Beacon Technology Adds a New Dimension to Location-based Marketing

officingtoday.com

Forbes says beacon technology is “catching fire”. Marketing Magazine reckons it’s all a bit “yesterday”.

Before you decide what it’s not, it’s important to understand what it is… or what it could be.

Essentially, beacon technology allows location-based businesses, predominantly those in retail and hospitality, to send alerts when someone approaches or leaves their location. It allows businesses to send notifications, such as special offers, to a prospective (or existing) customer’s smartphone, thereby grabbing their attention as they pass.

For centrally located business centres and coworking spaces, it’s easy to see the potential. But is this technology really catching fire, or is it just a flash in the pan?

John T. Anderson, workspace expert at Condeco Software, answers our questions and discusses some of the ways that beacon technology could help workspace operators attract new business:

In a similar way that ‘beacons’ deliver special offers to shoppers, could workspace operators use this as part of a location-based marketing incentive to attract passing businesspeople?

Absolutely. Whenever a desk or office is free, an operator could send real-time coupon codes to nearby customers who had downloaded their app, encouraging them to come in. These offers can be highly personalized as they can be tailored to the preferences of the customer. For instance, if a customer usually rents a single desk near the window, workspace operators can send this coworker a targeted offer whenever a desk with a view is available.

Beyond the marketing advantages, it’s also important to highlight how beacons can contribute to a seamless, mobile-driven workplace experience. Coworkers that come into the office will no longer have to swipe their badges at every elevator or door. Instead, their smartphone will automatically give them access to their spaces, saving both time and energy. Moreover, the app will guide visitors to a free desk, so they no longer have to cross the building searching for a place to work. By removing all sorts of frictions in the workplace, beacon technology can improve overall workplace satisfaction.

Not every operator has a Regus-sized marketing budget. So how expensive is this form of marketing? And is there a viable return on investment?

Although beacon technology may sound costly, the technology is relatively inexpensive and easy to deploy. Beacons can be bought for between $20 and $40, depending upon the type and quality. If you’re planning to use the beacons for marketing purposes, it’s also important to consider the time and resources needed to create the marketing content that will be shared via beacons.

However, when making this investment, workplace operators should consider that beacons can help cut costs in multiple ways. The app on visitors’ smartphones will log whenever a person enters or exits a room, and trigger a reaction that turns the lights and temperature on or off accordingly, reducing the likelihood of paying for unnecessary amounts of electricity.

Moreover, beacons will give a real-time overview of the utilization of the workplace, which allows workplace operators to maximize the use of their workspace. If a certain area turns out to be consistently rented out less than others, personalized offers via beacons can increase the chances of it being used. Studies have demonstrated that 60 percent of customers open and engage with beacon-triggered content and no less than 30 percent of customers redeem beacon-triggered offers at the point of purchase.

How do customers interact with beacons from a privacy and security standpoint?

Workplace beacons offer a secure environment when they are connected to an internal network. Furthermore, personal data can be encrypted to ensure privacy over the network, which should ease customers’ security concerns.

From a privacy standpoint, beacons will only track customers when they enable location services on their mobile device and grant beacons the permission to access their information. Just like users can determine which parts of their social media profiles they may want visible to certain people, users also have the power to control their beacon privacy settings by granting or rejecting permission to an app.

Don’t all those pings become quite annoying?

Beacons don’t send push notifications, but the applications that receive data from familiar beacons do. Customers will only receive push notifications for those apps that they have given permission to. They can tailor their preferences based on personal interests, so they will only receive offers that are highly relevant to them.

Ads are coming to Facebook Messenger

marketingdive.com

Dive Brief:

• Facebook’s Messenger app will begin serving ads to users in Q2 2016, according to a leaked document TechCrunch got access to.
• According to the document, businesses will be able to send ads to Messenger users who have already chatted with them on the app.
• Facebook has also launched a URL short link – fb.com/msg/ – that opens a chat thread with a business, and confirmed the existence of that short link to TechCrunch.

Dive Insight:

To prepare for Messenger ads, Facebook is advising businesses to get customers to chat with them first. This way the companies can take advantage of the new feature once it launches, according to the document obtained by TechCrunch.

TechCrunch reporter Josh Constine was told by Facebook, “We don’t comment on rumor or speculation. That said, our aim with Messenger is to create a high quality, engaging experience for 800 million people around the world, and that includes ensuring people do not experience unwanted messages of any type.” 

From a marketing standpoint, sending unsolicited ads to Messenger users might backfire. People tend to see their mobile devices as part of their personal space, and marketing through those devices – be it SMS campaigns or geo-targeted push messaging – is an area where marketers should tread carefully and not risk creating a negative user experience.

That being said, Facebook has been highly successful on mobile, which now accounts for 80% of total ad revenue for the social network. And the social networking giant only recently opened Messenger to businesses with the Messenger for Business initiative, brands have already begun harnessing the messaging app for marketing purposes. Given the large user base, Messenger offers marketers an attractive opportunity to provide personalized services and engage with consumers one-to-one.

Recommended Reading

TechCrunch: Facebook Plans To Put Ads In Messenger
Marketing Dive: Facebook eyes games for Messenger app
Marketing Dive: How marketers are using Facebook's direct messaging apps

With The Physical Web, You Become The Search Engine

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If Google’s initiative catches on, digital marketing will need to expand beyond targeting users, to targeting the physical world.

Credit: BKON

What if everything could send out its own web link?

That, essentially, is the idea behind the Physical Web, a new open-source approach to beacons that Google announced last summer. And it’s an approach that could — if it becomes popular — significantly change the way marketers do their jobs.

A beacon is a small device that acts as a kind of digital lighthouse, emitting a location ID from its spot in the ceiling or on the wall of a store that says, in effect, “This is location 123.”

That location signal is picked up by a store app on the smartphone of a nearby customer standing in the store. The location signal is sent via the store’s WiFi or the customer’s 3G/4G data service to a marketer’s server.

The location ID tells the server that the customer is standing in the games aisle at Walmart, for instance, and the marketer’s system responds by sending something like a discount coupon for a game to the app on the customer’s smartphone. Some marketers use it simply to track the number of people who have visited that aisle.

Notice the bottleneck: you need an app that supports that store’s beacons. It could be the store’s custom app, or it could be a supported app that several stores use.

But how many apps are customers going to install and maintain?

Google’s solution: who needs an app? Use the browser.

The tech giant has always favored mobile web over mobile apps, not coincidentally because apps are the realm of its mobile arch-rival, Apple, and its iOS platform.

But the browser solution does more than just take care of beacons’ too-many-apps issue.

It also allows any location or any physical object that sports a compatible beacon to broadcast a web address.

A URL from a nearby restaurant, for instance, could lead to a web page with the menu. You could even leave your name for a table and get pinged when it’s ready. A movie poster becomes a portal to video clips from that movie. You can pluck a map for a stadium out of thin air, and dog collars can broadcast their owner’s info.

The Physical Web is the “natural evolution toward increasing simplicity,” BKON CEO Richard Graves told me.

His Nashville-based company makes beacons, including enterprise-scale Physical Web beacons and a beacon management tool called Phy.Net. He said that about two dozen beacon manufacturers currently support Eddystone-URL, the name of this URL-broadcasting, Google-launched open protocol.

In BKON’s implementation of The Physical Web, its beacons broadcast a web address that is Phy.Net/UniqueCode. Clicking on that link goes to the Phy.Net server and returns a web page specific to that unique code — that is, specific to that beacon. Graves noted that the first URL is delivered anonymously to the user, with no mobile device IDs or other identifiers. Once you click on a second web link, though, you’re in the regular web.

The beacon needs to support Eddystone-URL. And you need a browser that supports Eddystone-URL. Right now, that’s Chrome for iOS, and Google has released a compatible beta of Chrome version 49 for Android. Support is in the works for Firefox, Opera and Microsoft’s new Edge browser.

To scan for nearby Physical Web beacons, you swipe down from any screen on a phone with a compatible Chrome browser, even if the browser isn’t open. URLs with location titles will be ordered by proximity, the nearest ones at the top. (In iOS, you need to enable the Physical Web capability first, and then you can see the nearby URLs in the Today view of the Notification Center.)

In Chrome on Android, a first encounter with Eddystone-URL beacons will generate a one-time-only buzz on your phone to introduce you to a list of nearby URLs. There’s no buzz alert on subsequent Eddystone-URL encounters.

Tristan Louis, chief marketing officer for proximity engagement marketer Thinaire, pointed out that the Physical Web turns beacons into devices for “pull” marketing that is dependent on user choice, instead of “push” marketing that is more in-your-face.

But this is not pull marketing where you are, for instance, typing in a search.  You can now discover the physical world by responding to the objects, establishments or products that are raising their hands. You are walking around, and that act is doing the search for you.

Credit: BKON

Graves describes this as “searching for content in your surroundings.” Of course, this is different from searching for content about your surroundings, which is what we do now.

Or, as Google Physical Web leader Scott Jensen has pointed out, “The web needs a discovery service.”

It’s difficult to overestimate the potential impact on digital marketing of this kind of URL-broadcasting, if it catches on.

These days, digital marketing is characterized by finding the user in the virtual world, such as ad targeting or delivering personalized content on web sites. You can also entice the user with inbound marketing that, for instance, makes available white papers on a given topic. You might encounter these by searching for the topic or a related site.

There is also location- and device-based targeting, like sending a dinner discount coupon for a nearby restaurant.

But the Physical Web would mean digital marketers aren’t only sending messages to people in the hope that they will interact with the virtual and physical worlds. And they aren’t distributing white papers in the hope that they’ll be searched on Google.

It will mean marketers are sending messages to things and places, in the hopes that they will interact with people.

Everything With Its Own Story

Some have suggested this is similar to QR codes, but QR codes require you to find the code and scan it, something you’re not going to do when standing in the cold outside a restaurant. Here, your phone scans for physically nearby messaging.

As a marketer, you’ll need to consider what the restaurant should present on the landing page — a video of the ambience, a menu, or a coupon?

And what, exactly, is the interaction model when a potential customer has just discovered a new restaurant because the restaurant broadcast itself?

Eventually, this Physical Web could evolve into something much more. There will undoubtedly be country or even global maps where you can drill down to find all broadcasters in a given area, instead of simply walking around and scanning your vicinity. Some places could implement peer-to-peer communications off their URL, like a music club that shows streaming videos from patrons inside to potential customers outside.

There’s also no obvious reason why this has to be a web-only party. The browser is your scanner, but once you click on the club’s URL, why not deep-link into an app?

Also, while the initial URL is anonymous, your subsequent clicks put you into the regular web. Once there, you’re again identifiable by your mobile device ID or other factors, so you could get a web page about the music club personalized for you.

And, if the beacon is cheap and small enough, why wouldn’t virtually every product have its own story to tell? You could check out the instructions on how to use anything around you.

If Google Glass or other such wearable viewers succeed, you could walk a historical trail in a city and view vignettes broadcast from important spots as you go.

Google uses the term “Physical Web” to describe this new connection between the physical world and the web, a web that is embedded in physical objects. And if it catches on, web-based marketing will become more about how the physical world reveals itself to us.

App fraud: Marketing's $1B problem

marketingdive.com

Dive Brief:

• Adjust, an app business intelligence company, looked at 400 million app installs and found that between 1.35% and 5.55% were fraudulent.
• For marketers this means some measure of advertising dollars spent on app install ads is wasted on false conversions.
• Adjust is taking a proactive stance against app fraud with its newly-released Fraud Prevention Suite that includes three components that check out IP traffic and verify purchases.

Dive Insight:

Last summer fraud detection firm Forensiq ran a study on 12 million devices and found app fraud to be an $857 million dollar annual problem, and since that study came out, the estimate has risen to closer to $1 billion. The issue is significant because marketers are increasingly taking advantage of app install ad formats, as well as marketing via apps.

Something to note, Venture Beat pointed out, is that "the percentage of ad fraud traffic is heavily skewed between different types of paid traffic, depending on whether it is coming from Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, which are less susceptible to fraud, or other sources." Meaning, if you're filtering for fraud outside of these platforms, the potential for fraud doubles.

"Fraud in this context refers to fake conversions, spoofed by illegitimate publishers looking to claim CPI payouts for traffic that never existed. Faked conversions isn’t just a financial liability, but also corrupts your dataset - skewing ROI calculations and shaking your trust in your optimization work," Simon Kendall, head of communications for Adjust, explained in a blog post.

An interesting element of Adjust’s tool is it includes attribution analytics so when bad traffic can’t be attributed to a source, advertisers don’t have to pay for the fraudulent conversions. Also, Adjust said it is the first tool of its kind that can work in real-time. One thing the Adjust research makes clear, marketers need to be aware that app fraud is an issue they can't ignore.

Recommended Reading

Adjust: Announcing the Fraud Prevention Suite
Venture Beat: Advertising’s billion-dollar problem: app fraud — and how to fix it
Marketing Dive: App ad fraud heading toward $1 billion problem
Marketing Dive: App fraud weighs on mobile marketers

10 trends that will shape up the future of mobile ads and marketing

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With SEA showing signs of explosive smartphone growth and the young demographics becoming increasingly tech savvy, mobile ads can make great inroads and become a lucrative market for ad-revenues

The explosive penetration of smartphones in recent years has taken the entire world by storm. Global smartphone penetration has been continuing to surge upwards in double-digit figures year-on-year and India has been no exception to the smartphone boom.

India has, in fact, emerged as the third largest smartphone market in the world and is all set to hit the 500-million Internet users mark by 2017, of which a whopping 314 million would be mobile Internet users. It is expected to overtake the US smartphone market in 2016.

The personal nature of this device has opened up a huge potential target market for businesses to tap into; something that has never before been seen in the history of marketing and advertising. Businesses, both big and small, have realised the power that this simple gadget holds to boost their revenues, and therefore, mobile advertising is witnessing a huge surge of late.

Not surprisingly, globally, mobile ad spends are expected to touch US$100 billion in 2016 and capture 51 per cent of the digital market.

With Southeast Asia, and particularly India, showing signs of explosive growth in smartphones owing to rising income levels, falling smartphone prices and the young demographics becoming increasingly tech savvy, mobile ads can make great inroads and become a lucrative market for ad-revenues.

According to business reports such as eMarketer and others, India is still at a nascent stage when it comes to digital ad spending (only 1.1 per cent of the global spend), despite being the second most-populous country globally. It also reports that India will increase its paid advertising to US$8.53 billion by 2019.

Clearly, this space is sure to pick up even greater momentum in the coming times.

Trends to watch out for!

Many interesting and novel trends seemed to be emerging in the overcrowded mobile advertising and mobile marketing industry such as:

1. Mobile video

This is one of the fastest growing and most popular formats in the mobile ad world. Video ads are generally more receptive and command more eCPM’s. Facebook reported 8 billion video views daily, with 75 pee cent being mobile video ads in November 2015. Google, too, plans to include mobile video ad links in its search results. No wonder advertisers all across seem to be focusing on making creative video ads for mobiles, with vertical videos formats and even 360-degree videos.

2. Native advertising

Native ads concept is pretty interesting, can use the device-specific information for target-specific ad campaigns and prove beneficial in case of in-app environments like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube etc. This helps enhance brand recollection by the users.

3. In-store beacons

Beacons are found to be more effective and can tap into the personalised behavioural patterns of the users, especially indoors, as compared to location services like GPS. Mobile ads that use the beacon signals, especially for in-store promotions, are beginning to find favour with many retailers.

4. Use of wearables to get user data

With the wearable technology market steaming up, marketers are going all out to personalise their ads and target their customer base based on individual data such as physical and emotional signals and preferences. With wearables such fitness bands, smartwatches and even ‘smart’ accessories etc., marketers are all but waiting to use these to tap into the personal data of a user and reap maximum gains.

5. Rise of mobile programmatic

Programmatic ad spending has been on the rise, and shows no signs of letting up. With rich ad formats, and usage of real-time, first and third party data, marketers will buy digital ad inventory based on programmatic solutions for intelligent connections with consumers who can identify the brand that is being advertised.

6. Interactive ads

Users can be more engaged in ads that are interactive. Traditional ad formats are dying down slowly and being replaced with energising ads that give the user the power to play and control.

7. Mobile gaming

Research has shown that mobile gaming accounts for 60 per cent of mobile time usage. Since the gaming audience is more focused on their device screens, as against on-the-go surfing, it is a powerful, yet sparingly used ad genre. Gaming is gaining attention of the advertisers, since a gaming ad-experience is a very powerful in-app advertising platform.

8. Mobile coupons

This involves redeeming a coupon or code received on a mobile for online or offline shopping.These are very effective in increasing in-store purchases. This is the best way to link a mobile ad to the actual purchase and can give valuable feedback on the RoI and effectiveness of ad campaigns as well.

9. Mobile chats

Earlier viewed as chats for customer support, chats via mobile platforms now enable users to connect with their preferred brands, request services, even make purchases, all via a single app that enables the chat. Thus it is a sure-shot tactic for target marketing.

10. App Promotion – install app ads

In today’s world, more challenging than making an app or an ad is to be discovered amidst the millions of apps that keep mushrooming on app stores. Google recently modified its searches to include app search results. This directly affects the discovery and usage of apps.

Paid app discovery and even install campaigns are becoming popular. There is a huge investment in app install ads. Targeting the right audience is the key for a business to get the desired results. Of course, this relies heavily on intelligent tech-solutions like programmatic ad serving and deep digging for user info.

A thorough follow through and analysis is important

Understanding how a customer reacts to your app is crucial for your business. The marketing effort doesn’t end with the app getting downloaded. Knowing whether a person ignored the app post download, uninstalled it or used it to make purchases is important since the information becomes the basis for planning future budgets. It also helps marketers gauge the effectiveness and the ROI of their advertising efforts.

Conclusion

For any business to succeed, it is imperative that they understand the customers’ tastes and preferences and base their marketing strategies around them. Clearly, with smartphones becoming almost a necessity and emerging as that one most-preferred tool for customers to accomplish all they can, it is only wise that businesses smarten up and leverage the medium optimally to enhance their revenues. What better than catching their attention where they like it best!

Why the success of mobile apps begins at launch

marketingdive.com

Here are 5 crucial points to track when marketing a mobile app

As mobile's influence on digital marketing continues to climb, mobile apps are playing a more central role in marketing, specifically in the mobile app install ads category.

In fact, according to eMarketer research from last year app install ads wereexpected to reach $3 billion in 2015, accounting for 10.4% of mobile ad dollars and representing an 80% year-over-year increase. And per app analytics and marketing intelligence firm App Annie, the global app market is expected to increase 24% to $51 billion in revenue this year across all app stores, and app store revenue is slated to hit $101 billion by 2020.

"Mobile app install ads have become the key to getting in front of the right audiences at the right time, and building an audience," Sean Galligan, vice president and industry lead for entertainment at Yahoo, told Marketing Divein October.

But even though apps are helping marketers with real-time messaging and many companies – from many industries outside of the traditional gaming companies such as retailers, banks and media firms – now have apps, questions around the health of the app economy and how to best integrate apps into overall marketing strategies still come up. That, and what to track when marketing a new app.

And marketers could be doing more to maximize the benefit of having developed and launched an app, Nancy Hua, CEO of mobile A/B testing service Apptimize, told Marketing Dive. She said there are five key points to track when marketing an app (more on this below) to ensure its success from launch.

"This is a quickly growing and developing industry," she said. "The 'experts' don't have it figured out because everything is changing so fast. You can be the expert even if you're not a developer. You just need the right mindset to go out there and experiment and learn."

App success begins at the launch

One key mistake marketers make with new apps is focusing on gaining users and not improving the app itself, Hua explained. Apptimize sees a lot of app makers allocating a good amount of time and resources upfront to creating the app, and then investing a lot of money on amassing users, but let iterating and tweaking the app fall by the wayside after launch. 

"You're not going to get everything right the first time, so you have to have a plan for how you'll improve the app as you start to get user feedback and analytics," Hua said.

That said, tools exist that allow marketers to improve apps without having to tap back into engineering resources. According to Hua, ad campaigns can test messaging, run in-app promotions or do A/B testing to optimize apps on the fly.

Though A/B testing does most likely require a third-party solution since Apple and Google don’t currently enable A/B testing, Hua recommended finding a tool that is designed for non-engineers so tests can be run without developers. Testing should be controllable without waiting for approvals from Google or Apple.

A major reason to begin optimizing the app experience from launch, according to Hua, is there’s a danger of spending an entire budget on bringing in users who will have a terrible experience.

"Marketers should spend just enough to get some basic ideas on what needs improvement within the app, quickly fix those issues, then spend more on acquisition... rinse and repeat," she explained.

As far as utilizing the popular app install ad format, Hua said those campaigns are great for testing out messaging, but that there is a specific strategy that will give marketers the most benefit from the ads.

"Don't dump a lot of money into acquisition on a rough first launch," she cautioned. "Spend some money to get early users, learn, iterate, spend some more."

The goal should be to get 30-day retention rates up and users leaving positive reviews. At this point marketers can begin leveraging both paid and unpaid tactics to ramp up the user base. Install ads are good to keep in the marketing mix because the ROI is easy to measure and the paid marketing can have a positive impact on organic traffic, Hua explained.

What to track once you have an app to market

1. The purchase funnel

"You not only need to be measuring every single step of the way, but also set up A/B tests to question the entire structure of the flow and conventional wisdom," she said. This means from how many people are in the landing app and what percentage of items viewed lead to the checkout button, to how many people click on the next button after the checkout and eventually add a credit card. 

A case study on how HotelTonight increased checkout by 26% by getting rid of user accounts, she said, is a good example of how accurately measuring from the start can help propel your success.

"How many finalize 'checkout'?," she said, is the question you need to keep top of mind.

2. Influence metrics

If you know that your clients are making purchases elsewhere, for example on the web store, then it's important to be tracking influence metrics, like how many items viewed per visit, across channels.

"What most apps do is track the number of items someone views the details," she said. "Either they click on the thumbnail that appears on search results or they tap a 'details' button that shows that they are actually interested in that offer and not just glancing through."

That being said, Hua cautioned, it's important to remember that "40% of adults start activity in one platform and complete it on another."

3. Onboarding experience

"You must measure the quality of your onboarding experience. If you don't nail onboarding, the rest of your app doesn't even matter because no one sees it," Hua explained.

She said there are several metrics that come into play here.

"Depending on how your app is set up, you'll want to measure the number of people who have signed up or done some sort of action that indicates interest in your app. Maybe you've seen that customers who browse through five items are much more likely to become long term users of your app," she said.

According to Hua, most apps will need to set up some sort of "x-day" retention (for example, 7, 15, 30, 60, 90) to measure what percentage of new users come back a second time in an "x" period of time.

"This is a good measure of whether or not your app has done a good job of conveying value right away," Hua said.

4. Engagement

In terms of engagement, this depends on the app. For some apps it might mean a combination of "x-day" retention for new users and number of visits per month, or it could include items viewed per visit. 

"You need to find the engagement metric that works for you, but the point to keep in mind is that mobile is all about engagement," she said. "The whole reason you want to build an app instead of another website is that the mobile app is in your user's pocket all the time."

5. Acquisition spend

Carefully tracking acquisition spend is crucial for all apps, but particularly to newcomers.

"Too many apps spend a ton of money on ads and then only track which ones get clicks. You need to also track which ones actually lead to purchases or an influence metric," she said, adding that either way, a good rule of thumb when it comes to app marketing is to "question everything."

How the Internet of Things Will Change Shopping Forever

risnews.edgl.com

The Internet of Things is expanding, and it’s going to bring about a revolution. While it’s still a few years away from mainstream adoption, its impact on the retail world has already begun.
 
Many retail businesses have taken the first steps in implementing this new technological worldview with great success. The first wave came in supporting intelligent business operation and back-office work, but there’s now more businesses using beacon and Wi-Fi tracking technology to collect data in stores — feeding predictive and real-time analytics engines to inform even the most basic daily operations.
 
Brick-and-mortar retail is all about serving the customer in a physical space. Both of these elements — the customer experience and the space itself — will soon be transformed by this emerging technology.
 
Rethinking the Physical Layout
 
Stores are often at a disadvantage compared to their online competitors. While it’s easy to capture information from online shoppers about what products interest them, what items they're putting in their carts, and what they ultimately buy, Main Street retailers have only ever had point-of-sale data to work with.
 
But with GSM or Wi-Fi tracking, retailers can gather information about where customers walk, what they stop to peruse, and what goes into their carts. This information can be used to optimize store layout and increase traffic to certain areas. This is a tactic retailers like Nordstrom have tried and abandoned, while others like Cabela’s and Family Dollar have found it exceedingly useful.
 
Another development causing retailers to rethink their space is RFID technology. This features a barcode that uses radio waves to scan items from a distance and track inventory in real time. Stores like Zara are using it to efficiently replenish stock, ensuring that store shelves never have too much or too little of any product.
 
Increasing the responsiveness of inventory makes it easier to do more sales with less floor space — another advantage for businesses facing competition online.
 
Reinventing the Customer Experience
 
Using predictive technology to build smart shelves and warehouses, it will be possible to nearly eliminate the bane of the customer experience — arriving at a store to buy a product that isn’t there.
 
In the future, however, stores will do more than sell what you want — they will be what you want. They will be able to literally transform with your presence using virtual reality, lights, or television screens. Macy’s knows what perfumes you like; what if that scent followed you through the store? The personally adapted sales floor would revive the in-store experience. 
 
Here are a few simple steps retailers can take to prepare for the possibilities offered by the Internet of Things:
 
1. Update your current IT architecture to support the coming influx of data. Data is what powers the Internet of Things, and to avoid data overflow, you’ll need to identify the most important data to collect for your business.

2. Start building a multichannel strategy that can embrace new avenues, such as user interaction in the store. All channels need to have coherent communication. Don’t start a new channel merely because you can. Not all solutions are meant for every business.

3. Be ready to act fast. You’re going to have to make decisions on the spot, so you need good business rules in place to automate as much as you can.
 
The Internet of Things will transform retail for the better, improving the physical space and optimizing the customer experience. With enough preparation, this model could mean a whole new universe for your business.