Signal to Sale: How Ultrasonic Tech is Solving Retail’s Attribution Problem
For all retailers, the physical store remains crucial for customer conversion, but the rapid expansion of digital channels has created a non-linear path from awareness to purchase. The exponential increase in consumer touchpoints makes it nearly impossible for industry leaders to draw a clear line across the whole customer journey. This disruption in the funnel universally impacts big box stores, CPGs, and small brick-and-mortar merchants alike.
How are companies supposed to invest resources into promotion campaigns when conversion metrics are basically a shot in the dark?
The Problem: In today’s retail ecosystem, merchants only truly know their customers at checkout, but by then, it’s too late. If businesses could identify their consumers throughout the entire shopping journey, they could present personalized offerings at critical stages of the buying process and understand full attribution of which promotions worked and which didn’t.
The Game Plan:
- Recognize which customers viewed certain TV promotions at-home
- Identify customers when they enter the store
- Present customers with personalized offerings during their shopping experience to increase spend or highlight higher margin items
- Cultivate unique shopping experiences that increase word of mouth marketing
- Gamify the checkout experience to make consumers excited for their next visit.
With this equation, your retail store doesn’t become an option; it becomes the destination.
The Solution: LISNR’s Radius, an ultrasonic SDK capable of sending data over inaudible sound using standard speakers and microphones. Radius transmits data using frequencies higher than what humans can hear allowing these “tones” to be layered over TV broadcasts and in-store music/announcements. Our Zone66 tone profile can send data over 30 feet from standard speakers and can be used to identify a consumer and their relative location within the physical store. Once identified, merchants can send personalized offerings directly to the consumer’s device as they are in front of specific products.
Furthermore, LISNR offers Quest, a loyalty management platform that enables tracking of consumers’ purchase history and incentivizes future purchases. Utilizing the gamified nature of Quest at checkout, consumers can track their progress toward rewards and redemption, keeping the store top of mind.
The Proliferation of LISNR-Enabled Digital Touchpoints
LISNR capitalizes on digital touchpoints by enabling the delivery of valuable and personalized offers directly to consumers at various touchpoints found in everyday shopping experiences. By integrating with LISNR, retailers can enable attribution within their existing infrastructure.
At-Home Television
Retail media, CTV, and linear TV ad spend is projected to be around $5 billion in 2025, according to MediaPost. Retailers clearly understand the value in advertising through television; however, realizing the ROI is much more difficult. How can businesses confidently attribute an advertisement to an uptick in purchases at checkout? The answer is Radius.
Radius’ ultrasonic tones can be played simultaneously with a normal TV audio broadcast. Image 1 shows an example of a Radius tone at a frequency far above standard broadcast audio being played at the human audible level. Retailers can utilize any audio stream to encourage their consumers to open their app and engage or receive a promotion. What better way to embrace the ever-present second screen?
Retailers can either broadcast a single offer to all consumers or offer a personalized coupon based on their previous shopping behavior.
In-Store Audio
In-store audio, whether music or PA announcements, is commonplace in retailers and is often drowned out as white noise. As a result, in-store audible advertisements often fall short, with retailers relying on consumers to be actively listening. Again, Radius can break this paradigm.
By operating simultaneously with in-store audio, consumers are seamlessly presented with personalized offers via their device. The Radius SDK even allows data to be transmitted over three distinct audio frequencies or “channels” to prevent overlapping messages. Image 2 demonstrates how three distinct data streams can be played simultaneously over audio.
For this use case, retailers can broadcast “Zone IDs” in-store to locate consumers and present relevant messaging. Once the consumer’s device receives the Zone ID for the store, the retailer’s backend app logic is able to present the consumer with a personalized offering. App logic can also be set up to limit the amount of promotions a consumer receives in a given timeframe.
At-Checkout
Many of today’s shopper cards or loyalty programs are either a black box for consumers, or a percentage discount disguised as loyalty points. This does nothing to create loyal or engaged customers. LISNR instead offers Quest, a gamified loyalty platform.
By creating gamified experiences, Quest taps into a different mindset of the consumer, building a connection to merchants while increasing transaction size and volume. Quest is not just about dollars spent; it empowers retailers to incentivize any customer action (visits, specific item purchases, referrals) that they deem impactful. Consumers can interact with time-based criteria (quests) or lifetime progression (achievements) to track their loyalty and redeem rewards.
Quest’s data builds a positive feedback loop for consumer preferences. As consumers shop more frequently, their preferences become more defined allowing retailers to present more relevant offers. These offers in turn incentivize consumers to come back, spend more in-store, and look forward to their next visit.
Conclusion
By establishing a channel from awareness to conversion, retailers can capitalize on the power of targeted marketing and attribution. Retailers no longer need to guess at their ROI vs cost per impression, LISNR leads to insights of cost per conversion. Add personalized loyalty into the mix and you begin to see the LISNR flywheel for retailers.
We’ve created an easily digestible overview of this process, highlighting the digital touchpoints for consumers in-store. Fill out your contact information below to download a digital copy for you and your team.