5 Ways NFC Technology Can Fine-Tune Your Marketing

Near field communication (NFC) technology brings actionable intelligence to everyday consumer engagements. Data acquired from NFC interactions provides deep insights into a customer’s offline behavior, enabling marketers to open a direct channel for delivering dynamic experiences to customers who have opted in. Marketers can then prompt customers to learn more about the products they purchase, launch videos, enter contests, and much more.

The analytics gained via real-time customer interaction helps marketers improve the customer experience by sharpening customer segmentation and providing more relevant, targeted content in future interactions.

Here are five examples that demonstrate how NFC can elevate customer experiences in the real world and help brand owners fine-tune their marketing campaigns.

1. Solving tough mobile-marketing challenges

NFC enables new ways to find, bond with, and retain customers throughout the consumer journey. For instance, engagement data gathered from NFC-enabled smart liquor bottles revealed the unforeseen popularity of a company’s beverages in a market that it hadn’t previously targeted. The actionable information and increased visibility into its supply chain helped the craft distillery modify its marketing programs and expand its distribution network.

2. Tracking the sales cycle end-to-end

In retail settings, NFC tags or labels are used to launch unique experiences on Apple or Android smartphones, while cloud-based analytics track consumer interaction before, during, and after a sale. If your preferred color isn’t available on the shelf, the tap of a smartphone can instantly order the color you want. Or, scanning an NFC tag can set up a notification for when it’s back in stock.

Following a purchase, analytics can determine what triggered the sale and can be used to tweak marketing messages and advertising campaigns. Each NFC tag is unique to the individual product to which it is affixed. Think of it as item-level intelligence. It’s not just a 750ml bottle of vodka…it’s a specific bottle, with a specific history, belonging only to you — much more than traditional SKU tracking.

Consumer engagement doesn’t end at the point of sale, it continues to the point of use – at home, work, or wherever. Understanding who tapped, when and where, and what they did afterwards provides critical insights for improving brand communications, reducing churn, and prompting repeat sales.

3. A direct channel between physical products and the online world

The sales environment for B2C and B2B transactions has been radically transformed by the proliferation of digital intermediaries such as search engines, e-commerce, online reviews, and social media. With NFC, your digital messaging comes off the shelf straight from your products. Because you control the channel, you can focus on delivering your brand message and calls to action while bypassing dishonest reviews, paid placement on search engines, an e-commerce channels that are increasingly incentivized to push their private label products instead of yours.

4. Rich data, rich analytics

Where was the product purchased and where is it being used? How many times did the customer launch the NFC-triggered experience? Was the product passed along to friends and family, and did any of them launch their own digital experience? Did the engagement lead to a conversion, such as a re-order, up-sell, or cross-sell event?

Data can be collected and analyzed to contextualize consumer interactions with the product, measure the effectiveness of brand messaging, and make real-time adjustments. What emerges is a better understanding of customer attributes and how they are using a product as well as a framework for segmenting the market for distinct personas. NFC interaction data can then be integrated into Adobe Analytics Cloud using unique audience segments and attributes for developing customized, data-driven marketing campaigns.

5. Unforeseen insights

NFC tags provide deep visibility into the physical selling landscape. At Thinfilm we’ve seen our clients launch successful marketing campaigns, and we’ve also seen them use consumer engagement data to reveal surprising insights that would otherwise not be available.

For example: A Scotch whiskey purveyor monitors supply chain performance to get a clearer picture of ship-to-shelf time across its distribution footprint. By monitoring when NFC enabled bottles are scanned by consumers, the brand knows when bottles have reached retail stores and can time its advertising and marketing campaigns more effectively. They’re no longer wasting money on ads or promos when product is still sitting in the warehouse and not on the shelf.

Unique experiences, a different way to connect

As an opt-in solution, NFC puts the customer in the driver’s seat. Your brand’s voice comes through directly, brand loyalty is boosted, and, customer satisfaction increases. Using NFC technology, Thinfilm clients have reported success: 4.5-times more time spent on their websites; engagement rates nearly triple the benchmarks associated with email, search, and social media marketing; 10-times more campaign traffic than social platforms. In addition to this, there is a “Wow!” factor that, while it can’t be quantified, makes a big impact in our attention-based economy.

Thinfilm helps connect the digital and physical worlds through NFC. To learn more about NFC implementation, download contact Thinfilm to see a demo of Thinfilm’s integrated physical + cloud solution for consumer engagement.