Tag: walgreens

The company is now pushing the use of geolocation options to customers through their mobile app.

Walgreens geolocation beacons are taking a much more central role in the latest mobile app update. The application is now pushing the use of the store’s beacons with offers of location based deals such as coupons.

The Walgreens chain has been testing the use of location based beacons in certain specific stores.

The Walgreens geolocation testing first started in February and has been focused on Duane Reade locations. The store expects that these additional mobile marketing tools will help it to record an increases in sales. At the same time, the company has expressed certain concerns about barriers to widespread adoption.

For this reason, Walgreens is being very careful and strategic about the way it is approaching location based marketing. It is seeking to ensure that its offers and features are always within its shoppers’ comfort zones.

The reason is that Walgreens geolocation uses tech that has caused consumers elsewhere to voice concerns.

Location based beacons have the potential to boost both engagement and sales while in-store at Walgreens. This mobile technology is seen as particularly promising when it comes to selling consumer packaged goods (CPGs).

Moreover, recent studies have shown that CPG shoppers are interested in receiving discount coupons. BI Intelligence reported that 61 percent of American shoppers who had never used geolocation in-store would opt-in in exchange for receiving mobile coupons and discounts from a retailer.

Furthermore, that same report said that 47 percent of US shoppers would opt in to location based messages in exchange for loyalty rewards. Since CPG purchases happen exceptionally regularly, Walgreens may be on to something in using location based tech to offer in-store savings opportunities. This has the potential to boost total sales and customer loyalty.

In fact, the same report indicated that beacons such as those used by the Walgreens geolocation program are already making a difference. It estimated that $8 billion in CPG sales was influenced by the receipt of some form of beacon-triggered message while shopping in-store. That represents 2 percent of the total CPG sales in the United States.

The pharmacy chain has decided to boost its in-store offerings through the use of a customer’s own smartphone.

Now that about three quarters of all adults in the United States have smartphones, Walgreens has decided that this is an opportunity that is too good to pass up and it has now added mobile apps to its shopping experience in order to make sure that it is as easy and convenient as possible.

Three out of every four people in the U.S. also have a Walgreens within five miles of where they live.

This means that most people have both a smartphone and a local Walgreens, making mobile apps an ideal opportunity to reach out to customers and improve their experience in-store. By doing this, the chain is also hoping that it will encourage people to buy more, while they’re there. The idea has to do with providing the ultimate in convenience. This smartphone application makes it possible to conduct searches for products in the store, to learn more about what they’re seeing in front of them with connected devices, and even to obtain savings opportunities with digital coupons.

The mobile apps also allow customers to fill their prescriptions with a few taps of their smartphones.

At the time that this article was written, Walgreens had not revealed how many users its smartphone app actually had, but the application continually finds itself among the top 10 lifestyle apps within the Google Play and iOS stores.

According to the Walgreens director of digital commerce product management, Adam Crouch, “Offline and online have blurred in the minds of consumers, so almost everything we do digitally ties back to stores in some way.” He went on to add that “We’re figuring out how to use digital to take convenience to the next level.”

The pharmacy chain now has a team that is dedicated to rebuilding the company based on a kind of “digital DNA,” said Crouch, who also pointed out that the company’s primary focus is on customer convenience. By putting a digital strategy into place, it helps to make sure that Walgreens will be more flexible and capable of adapting to the latest consumer behavior and expectation trends, particularly when it comes to the shape of its mobile app.