmart expanded the product assortment for the holidays to include toys, a top category.

• Key takeaways: Savings Catcher was already easy-to-use and provided instant gratification to shoppers. Walmart simply expanded eligible merchandise to take advantage of holiday monetization opportunities. You can take a cue from Walmart: Instead of reinventing the wheel, what small adjustments can you make to your existing mobile experiences to align better with your customers during special seasons or events?

3. Neiman Marcus

At the end of October, luxury retailer Neiman Marcus launched Snap. Find. Shop., a tool available within its mobile app. Using visual search technology, Snap. Find. Shop. allows consumers to take photos of items they see out and about, and shop Neiman Marcus inventory that is similar or identical.

A key benefit of this tool is that it provides immediate access to products and information, and it helps merge the digital and physical worlds. What better way to facilitate inspired impulse gift buys for friends and loved ones?

• Key takeaways: Sure, not every retailer wants or needs visual search in their app, but there are ways you can still make the browsing experience easier. Sometimes a mobile customer will prefer leisurely iPad shopping, while other times they know exactly what they’re looking for and want to make a purchase quickly. Are you providing the tools and capabilities to appeal to both personas?

4. Office Depot

Everyone knows Elf Yourself. It has become a staple during the holiday season. Although it’s not directly correlated with Office Depot products, it creates a great image and personality for the brand. This year, the retailer unveiled the Elf Yourself app, which includes new customizable dancing elf videos in nine languages. Users can create customized videos and even upgrade to new video options and add different songs for a small fee.

• Key takeaways: Simply put: Sometimes it’s okay to have some fun and not always think about selling! During this time of year, it can be difficult to stand out. Creating a fun, energetic and out-of-the-box app that has a seasonal spin is a great way to generate buzz. And if you can leverage a freemium pricing model like Office Depot, even better!

How are you going to use these takeaways in 2015? Comment below and let us know!

The post Mobile Merriment: How Top Retail Apps Brought the Holiday Spirit appeared first on Phunware.

Over the past few months, there has been a lot of debate taking place around beacon technology. Of course, Apple ignited the discussion with the unveiling of iBeacon, which is designed to extend location services to iOS devices. In addition to beacons being rolled out in Apple stores, other retailers, including Macy’s, Kenneth Cole and American Eagle are testing the technology.

Yet many retailers still have not warmed up to beacons. Shopper sentiment and overall acceptance of the technology are two factors influencing lack of adoption, as some consumers are (rightfully) concerned about their privacy.

But the catalyst of beacons is that they can help retailers facilitate in-the-moment engagement with shoppers while they’re in a store and ready to buy. This not only piques interest, but also can help drive sales and ongoing engagement. After all, the easier you can make consumers’ lives, the more loyal they will be to your brand.

In a recent webinar during the weeklong Retail TouchPoints Connected Consumer Series digital event, Adam Silverman, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, indicated that location is going to be critical to the next-generation brick-and-mortar store.
Overall traffic in brick-and-mortar stores is declining worldwide, with 15% of all shopping malls going out of business.

But don’t panic!

“That doesn’t mean the store is going away,” Silverman explained. “It’s just that the role of the store is changing. The store needs to become more of a place of engagement with a greater focus on conversion. This is where beacon technology can help quite a bit.”

Beacon technology can offer context, personalization, insight, efficiency and differentiation to the brick-and-mortar experience. Placing censors throughout the store, retailers can “wake up” their branded mobile apps when consumers are in close proximity to a specific aisle, display or end cap.

Silverman explained that empowered buyers “demand a new level of customer obsession.” Because shoppers have fingertip access to more information than ever before, they expect retailers to go a step further, making all interactions highly relevant and tailored to their unique preferences.

Beacon technology can help you engage customers down to the department or aisle level. So if a customer is looking at shoes, you have the opportunity to initiate engagement and send her a 10% coupon on the latest line of sandals. Talk about a powerful incentive!

Full disclosure: I am a Millennial. My mobile device is glued to my hand at practically all times, and I’m always looking for the latest app to make my life a little bit easier. Yes, that means I’m also always looking for offers and deals that align with my wants and needs. So you could say that I’m the target audience for beacon marketing.

Although you may not be a Millennial, you may be the target audience for beacon marketing, too! Think about how many times you check your smartphone throughout the day, how many push notifications you receive or how often you tap into a device while you’re at home after a long day at work.

The bottom line is that if you’re a mobile-empowered consumer, you can get tremendous value out of beacon marketing.

The Benefits Of Beacons

Mobile devices are becoming the nucleus of our everyday lives! We need them, rely on them and simply gotta have them! It’s only right that retailers strive to meet shoppers’ needs on their device of choice while they’re at home, on the go and even venturing through a store.

With that, I’d like to outline what I believe are the top benefits of beacon marketing:

• Data security isn’t an issue: The greatest misconception of beacons, in my opinion, is that once a retailer rolls out the technology, consumers will be bombarded with messages they don’t want or need, and retailers will track their every move. Wrong. To participate, consumers need to opt in by turning on their Bluetooth and enabling location-based services. If shoppers don’t “raise their hand,” retailers can’t interact with them.
• Offers and interactions can be more relevant: Beacons turn on when an opted-in smartphone is nearby, which helps retailers better understand traffic patterns and dwell times throughout the store. Additionally, retailers have the ability to initiate engagement with these consumers while they’re looking at specific products, leading to more compelling and timely marketing tactics.
• Services and experiences can be improved: During the Connected Consumer Series webinar, Silverman noted that Aloft Hotels is in the process of testing beacons to unlock room doors. He added that there is potential for the technology to facilitate the check-in process, allowing customers to page representatives or check in using their mobile devices.

It is undeniable: We are living in the age of the empowered mobile consumer. Forrester Research supports this point, noting that many consumers are using smartphones in multiple locations throughout the day, including in the car (68%) and of course, in the store (68%). What are you doing to reach these consumers?

Although only 14% of executives who attended our beacon-themed webinar are currently using the technology, 67% are considering or planning to use it this year. That’s a lot of implementations on the horizon for 2014.

The post Why Retailers Should Bet on Beacons appeared first on Phunware.