SmartFocus Launches Virtual Beacons as Part of Message Cloud Offering

SmartFocus VirtualBeacons
Using Message Cloud, store staff can create zones in a store by drawing them onto a floorplan in the system

SmartFocus has launched the Message Cloud, which is designed to offer brand marketers a holistic view of their customers and enable them to deliver more personalised marketing interactions.

SmartFocus says the Message Cloud will process unstructured customer data to automatically personalise and contextualise all customer communications. Using a host of factors including location, weather, customer age and gender, favourite brands and products, web browsing history, past buying behaviour and abandoned carts, The Message Cloud will listen to and learns from a brand’s customers.

As part of The Message Cloud offering, SmartFocus will be offering what it says is the the world’s first virtual beacons that, it also says, render current beacon technology redundant. The virtual beacon tech relies on a single physical beacon located near the entrance to a store, as opposed to a typical deployment of multiple physical beacons in different sections of a store. This beacon will interact with shoppers’ phones to triangulate their position within the store and target them with offers or messages from different parts of the store that can be input into the Message Cloud system by marking the zones on a store floorplan. To change the location of a zone, it simply needs to be redrawn on the store floorplan.

“Every customer is on their own unique journey,” said SmartFocus CEO, Rob Mullen. ”Motivations to try, buy or stay loyal change depending on the individual making the choice. A brand marketer can ‘own’ that moment by using our Message Cloud technology to harvest and interpret data and create contextualised campaigns that are triggered by customer behaviour; not by their best guess.

“We all know it’s all about mobile and, whether it’s personalised content on a webpage, a mobile push message, a proximity alert or an optimised email, it is now more and more likely to be received and viewed on a smartphone. Brands need to react to that and SmartFocus can help. Mobile has the power of 24/7 access to the ‘remote control’ of your customer’s life and the ability to enable location-based personalised marketing messages better than any other medium.”

Toy retailer The Entertainer has already deployed the Message Cloud solution. Its CMO, Phil Geary, said: “SmartFocus helps to make our customer experience be the best it can be, irrespective of what channel we’re using, and the SmartFocus Message Cloud ensures that my team and I can offer perfect user experience every time. Replicating our in-store experience when each and every one of our customers visits our website or receives one of our marketing messages is critical to us. The SmartFocus solution offered us all of the capabilities we needed in a single, comprehensive platform.”