Beacons, the Uncharted Star to Improve Mobile App Metrics

If you happen to be following BLE Mobile Apps for a while, then you know how to send proximity marketing campaigns to users’ mobile phone, marketers need to make a nearby beacon and a relevant mobile app to work in cohesion. It could be the app published by the retail chain you frequent, for example Walmart. Have you ever considered beacons to drive engagement to your mobile app?

For non-starters, beacon is a small device that broadcasts Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) signals at regular intervals. Marketers can encode the signal with contextually relevant marketing content. For example, they can install a beacon at the storefront to allure people passing by into their promoted outlets with smart marketing. Smartphones can intercept the signal and a relevant mobile app, if installed, can decode the signal to display marketing messages on the screen. Marketers can send out coupons, gift vouchers, exclusive offers, etc. with beacons over BLE to improve customer retention and boost walk-ins.

Driving Mobile App Engagement

While beacons are excellent proximity marketing tools, not many marketers consider their applications in boosting user engagement on a mobile app. Did you know? 50% apps installed on a mobile device are never opened. People either don’t feel the urge to open those apps or they simply install and forget. Either ways, as the promoter or publisher of the app, your job is to make people open it. App marketers invest a greater part of their budget in acquiring new customers. They expect some sort of ROI and expecting ROI for an app that not many people are opening after installing is a gamble.

When you’re in the business of mobile apps, open rates tell only a part of the story. There are so many more metrics you must consider.

• Active Users: This metric calculates number of users visiting the app, real-time, daily and monthly.
• Stickiness: It is a metric of addiction to your app. It is the ratio between average daily active users (ADAU) and monthly active users (MAU)
• Retention Rate: Retention is a measure of how many users remained customers over a period of time such as five days, eight weeks, or one year
• Lifetime Value: Lifetime value formulas will help you assess whether you’re paying too much for—or getting a good deal on—your customers, given the value they bring to your company.
• Average Revenue per User: You can also calculate the current LTV your app has achieved since launch, by simply dividing the total revenue of your app by the number of users you’ve had.

Improving the Metrics with Beacons

You can employ beacons to improve the metrics provided the app supports beacon-connectivity to catch push notifications. For example, if an app is dormant on a user phone for quite sometimes, then he needs a reason to open the app. When he comes in the vicinity of beacon, it will trigger contextually relevant notification on his mobile phone, which more likely to make him open the app than a synthetic push notification. It could be a case when he is walking an isle of a departmental store and he encounters a nice handbag. A contextually calibrated beacon would send him a discount coupon on his mobile screen, which will make him open the app and show it to cashier at the time of checkout.

If your app marketers are smart enough, they can learn the users’ buying preferences and will send him or her relevant push notification to make him open the app from time to time, which will improve the number of daily active users. The number of people visiting the store to redeem an offer sent on their mobile phone is a great idea of conversion. In a nutshell, beacons are a great marketing tool to make people open the app, drive app engagement and trigger conversion.

Integrating BLE Connectivity to Your App

If you’re into the app business with a number of apps on Play Store and App Store, you may consider beacon app development with beacon connectivity in it if it caters to one of the following industries: Traditional Retail, On-demand Delivery, or Scheduled Events.

1. Traditional Retail

Retail outlets such as grocery stores and departmental stores are facing a tough competition with Amazon as the eCommerce giant puts feet into every category of retail from green grocery to high-end brands. These outlets are facing a test of time and working hard to stay relevant in the era of online stores. Despite all sorts of efforts to enter the digital world, they are not seeing much transition of their customers to the digital channel. Their apps lack active users, their websites have a flat traffic curve and their online extension of store is seeing zero enthusiasm.

By building beacon support in their application, they can deliver relevant offers to their customers phone and drive open rate of their app. In addition, they can offer beacon enabled in-store navigation to make people keep the app open whenever they are in the store to keep active users in check.

2. On-demand Delivery

If the primary service you’re offering by means of the app involves delivery of any sort, then beacons can be a good app engagement driver. If your app allows people to deliver taxi to your users’ location like Uber, then you can raise stickiness to your app by delivering beacon based experience on their mobile screen while in transit or when they pass an idle taxi parked near the alleyway. In-car beacons make for a fantastic opportunity for delivery startups to make people use their app for a longer duration.

3. Scheduled Events

Events and beacons have a long history. People have been using beacon to improve in-event experience for many years now. Beacon integration in event apps is common. But what happens to the app after the event concludes. Nobody comes down to the app, making it dormant between two successive event periods. Beacons can drive app engagement during and after event period, keeping the app active and the user interest in the upcoming events.

For example, when pass by a billboard, the beacon installed trigger the event app because the brand is taking part in the event.

To learn more about Beacon app development, please call us at +1-408-400-3737. You could also drop us a mail on contact@blemobileapps.com if you have any questions about how Beacons can help improve mobile app metrics.