Retailers attraction: Proximity Marketing

By CIOReview | Monday, December 17, 2018

Proximity marketing is all about communication with the customers maintaining the right place, the right time and with highly relevant and personalized messages on their smartphones. Legacy advertisements on televisions, billboards, and radio deliver the appeal but lack in the impulsive drive to avail an offer, or try a new product. Digital technology as beacons bridges the gap between offline and online. Proximity marketing let the businesses and brands sending text messages with the location to mobiles that are in proximity to a Bluetooth network.

Proximity marketing solutions:

Advanced technologies that let proximity marketing happen are Bluetooth beacons, NFC (near field communication), RFID (radio frequency identification) and WiFi.

Proximity marketing using Bluetooth beacons: Bluetooth beacons are the leading proximity marketing technology. According to the study of Proximity Directory Report Q4 2017, 86 percent of the proximity sensors deployed across the world are beacons. Beacons are equipped with Bluetooth low energy and low energy transmitters, used to deliver relevant notification on nearby smartphones.

Proximity marketing with NFC based systems: NFC is enabled to accomplish highly secure payments and applications. NFC works as QR codes because users have to initiate the connection. Today’s smartphones come with NFC chip embedded in them. It allows customers to pay by tapping smartphones against NFC-enabled devices. Users have to bring the phones in proximity to the NFC transmitter to receive messages.

Proximity marketing with WiFi-based systems: Marketers now use WiFi connections to send notifications to the customers. Also, WiFi hosting website sends location-specific content to the customers’ browser.

Proximity marketing with RFID based systems: RFID tags are used to track stored product movement and inventory. The tag is similar to the barcode scanners that are used in the retail stores only except that RFID needs the object and the scanner to be in the line of sight. The tags that the RFID called semi-passive tags that have their power supply to activate themselves, but for transmitting data, they have to depend on the reader’s power supply.

One of the biggest strengths of proximity marketing is its ability to deliver the right message, to the right user, at the right time and it is getting the popularity among the leading technological companies.