How a $3.9B market is helping bridge the online and offline worlds

Digital marketing is a force of nature. Startups and established companies alike are using the online world to grow at rates never before imagined.

But for many, the online world also causes negative knock-on effects in the offline world. If we all buy our products in cyberspace, where will that lead, and what will it mean for businesses with a “real world” presence?

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Fortunately, there is a lot happening to bridge the online and offline worlds, bringing fully integrated marketing and sales processes together so that both sides prosper. For companies that haven’t yet managed to connect the dots, we’ll be discussing ways to achieve this synergy during GrowthBeat in San Francisco next month.

Take the smart beacon marketplace as an example.

In my recent report on consumer attitudes to personalization in marketing, I noted that the “Bluetooth smart & smart ready” market was worth $2.3 billion in 2013 and is expected to reach $3.9 billion by 2020. There’s a reason for this level of growth.

Marketing technology company Swirl Networks analyzed in-store campaign performance data from tens of thousands of shopper interactions over a three month period.

The results reveal that in-store beacon marketing campaigns are having a high impact on shopper behavior.

In particular, 60 percent of the shoppers studied opened and engaged with beacon-triggered content, and 30 percent of shoppers redeemed beacon-triggered offers at the point of purchase. These activities keep the shopper engaged, and increase the chance that they’ll buy right there, right then, rather than shopping around and taking their business elsewhere.

Truly integrated campaigns use offline shopping data to personalize offers for shoppers when they next go online.

Beacons aren’t just for retail applications, either.

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Tealium has used smart beacons to better understand attendee behavior at conferences. It uses beacons at events with personalized messaging to help drive attendees to the right place at the right time, and togather important information on whether sessions, exhibitors, and other conference features are resonating or not. This offline data helps to customize online messaging, and ensure that attendees get the most from their conference.

But you don’t have to use smart beacons to connect online and offline data in interesting ways.

Meat Pack shows how location can be used to offer something exciting and surprising to its customers in a more personal way; on a smartphone.

Who is Meat Pack? A shoe store in Guatemala with over 115,000 likes on Facebook, the company is known for being trendy and edgy, and has a youth-based audience that lives online; specifically, on their smartphones.

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In an innovative marketing campaign, Meat Pack used GPS data to determine if one of its customers was visiting a competitor’s store, which triggered a response on the customer’s smartphone.

In what was called a “hijack” campaign, the app flashed a discount offer on the mobile screen that started at 99 percent and counted down by 1 percent per second until the customer reached the Meat Pack store. In other words, the faster customers left the competition behind and got to a Meat Pack location, the more money they could save on a new pair of kicks.

The result? During the campaign, Meat Pack “hijacked” over 600 customers from competitors’ stores.

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If you want to learn more about connecting offline and online marketing for optimal results, you won’t want to miss GrowthBeat. We’ll have informative, actionable insights from speakers such as:

• Joe Megibow, CDO, American Eagle Outfitters
• Lara Balazs, Head of North America Marketing, Visa
• Baron Concors, Chief Digital Officer, Pizza Hut
• Kieran Hannon, CMO, Belkin

We’re incredibly excited to kick off this event on August 17 and August 18 at the Parc 55 in San Francisco.

To join us, grab your ticket here.