Payment24 News
While there is a great deal of interest in the potential for personalized, location-based marketing, South African retailers have been slow to benefit from it, says joint CEO of Payment24, Nolan Daniel.
The retail industry is faced with the challenges of maintaining market share and profits and while international companies are fast to adopt and exploit new marketing opportunities provided by location-based technologies, local companies have been slow to adopt and maximize these mobile technologies.
Reasons for the lack of uptake are often due to the infancy of their overall mobile strategies or because retailers quite simply do not know how to harness location-based messaging to support their businesses. Many also have the misconception that implementing these advanced tools will prove highly complex, time-consuming, and expensive.
But times have changed. Advanced software now allows retailers to roll out mobile platforms and applications in a matter of weeks, enabling highly agile location-based marketing modules almost instantly. Retailers can choose to use the ‘big net’ of geofencing to notify customers of relevant special offers up to 20km away or retailers may choose to deploy small Bluetooth low energy (BLE) beacons, enabling them to detect customers’ mobile devices within close range of particular products on-shelf, allowing for highly granular messaging.
This ability to deliver personalized, relevant notifications based on customer interest, past buying behavior, and location is an incredibly effective method to engage with customers and create new monetization opportunities. In addition to basic configuration options such as ‘when’, ‘where’, and ‘how often’ to notify customers, location-based marketing tools allow retailers to leverage Big Data to identify patterns and deliver a wider variety of goods and services. Gartner expects that by 2020, companies using location-aware notifications will see a 5% increase in sales.
Payment24 features a comprehensive white-label mobile platform including loyalty programs, electronic coupons as well as modules that enable retailers to harness mobile technologies for marketing and customer relations, cost-effectively and quickly. With built-in geofencing and BLE beacon capability, retailers are able to take advantage of location-aware technologies, allowing them to send ‘right time’ notifications to attract customers into their stores.
This cost-effective solution is highly configurable and supports dynamic enabling of new features, making mobile app management fast and simple.
With the cost and complexity of the challenges of location-aware mobile marketing now reduced, we expect to see South African retailers speeding up their adoption of mobile solutions to increase their bottom line.
