IoT Solutions for Retail
Give customers relevant, omnichannel experiences – in real time, on their terms.
Gain an omnichannel view of your customers across all devices. Understand, adapt to and anticipate customer needs. IoT solutions from AEB bring together data, analytics, and marketing processes to help you:
- Sense customer needs and preferences in real time. Use smart devices to gather location-based information. Then integrate that data with previously known information to form contextual, real-time insights that you can act on.
- Gain a deeper understanding of customer patterns. Merge detailed online customer behavior data with data from offline channels for a complete customer view that reveals what customers truly need so you can respond in real time with relevant, meaningful offers.
- Provide profitable new services to customers. Combine what you’ve learned from previous customer experiences with what you anticipate about future needs – then take action to seize opportunities ahead of the competition.
Create relevant, satisfying, valued customer experiences.
Infuse your marketing decisions with unprecedented customer insights. Customer-level digital data merged with traditional data sources yields a 360-degree customer view. Embedded predictive marketing analytics engenders a deeper customer understanding. Engage with customers contextually across inbound and outbound channels. And craft compelling customer experiences tailored to each unique customer’s journey.
Give marketers true predictive power.
An easy-to-use marketing interface backed by advanced analytic capabilities enables marketers and business analysts to quickly transform digital data into predictive, customer-focused insight. Use that insight to guide and shape real-time customer interactions, making contextual decisions that result in highly personalized, relevant offers your customers can’t resist.
Beacons: The Retail IoT Revolution
Beacons are small wireless sensors that can be attached anywhere. They use BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) technology to broadcast tiny radio signals that your smartphone, or other devices like your wearables, can receive and interpret. By interpreting this signal, your smartphone unlocks micro-location and contextual interactions.
Put in simple, beacons are small sensors which your smartphone or wearable can track to unlock information directly related to your context and location.
Now, how does this work? For your smartphone or wearable to track the beacon and unlock this information three conditions need to be in place:
1. The retailer that wants to use the beacon sensor to communicate with you must have available a mobile app that will act as the user interface. It’ll be this app what you’ll be actually interacting with when you receive the push notifications containing the information the retailer wants you to receive. In the case of wearables, the retailer must have developed a specific app compatible with your wearable OS.
2. You have to have downloaded in your mobile phone or wearable that retailer’s app, and have a validated user account in it. If you don’t have this user account with your purchases history, the beacon won’t be used to its full potential of delivering you highly personalized, contextualized information.
3. You have to give permission to the beacon sensor to send you push notifications with information whenever it detects your smartphone or wearable nearby. Note that you only have to grant permission to the beacon the first time it gets to acquaintance your smartphone; from then on, it’ll just send you the push notifications
This need of giving permission to the beacon to communicate with your smartphone makes a big difference with RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology which could be used for the same purposes. The beacon authorization step gives you the full control of the communication as it’s you who chooses which beacons to interact with and which not to. This makes communication with BLE beacons far more private than through RFID, and far more tailored to each specific, unique customer.
The picture to the right is an Estimote Beacon which AEB recommends for the retail environment.