Better targeting with xamoom 10 »Bruno Gironcoli«

Geo push, loyalty, barcodes and more: How relevance drives usage of mobile projects.

No one likes interruptions – neither on vacation nor (certainly) when you have important things to do. Therefore, relevance is the key to using a mobile service.

It must fit. When we need an answer. When we need help in a particular situation. When we need a tip for a place to visit. A push message from the holiday destination must not reach us after the holidays. Period.

Relevance is critical, and xamoom 10 (dedicated to Carinthian sculptor Bruno Gironcoli) takes full account of this. In the just-released version, we have integrated features for more relevance, which drive usage.

Geo push

Geo-push: A push notification sent to people inside or outside a geographic boundary.
Geo-push: A push notification sent to people inside or outside a geographic boundary.

Push messages (available since summer 2018) are the best way to enable app users. However, they can sometimes only be relevant in a specific area. If something with "Pieps! Pieps! "Comes along, without being relevant, the app is often uninstalled, and you lose a communication channel to the customer.

Applications for geo push (new in xamoom 10) are manifold:

  • Geo push: Messages reach only users within a geographic area.
    - Information about an event can interest users within a region but not those outside of it (for example, vacationers who have already left)
    - Regionally limited actions (e.g., opening offers of a new subsidiary)
    - Information to a particular target audience (for example at a big festival)
  • Reverse geo push: Messages reach only to users outside a geographic area.
    - A goal alert is not relevant for fans in the stadium. They have already cheered. But it is valuable to those outside the arena.
    - Information on arrival at a big event (does not interest those who are already on site)
    - Marketing push to all users outside the tourism region (for example, next-stay voucher)

Geo-Push is accurate to a few feet. It assumes, however, that the user has given consent to the use of the location. It also takes a while to get the current location data.

Of course, the information of the push message is multilingual, and you can use emojis (30 percent higher opening rates!).

Centralized beacon management

Efficiency is key to a successfull beacon roll-out
Efficiency is key to a successfull beacon roll-out

Bluetooth beacons are usually installed permanently – in locations where they supply the desired target area as well as possible (not always as vast as possible). Therefore, it is sometimes not easy to turn them on and off or temporarily remove their batteries. As a result, vendors like kontakt.io can configure iBeacons centrally from the office. However, you then have to be in the beacon's range to update the configuration.

xamoom 10 jumps in for you. Not only can you change the content of each location from anywhere. You can also switch the Bluetooth transmitter on and off – directly in the CMS with just a few mouse clicks.

This is used for events, for example, when many have to “beep” at once – almost from zero to iBeacon.

Loyalty, sweepstakes and more

A beer cap is often used for sweepstakes. Problem: fraud is high.
A beer cap is often used for sweepstakes. Problem: fraud is high.

Increasingly, dynamic QR codes are a thing in marketing. The term refers to QR codes (with xamoom also supporting NFC tags, beacons or geofences), whose content can be changed: With xamoom 10 it also works automatically and depending on the user's situation and context.

How do you identify and reward loyal customers? With a smartphone, you can (anonymously) know how often someone is in a particular place. Since the release of xamoom 10 you can provide different pages – depending on how often someone was on site. This is detected in an app via a Bluetooth beacon.

If a certain threshold is exceeded (for example, 5 visits in the last 7 days), you could offer the guest a voucher.

Competitions or sweepstakes with xamoom 10 work with the same technique (called “conditional content”). Instead of printing 100,000 bottles or crown corks with 100,000 codes, just a single one will do the job. Because custom printing is expensive, a lot of money can be saved.

How it works: The app is necessary to scan the code. Pure coincidence decides who wins. The game organizer determines the probability (x percent of scans) and the maximum number of winnings. Non-winners will see page A and winners page B. The pages themselves cannot be shared with friends.

A bit more insecure, but without barriers, participation in such sweepstakes is possible on the mobile web.

Another mechanism provides variety: The first scan (or any interaction with QR, NFC, iBeacon, etc.) serves page A, the second serves B, the third scan page C ... and so on.

So you can always tell a new story in the same place or object – of course, in any number of language versions.

There is a whole range of other possibilities that work out-of-the-box (without separate development cost). If you need even more flexibility ... tell to us more about your application:

Insights from data

A dashboard full of charts is waiting for our customers
A dashboard full of charts is waiting for our customers

Insights from data

We believe in data and that it can provide insights into every business and give hints on optimization. That's why we've offered a range of analytics tools right from the start: simple usage statistics, the integration of Google Analytics, and the delivery of raw data from our log files.

With xamoom 10, we have improved our statistics. Not only do we now have new charts, but we also offer a usage forecast over the next few days.

New applications for barcodes

Only with xamoom: You can scan barcodes and get information on the product
Only with xamoom: You can scan barcodes and get information on the product

Recently, our apps have learned to scan many machine-readable codes: barcodes according to EAN or UPC, DataMatrix, Aztec, Code 39/93/128, 2of5 and many more.

What is the advantage of using them in comparison to the QR code, which can be read by a wide range of scanners?

  • Hide content: The advantage is precisely that only our scanners can do something with the information in the code (e.g., 44332211). Only apps that can check the xamoom backend, what information is behind 44332211, can serve the content.
  • “Force” users into an app: Audio guides offer great value – many of us pay for them. If an audio guide is offered for free – but in an app – for many, this is a motivation to install an app. Voilà! From now on, a (push) communication with this user is possible.
  • Packages already rolled out: Barcodes like EAN or UPD are practical especially if their products are rolled out already millions of times. So it is possible, in retrospect, to tell a story about the product. This is also useful if there is no space on the packaging for a QR code (and a necessary explanation of the benefits).

This also works with any number of languages: Austrians and Germans get the content in their language as well as French or Italian – using the very same code.

With open maps

A comparison of Mapbox's Open Streetmap material with Google Maps
A comparison of Mapbox's Open Streetmap material with Google Maps

Google Maps is great for getting from A to B by car. But it is not useful when it comes to the orientation away from roads – in forests, on mountains, or in nature parks, there are only large gray areas.

While Google Maps (see image on the right) is created by a company, there are tens of thousands of volunteers at OpenStreetMap (OSM, above on the left) who are creating and continuously updating map data. The quality of OSM's data maps is – especially in Central Europe – much better and there are details that you can not find at Google (hiking trails, forest roads or even footpaths).

Our map provider has been Mapbox since xamoom 10. This allows us to display maps in different styles (outdoor, road, etc.). Mapbox is very developer-friendly, and we will bring many more map features.

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