Epicurious Taps Swirl In-Store Mobile Beacons

With a growing number of consumers using smartphones to research products and compare prices while shopping, retailers and marketers are partnering with media companies to gain access to their app users in-store.

Epicurious, Condé Nast’s digital platform for all things food, has partnered with Swirl Networks, which operates in-store mobile beacons powered by Bluetooth Smart and Apple iBeacon.

The collaboration will allow marketers to deliver personalized offers, tips, meal ideas and related lifestyle content to smartphone owners who have downloaded the Epicurious mobile app whenever they are near Swirl beacons in retail venues. The messages can be targeted to specific locations in a store to reach shoppers by product category, as well as by the behavior of mobile app users who opt in to the service.

Swirl’s previously announced retail partners include Lord & Taylor, Hudson’s Bay, Timberland, and Kenneth Cole stores nationwide.

In April, Epicurious announced that it was joining the inMarket Mobile to Mortar beacon platform, which launched in January with the goal of connecting advertisers to shoppers in the retail environment. Through the partnership with inMarket Mobile to Mortar, the Epicurious Recipes & Shopping List mobile app enables smartphones to recognize the shopper’s immediate surroundings in “smart locations” and alert them to relevant content.

The Mobile to Mortar Network is currently live in grocery and big-box stores in major U.S. metro areas, including Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Seattle.

While adoption remains fairly limited, early data from beacon deployments in supermarkets is promising: back in July Hillshire Brands’ agency BPN conducted an analysis and found that purchase intent increased 20-fold among shoppers exposed to messages sent from beacons in grocery stores. The campaign was deployed in the top 10 markets for grocers nationally and involved thousands of beacons that could send messages to iOS and Android phones. Shoppers using apps such as Epicurious, Zip List, Key Ring and CheckPoints could receive in-store messages.

1 comment about "Epicurious Taps Swirl In-Store Mobile Beacons ".
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  1. Dov Cohn from Bronto Software, August 12, 2014 at 11:34 a.m.

    So does this mean that Epicurious will access/leverage both Swirl and InMarket beacons, or have they replaced inMarket? Can you leverage multiple beacon networks?

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