This sponsored post is produced in association with Skyhook.
Mobile has upped the ante for reaching users at the right time and right place, making location-based services like geo-caching essential tools to marketers. Yet, despite its importance in today’s mobile world, according to Mike Schneider, VP Marketing at Skyhook Wireless, app owners continually fail to properly facilitate location services with their users.
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Of course, that first user experience is key — if your users turn off location services, you’re dead in the water if you want to be able to offer up messages, offers, and location-based services that enhance your users’ experience.
He gives the example of CardStar, a Skyhook client. CardStar eliminates the need to carry a wallet stuffed with loyalty cards by housing them all in a convenient app. However, in the app’s first iteration, users would arrive at a particular retailer, open the Cardstar app, and then need to scroll through all their cards to find the right one. By integrating geofencing technology, the app now recognizes the retail location the user has arrived at, and when a user now opens the app, the right loyalty card pops up for easy scanning.
Yet, if that Cardstar customer doesn’t have location services turned on in the first place, that experience becomes moot. So instead of having location services come up randomly, Schneider says, “We recommend that you don’t turn it on until you’re ready for [users] to use it and you explain how they’re going to get value before they do it because once they turn it on, it unlocks this amazing ability for you to do some really cool stuff from an experience perspective — once they have it on.”
We caught up with Schneider at MobileBeat. Watch the whole video with him below.
Check out Skyhook’s series, “Apptitude,” looking at how app owners can reduce friction, boost user engagement, monetize, and get to the user’s home screen. See all the posts here.
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