SA retailers need to get to grips with location-based messaging

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 the full potential of 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 personalised, relevant notifications based on customer interest, past buying behaviour 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.

Paradigm Groups’ new retail and commercial platform, Payment24, features a comprehensive white label mobile platform including loyalty programmes, 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 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.