Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Ibeacons Conference With Mowingo In Paris



I attended on December 11th a conference at l'Echangeur about Ibeacon and mobile usage in store. It was the occasion to meet with Daniel Dreymann, founder of Mowingo. The conference was organized by le Cercle du Marketing Direct and Laurence Faguer.

The company was created 4 years ago to help brands engage with customers both nationwide and locally. Mowingo has amongst its best clients Mc Donald's among others.

Mowingo has been working for some time now on Ibeacon.

Here are the main insights of this conference.

Key data in mobile usage.
  • 41% of customers use store apps while in store.
  • 59% of them do so to get coupons
  • 50% of people who uses coupons buy a brand they did not plan to buy prior to the visit.
Difference between mobile website and applications: "Mobile websites create prospects, apps create loyalty".


Retailers can leverage their store network in order to anchor their CRM locally. 

Retail applications should generate multiple and frequent interractions.
It is never good to have a sleeping app. Therefore, you should find triggers for people to use your application on a daily basis. For example, Mc Donald's application give every day and extra something if people use it as an alarm clock. It can goes from a free burger, to an mp3 song. As Mc Donald's secure the customer will have an active response of its customers, it maximizes the efficiency of the message.

Better understanding of customers
Mobile marketing tools allow corporation to better understand the customer locally via KPIs given to local managers. Local management is hence empowered with local data to make local decisions. Beacons blended with Big data potential may give a lot of power to CRM, by knowing more about the shopping experience.

What beacons really are
Beacons are bluetooth beacons, that send a signal. The same beacon may be used either on Android or Iphones. The beacon only send messages, it can't think messages through. It sends messages between 25 to 40 meters. The beacons geolocalize the shopper and hence, the shopper may have different beacons activated at the same time. Each beacons have the same ID.

The key advantages of beacons are:
  • It is sharper to locate someone than any other categories.
  • It consumes few energy for the phone, as it uses low energy bluetooth.
  • The equipment for a store is relatively cheap.

When to use beacons
Beacons don't need an application to be activated to send messages. But that does not mean a beacon should send messages at all time. It is important to understand when to use the beacon depending on the time and the target. 


The future of beacons
Obviously, the conference has raised a lot of questions about how to use it, the full potential of it, and when it will really be part of our every day life. Obviously,technologies using geolocalization through mobile phones have been existing for at least ten years. Even GMS technologies were used ten years ago in Japan to locate customers. The beacons technology is obviously the most promising one, and we live in a connected world, that knows how to use mobile technology. It should help beacons to spring up. But I'll discuss probably further about the topic soon, to give you more insights.