Beacons meet Hybris Marketing. Match made in heaven?

SAP Hybris Marketing: an introduction

The system is so easy to use that after only a few days, I was able to create and manage personalized marketing campaigns. Discovering all the different possibilities of Hybris Marketing with beacon technology in mind made clear that the combination of the two can be interesting for companies.

The power of beacons

The integration part of beacon technology with Hybris Marketing was challenging. It was the work of different teams in delaware that made this integration possible. First, you need APIs to collect data from our beacon partner Bluepath. Bluepath is an external company that provides the beacons and the platform that captures all the data of the location of a customer. The Rest data from the Bluepath platform is changed into oData on an HCI (Hana Cloud Integration) to import the data into SAP Hybris Marketing. By adding interactions and attributes in the Hybris Marketing back-end, the implementation becomes more and more tangible.

Some hiccups

Not everything went as smoothly as planned. To comply with GDPR, data can only be captured after consumer consent and needs to be transferred as safely as possible. This meant there had to be a whole database-system build to get consent and safely transfer the customer data into Hybris Marketing.

Promising results

Beacon technology has many opportunities when combined with Hybris Marketing. For example, you can tag your customer according to their interests. If a customer visits the bike department of a store, you can suggest they are interested in bikes. Combining this knowledge with the functionalities of Hybris Marketing, such as segmenting and creating target groups, can lift personalized campaigns to the next level. Communication can be more personalized and expanded segmentation possibilities make it possible to create offers that are more tuned to the customer.

Lessons learned

Beacon technology is not perfect. First, you need an application and Bluetooth needs to be active. Next, the customer has to give their consent that you can use their data for marketing reasons. However, when all these thresholds are overcome, the customer experience and marketing campaigns can be enhanced.

It’s a match!

The integration of beacon technology with SAP Hybris Marketing opens many possibilities for further personalization of marketing campaigns and enriches customer information. It makes promotional material for the customer more relevant and interesting.

Author: Olivier Everaert.