With the rising influence of digital – online and mobile interaction on offline shopping behavior, retailers are looking at ways to increasingly weave the mobile shopper journey in the retail experiences they seek to provide. According to Media Post one of the retailers that has found success by integrating digital behavior with location-based services is Walgreens.

The Walgreens App is used by an estimated 55 percent of consumers while roaming the drugstore chain’s aisles. In addition to supporting its 100 million-member Balance Rewards loyalty program, Walgreens is testing iBeacon technology at some of its New York stores, and found that those who are targeted by iBeacon are more than 16 times more likely to use its app in-stores, which in turn increases basket size.

According to Flurry Analytics, time spent on retail apps represents 86 percent of time spent on the Mobile web.

Apps in addition to delivering personalized offers, better UX for customers, increase engagement and better ROI on campaigns by targeting more loyal customers and provide brands and publishers avenues for targeted campaigns with push-notifications and Location based data.

According to Lauren Moores, “Passive location data, specifically lat/long, is a by-product of opt-in user brand app usage, check-ins, photo tagging, social posts and more. Location data can be used to move beyond geo-fencing and targeting users based on geography to providing a signal for mobile based audience models and in-store measurement. The key to location-based metrics is to tie location to other attributes: brick and mortar brands, events, behavioral propensities or any other audience signal that can be associated to a geographical area.

The magic of location data is the power of its signal when it is accurate and associated with other relevant metadata. Once location is in context, we can connect digital campaign information to the corresponding audience interaction in the physical world to achieve that dream of measuring the effect of online brand interactions to offline sales as we know online channels have increasing influence on offline sales.”

Target has said it views “mobile as the new front door to Target”, and that mobile front door is increasingly in-app. In 2014,  68 percent of time spent on Target mobile properties was in-app vs. web, up from 21 percent in 2013, according to Comscore. Retailers need to adjust to the new reality of a multitude of stores in every consumer’s pocket, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

 Location Based Messaging For Targeting App Users

Moving beyond clicks and impressions, harnessing location data requires maximizing the shoppers’ attention in store as they are most likely to engage with your campaigns and offers. Here are five ways brands can maximize the potential of apps while targeting audiences in-store:

Micro location (and iBeacon):Create targeted campaigns for in-store shopper to create engagement as well as brand awareness. Customers are more likely to respond to targeted campaigns for your product while in-store shopping or even using click to collect service. Behavioral propensities available through social media channels and interactions can be built into targeting options to create get more on site conversions.

Trigger buying intent:  Beacons make it possible to trigger specific information based on the purchase history of the buyer.

Product Locators: Adding Product Locators to your app can help you in identifying the areas that are most frequented as well as how to optimize your messaging in the hot spots.

Segmentation: Segment your audience based on purchase behavior or life-style to arrive at the optimum messaging mix. If your audience is a value seeker then target them with savings or a low-price offer. For a reward point customer the same offer can be targeted with accelerated rewards offer.

Remarketing: Use your website data to target the audience with remarketing through in-app location-based offers. Target says customers who use its primary iPad app are very social, and that its updated iPad app will play off of that social success and showcase Target customers’ social posts on networks including Pinterest. The updated iPad app also will enable shoppers to personalize the home page by choosing which categories to feature.

For App Publishers, the revenues from in-app advertising are likely to grow at about 60 percent a year and are expected to surpass PC online display ad revenue by 2017, according to a report by market researchers IDC and AppAnnie.