The pinnacle of in-store mobile retailing is personal contextual engagement that leads to a sale and this takes a step closer to reality with the roll out of Message Cloud from SmartFocus – and it is set to revolutionise beacon technology by using virtual beacons instead of physical ones.
Message Cloud brings together a host of factors including location, weather, customer age and gender, favourite brands and products, web browsing history, past buying behaviour and abandoned carts, to understand – and then market to – consumers on an ultra-personal level.
As part of The Message Cloud, SmartFocus will also be offering the world’s first virtual beacons that render current beacon technology redundant. Virtual beacons will enable brands to benefit from proximity technology without the constraints of complex hardware integration or maintenance, while still being able to trigger micro location messaging to enable a contextual experience. No other indoor mapping technology can do this using just a floor plan.
Rob Mullen, CEO at SmartFocus, says: “Every customer is on their own unique journey. Motivations to try, buy or stay loyal change depending on the individual making the choice. A brand marketer can ‘own’ that moment by using our Message Cloud technology to harvest and interpret data and create contextualised campaigns that are triggered by customer behaviour; not by their best guess.
“We all know it’s all about mobile and, whether it’s personalised content on a webpage, a mobile push message, a proximity alert or an optimised email, it is now more and more likely to be received and viewed on a smartphone. Brands need to react to that and SmartFocus can help. Mobile has the power of 24/7 access to the ‘remote control’ of your customer’s life and the ability to enable location-based personalised marketing messages better than any other medium.”
One large brand using SmartFocus’s Message Cloud is the UK’s largest toy retailer, the Entertainer . Phil Geary, Chief Marketing Officer for the Entertainer, comments: “SmartFocus helps to make our customer experience be the best it can be, irrespective of what channel we’re using, and the SmartFocus Message Cloud ensures that my team and I can offer perfect user experience every time. Replicating our in-store experience when each and every one of our customers visits our website or receives one of our marketing messages is critical to us. The SmartFocus solution offered us all of the capabilities we needed in a single, comprehensive platform.”
Today’s announcement follows SmartFocus delivering the first view of virtual beacons at this year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona. SmartFocus is an innovator in messaging and communications empowering the world’s largest brands – including Nestlé, Mercedes-Benz, House of Fraser, Macy’s and Levi’s – to understand and reach today’s connected consumers via personalisation for web, mobile, email or social channels. Through The Message Cloud, SmartFocus listens to and learns from customers using patented algorithms and unique location-based marketing tools.
