Business Goals
If you are investing in a mobile app as a core asset for your digital customer engagement, push notifications play a big role in driving digital customer journeys and experiences. And while the user is distracted by far too many notifications, only those that are relevant can actually convert toward your goals.
By reaching your customers via push notifications while they are on-site you can enhance their on-site experience, while building customer loyalty and driving in-store sales.
To send a notification to a mobile user when he is on-site, you need to know its location in real-time. Geofencing allows to easily track user's interactions with predefined regions, such as your stores, to then trigger in real-time a contextual message via push notification.
However, for the app to obtain the user location the users have to grant the OS location permissions. Obtaining tracking permission, especially in the background (when the app is closed), has become harder and harder over the years. Both Android and iOS, in fact, have adopted transparency and privacy measures in recent years that make it quite difficult to obtain, and retain, an always-on location tracking permission (read more about iOS location permissions). Our data shows that in apps for which location is not mission-critical (such as a GPS navigator), the always-in location permission average is between 8% and 17%.
While obtaining "foreground" location tracking permission (when the app is opened) is easier, not all customers do open the app as soon as they visit a physical location, so their location cannot be obtained either in a prompt manner.
Using Cloud4Wi holistic location technology you'll be able to:
- Boost 5X the reach of on-site push notifications
- Boost 2X use of mobile apps while users are on-site
How to implement it
By integrating Cloud4Wi WiFi SDK into your app, you can invite users to enable automatic and secure WiFi connection upon arrival at your locations. The experience to enroll in this benefit takes only one click and it has a very high conversion, especially when adopting UX best practices to present this option to the mobile user.
- You can get started by testing the solution in your network by using the Cloud4Wi demo app toolkit. Just download the app and follow the instructions to set up your WiFI network properly, to start experiencing seamless and secure WiFi connectivity upon entering the range of your test network.
- Once you are confident with the technology, your app developers can follow the technical documentation to embed the SDK in your app.
- Once you have your SDK embedded, configure the Webhooks to stream location events ("Moments") to your mobile marketing stack. But first, check our connectors catalog to see if Cloud4Wi provides already a direct integration with your marketing solution. In the alternative, contact your Cloud4Wi customer success manager to request a custom connector.
By automatically connecting to WiFi all mobile users who have enrolled in the service, Cloud4Wi allows you to track in real-time user visits to your location. Our advanced on-site Moments engine combines multiple signals to identify whenever a user arrives, dwells a certain time, exits from your location, or even an indoor area of your venue.
Tracking these on-site moments does not require the user to grant any location permissions to the mobile app, since is the network infrastructure that detects the user's presence and location, not the app.
Once you have on-site moment streaming to your mobile marketing solution, you can:
- send push notifications to mobile users who just arrived to incentivize them to use the app
- send push notifications to drive improve the on-site experience or drive sales
Please note that despite the fact that the Cloud4Wi solution allows you to track and engage mobile app users regardless of the mobile OS location permissions, you still have to comply with the privacy and data protection regulation and obtain the proper acknowledgment or consent of the customer before collecting, processing or using the location data for any purpose.