An organization is not likely to find out how their particular
customers will react to beacon-triggered messages until they try them.
Numerous research studies have shown that a number of consumers are willing and even desire to receive messages based on
location, as long as enough value is provided.
Beacons can technically make the delivery of messages more targeted based on location but they don’t inherently make the message any
better.
And that’s where beacon testing comes in.
A beacon deployment over a large area can provide unexpected insights as well as help determine the limitation of beacon
messaging.
The Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival is held each year in Tennessee and draws upwards of 80,000 attendees.
AC Entertainment, co-founder and producer of the festival, found
that of the 80,000 attendees, 69,000 downloaded the organizer’s mobile app, which could be a great target base for beaconing, which they decided to test.
The idea was to install 120
beacons to see what they could learn and how attendees might react.
“We decided to keep all of our information passive, with 80% to 90% of the beacons just gathering data,” Jeff
Cuellar, vice president of strategic partnerships at AC Entertainment, told me recently.
Cuellar presented some of his findings at the MediaPost IoT: Beacons conference this week.
It
turned out that 20% of those with the app engaged with beaconed messaging.
“We were really shocked to have 20% of people engage with us,” said Cuellar.
And that was with
absolutely no promotion of the feature.
“We made no mention of it,” said Cuellar. “We didn’t advertise it in any type of way and we didn’t actually tell anybody
we were doing it.
“It was more of a passive thing for us to see if our consumers freak out about it, would they think Big Brother is there and monitoring them in ways they don’t
want to be monitored and what are we going to do with this information? These were things that were very top of mind for us.”
The messages that were sent dealt with health, safety and
directions.
For example, if an attendee walked by one of the free hydration stations, they might receive a message asking if their water bottle was filled up.
On average, people
received 13 messages, and feedback showed that it was too many.
Bonnaroo also used the beacon information for heat mapping to see traffic patterns.
They found that during a concert,
20,000 people stayed at the campground for the experience of staying with friends, which changed the thinking of how to interact with fans in the future during the four-day event.
They also
surmised that beacons could play a role in helping create an individual’s traffic pattern, which will be used to create a post-event scrapbook, recreating a person’s experience, such as
showing which bands they saw, which is now in the planning stages.
The festival organization now is in a position to take what it learned, expand upon it and deploy beacons at the next event
to learn even more.
Holding true for beaconing is the age-old mantra of mobile: test and learn.