Proximity Marketing Using Bluetooth Low Energy

摘要

Proximity marketing is a type of marketing that involves a local approach to advertising using wireless media. Technically, it can be used for use cases which involve advertising to potential users at a particular location. In this paper, we propose to use the technology of Bluetooth Low Energy (Bluetooth 4.0) for proximity marketing at a retail store. Bluetooth Low Energy, a wireless PAN technology, is an eco-friendly form of Bluetooth specifically designed for IoT applications. With the advent of the practice of using the IoT framework for automating processes, an approach to use this technology at a retail store could potentially eradicate the need to hire marketing staff and invest in traditional marketing strategies. This process of automation makes use of devices called beacons for transmitting BLE signals, a mobile application on a smartphone and centralised data storage on a server. Beacons can be detected by a mobile application on a smartphone and beacon specific data regarding particular offers and products can be collected from the centralized storage hosted on a server, which can be used for marketing the retail store's products and offers. This application basically acts as a shopping guide for the customers of that particular retail store. In addition to the automation of the marketing task, machine learning can be used for personalizing offers based on each customer's purchase history. Some other features that can be incorporated into the product include an indoor positioning system, a click and collect facility, payment wallet integration, etc. This approach automates the entire shopping experience and is a novel application of IoT in automating trivial tasks.