This year, we’re going to hear a lot about iBeacon technology. A wide variety of sports stadiums and shops have started to incorporate iBeacons into their overall flow. This could be a tremendous experience. Or an annoyance.

The key is to anticipate the consumer needs and think benefits, not features. Every unasked for iBeacon interaction should have a clear benefit to the receiver. Unasked for marketing pushes will get old very quickly and tarnish the technology in consumer’s minds.

From the linked article:

The next six months will see some winning and losing iBeacon-enabled experiences, and businesses will need to quickly mature their approaches and become more customer-centric. Our key recommendations include:

• Establish the expectation for valuable, relevant messages through your app’s regular push notifications
• Use individual app preferences and behaviors to tailor beacon-triggered messages
• Use responses to those messages as additional signals about users’ interests and preferences for ongoing segmentation
• Build logic and trigger management into iBeacon deployments, including frequency caps and timing delays so you don’t over-message your audience
• Leverage dwell times and distances from iBeacon to finesse messaging

To keep shoppers tuned in and turned on, relevancy rules. If it’s done well, your customers will feel as if they’ve gained a personal shopper — an advocate, even — someone looking out for them, finding them the best deals and delivering personalized service where and when it’s needed most.

These are good thinking points. Let’s get this right. I’m looking forward to the coming wave.