Marketing with Mobile Push Notifications in a Location Specific Context

Businesses have employed different tactics over the years to market directly to individual consumers. These range from blind mailing flyers to direct targeted Internet advertisements. Many forms of marketing are effective, but none of them incorporate contextual information based on a person’s current location in real time. Apple’s iBeacon technology and the Bluetooth LE protocol make this easier than ever. Beacons can be placed in physical locations throughout a store and emit pulses that mobile applications can subscribe to. In this project, a highly scalable marketing system using iBeacon and the iOS platform was built to send push notifications to users based on their proximity to the University Book Store. Content was provided to people to draw them into the bookstore for the purpose of increasing foot traffic and ultimately increasing sales. Analytics were captured to answer questions about how many people walk through the building housing the book store, how many users received notifications and how many acted on them.