Beacons influenced nearly $15B in offline spending Black Friday weekend

The original promise of beacons was real-time, in-store marketing. However, these days it seems that beacon installations are increasingly driven by analytics and attribution.

Making the argument for the original use case, beacon platform provider inMarket announced over the weekend that its beacons “influenced $14.5 billion in consumer spending in physical stores during Black Friday Weekend 2016.” I asked a company spokesperson how inMarket made this determination.

This was the company’s explanation:

It’s an algorithm that takes into account total number of beacon engagements we delivered, which saw a huge spike this year, in various store types across multiple apps; plus actual sales data that we have with certain retail partners that have a closed-loop ecosystem tied to their CRMs and loyalty programs.

In-store beacon-triggered “mobile moments” perform 5x better than traditional mobile marketing/advertising, according to inMarket. The company says it saw more than 370 percent more “beacon detections” in stores during Black Friday weekend this year vs. 2015.

It also says that it can reach more than 25 percent of all smartphone owners in the US through its own apps and those in its partner network. A network of pre-installed apps is critical to beacon reach because of limited installs of specific retailer apps.

The company’s beacons are present in 100,000 locations. Retailers and brands inMarket works with include Heineken, Clorox, Energizer and Rite Aid, among others.

The case-study video below shows an example of the in-store consumer experience using inMarket’s beacon platform.

About The Author

Greg Sterling

Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog, Screenwerk, about connecting the dots between digital media and real-world consumer behavior. He is also VP of Strategy and Insights for the Local Search Association. Follow him on Twitter or find him at Google+.