Location information has become crucial to marketing teams decision-making process. Teams can optimize their campaigns more if they know how many potential clients are in a given area.
But how can retailers use this location data most effectively? What ad campaigns or strategies will allow them to better target their main audience? Geofencing holds the key.
Geofencing Helps Retailers Understand Customer Preferences
In-store applications are essentially limitless. Some situations regarding customers that geofencing can help retail stores with at a physical location include:
- Comprehending the “why” behind non-purchaser intent
- Recognizing customer demand to satisfy it
- Improving time involved with preparing orders by being notified when customers are approaching
- Helping customers find the products they have been searching for in-store through an app
- Improving wait times
- Informing customers about new products or current specials
You can also use geofencing to limit the prospective clients you attract. While this may seem counterintuitive, focusing your efforts on higher-quality leads near your shop will help you convert more.
Retailers: Use Geofencing For Feedback From Customers
Geofencing’s value is in gathering customer feedback, which allows retailers to identify the primary causes of unhappiness and non-purchasing behaviour within their customer base. Then take appropriate action to fix them.
Businesses can gather client feedback and use that information in real-time to enhance the customer experience. Customers are more inclined to interact with your goods and services, come back frequently, and make further purchases when they believe that a business is personalizing their experience to them instead of taking a general approach.
Mobile marketing or Geo-fencing goes beyond collecting the measurements seen in conventional research to easily provide real-time data. By recording thoughts and feelings while shopping, it offers more consumer insights than survey research alone, allowing your company to create digital, in-depth roadmaps of the path to purchase.
Because surveys are only collected when people enter or leave a particular location or view a certain advertisement, geo-fencing delivers feedback while the experience is still fresh in the respondent’s mind. Retailers, eateries, and manufacturers of packaged products can quickly identify customers using geo-fencing and ask them to participate in a survey using a mobile app.
To better grasp the overall sentiment and the themes/drivers behind purchases, geofencing enables you to dive down into specific areas, channels, etc., when necessary. While geofencing is great for gathering consumer insights, the true advantage is in the activities it enables you to take to more effectively address customer demands.
IKEA and Geofencing Success Through Consumer Insights
Mobile marketing is a powerful tool for companies that has been proven to increase app usage, ROI and offer observable improvements in business performance. IKEA is a prime example of a company that used geofencing to solve the problem of having stores in far-off suburbs.
To encourage customers to visit these remote stores, IKEA used geo-location technology in its marketing activities. Ingenious strategies were also introduced by their marketing team, including “Buy With Your Time,” which allowed customers to convert their trip time into money, and mobile advertisements that calculated journey times to stores based on current traffic conditions. These initiatives increased traffic and encouraged repeat business, showcasing the effectiveness of geofencing in enhancing consumer interaction and fostering business expansion.
IKEA realized their customers’ barrier of not being willing to travel out of their way to visit a store and made use of geofencing to not only help their customers travel to their stores quicker but also develop a marketing campaign around geo-location to entice visitors to specific stores. This is a prime example of the limitless nature of geofencing when it comes to understanding your retail customers better. Forbes lists Geofencing and Mobile Marketing as one of the most attractive advertising methods.
Use Geofencing to Help Improve the Image You Have of Your Target Market
Your geofencing efforts can be made much more successful by using customer data to segment and target your audience. Once a retail shop understands its customer base better, it can make more meaningful marketing strategies which a higher conversion probability.
Personalization
Use your geofencing zones to tailor your messaging using information about your customers. Customers are more likely to connect with and visit a shop after receiving personalized messaging. Example: Offer a customer 50% off their next purchase of the same item they just bought from you.
Segmentation
Once enough information is gathered you can divide your audience into groups. It could be according to their activities, preferences, and previous interactions. Different offers or messaging can be more effective with certain categories and help you use your marketing budget more effectively. Send a BOGO offer to all your customers for certain products. You can hone in on the customers who already bought similar products for a higher ROI.
Geofencing Helps Retailers Know Their Customers
Any company with a physical location should understand how geofencing marketing functions and fully embrace this cutting-edge digital marketing technology. Geofencing can be a significant step for firms aiming to obtain consumer insights in local markets. With so many potential advantages it’s no wonder why retailers are taking advantage of geofencing for their marketing campaigns.