How to Master Geofencing: 6 Tips You May Like
In today’s digital age, geofencing has become a competitive necessity for businesses aiming to thrive in the modern marketplace. Geofencing, a location-based technology that creates virtual boundaries around physical areas, has emerged as a powerful tool that can redefine the way companies engage with their customers. Geofencing campaigns have been found to be more effective than other marketing strategies.
From enhancing marketing strategies to improving operational efficiency, geofencing offers different opportunities for businesses of all sizes. In this blog post, we’ll dive into geofencing and share six invaluable tips that can help you harness its potential to boost your business’s success. Whether you’re a local brick-and-mortar store or a global e-commerce brand, understanding and implementing these geofencing strategies may just be the competitive edge you’ve been seeking.
How to Master Geofencing
What is Geofencing?
Geofencing is a cutting-edge technology within location-based marketing, which uses the power of GPS, Wi-Fi, Cellular Data, and RFID (radio-frequency identification) technologies to establish a digital fence around designated geographical areas.
Businesses frequently use this approach to connect with their target audience in precise locations, delivering tailored and personalized promotions or incentives. Geofencing allows marketers to trigger various forms of engagement, such as notifications, messages, advertisements, SMS alerts, or even emails, ensuring that their outreach is contextually relevant and highly effective. If you want to learn more about Geofencing technology and other location-based marketing methods, you can read our previous article here.
6 Important Tips on Geofencing
We have gathered with our Success Managers and Product Owners to provide you with useful tips on Geofencing. By sharing our expertise and insights, we aim to empower you to make the most out of this powerful tool. With the right approach and understanding, you can elevate your geofencing campaigns and achieve remarkable results for your business.
1. Define clear objectives.
In the world of geofencing, having a well-defined roadmap is the compass that guides your brand to success. Before you start on your geofencing adventure, it’s essential to establish clear and specific objectives. Think of it as setting your destination before starting a journey. Are you aiming to boost foot traffic to your physical store, engage customers in a particular location, or streamline your operations? Defining your goals not only helps you on your way to success by giving you a clear path but also allows you to keep track of your progress by tracking the right Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
Let’s say you own a coffee shop, and you set up a geofence around a nearby office building during morning hours. When people working there enter the geofenced area, they receive a notification with a special discount for your coffee shop. This incentive encourages them to visit your store on their way to work, and you boost traffic to your physical store.
Or, think about a massive museum and you want to enhance the visitor experience. How can you do it by setting a simple geofence? Well, you can send informative notifications to visitors’ smartphones as they approach different exhibits around the museum. This provides valuable insights and engages visitors with interesting facts, making their visit more interactive and educational.
You run a delivery service, and you implement geofencing to optimize your delivery routes. Geofences are set around delivery zones, and as drivers enter or exit these areas, your system automatically assigns them new orders or updates delivery instructions. This streamlines the entire delivery process, reducing delivery times and increasing efficiency.
You may ask, can your business, without any brick-and-mortar stores, still harness the power of Geofencing to boost customer engagement? The answer is – yes.
Consider a music streaming platform, for instance. While it lacks a physical store, it can still leverage Geofencing to enhance user engagement.
How, you ask?
By setting up different geofences across different cities or even the entire country. Customers who enter or exit those specific locations can be triggered and targeted with push notifications. Imagine welcoming your users to a new city with a specially curated playlist, perfectly tailored to the vibe of the city.
This clever use of Geofencing allows businesses without physical stores to create unique and personalized experiences, allowing deeper connections to be made with its audience.
2. Know your audience.
Understanding your audience is essential to mastering geofencing and ensuring its success for your business. Begin by gaining a deep insight into your target demographic. Segment your audience based on their unique interests and preferences, and carefully consider the kind of content that will resonate with them. Your promotions address their needs and desires, prompting them to take action.
Take the time to research where your audience likes to go, what activities they engage in, and their preferred hangout spots. By knowing their favorite locations and routines, you can strategically set up geofences around these areas, allowing you to effectively target and engage them where they already spend their time.
Netmera’s Powerful Segmentation has the ability to build unified user profiles in real-time across various channels and offers brands and businesses a comprehensive understanding of their audience. This knowledge empowers businesses to retain users over the long term and increase their lifetime value through engaging and personalized experiences.
Netmera’s predictive segments allow you to proactively reduce churn and boost conversions by identifying users with a high propensity to churn or make additional purchases. Additionally, the platform enables you to re-engage inactive users, ensuring that you don’t miss out on the valuable customers you’ve already acquired. Netmera’s segmentation tools are your key to a data-driven, effective user retention and conversion strategy.
3. Pay attention to the size of the geofence.
When it comes to defining the size of your geofence, bigger isn’t always better. While a larger mile radius might expand your reach, it doesn’t guarantee immediate foot traffic to your brand.
For brick-and-mortar stores, if your potential customers have to travel 20-25 minutes to reach your location, they may decide to delay or skip their visit altogether. Instead, opting for a more modest geofence that can be reached within a five-minute stroll or short drive is a clever choice. This strategy allows you to concentrate your efforts on attracting customers who are more likely to visit your store.
Our Customer Success Team Lead, Ezgi Gul Eris, emphasizes that Geofence sizes can actually be smaller depending on the purpose.
“If it’s a specific entrance for a particular location, narrowed-down Geofences can work effectively. However, if it’s near an airport, broader Geofences are more suitable. It’s important to note that when we narrow down the Geofenced area, we inevitably reach a smaller group, whether intentionally or unintentionally. Therefore, the choice also depends on your specific target audience.”
4. Use your competitors as an advantage.
Leveraging geofencing to outstand your competitors’ stores can be a game-changer. Create a virtual boundary around their locations and include these customers in your geofencing audience. This tactic enables you to target them with enticing promotions, diverting their attention and business toward your store.
5. Set a notification limit to avoid overwhelming customers.
When using Geofencing technology, it’s important to consider setting limits on the number of push notifications. This strategic approach prevents overwhelming customers with too many notifications. By avoiding sending too many notifications, you maintain a positive user experience, keeping your customers engaged with your app or service. Additionally, limiting the number of notifications ensures that each message remains highly relevant to the user’s location and context, increasing the likelihood of user conversions and interactions. Furthermore, it also helps reduce the risk of churn due to overwhelming notifications.
Our Customer Success Manager Ilayda Gunaydin also emphasizes the importance of timing.
“Try to pay attention to the timing of your notifications and avoid sending messages outside of the business hours of your brick-and-mortar stores. Ensuring that your geofencing campaigns reach users at the right and relevant times increases the likelihood of a positive response from your customers.”
6. Power up your notifications with a clear CTA.
To maximize the impact of your notifications, it’s crucial to incorporate a crystal-clear call-to-action (CTA). Make sure your audience knows precisely what steps to take next when they receive your message. This empowers them to engage with your business seamlessly and increases the chances of conversion.
Netmera’s Geofencing
Netmera stands out in geofencing with distinctive features that set it apart from the competition. First, Netmera’s precision, the ability to capture users within 200 meters, gives its customers an advantage in targeting accuracy. But that’s just the beginning.
Unlike other platforms, Netmera can facilitate the store location upload process for brands, allowing users to effortlessly upload bulk information using a single document. This is a game-changer for brands with extensive networks of many branches.
What truly distinguishes Netmera, however, is its ability to run countless geofences concurrently, and to allow grouping them for diverse campaigns aimed at distinct customer segments. This flexibility empowers businesses to send a limitless number of tailored push notifications, ensuring maximum engagement.
Moreover, Netmera’s user-friendly interface eliminates the necessity to know the coordinates of the location. If you don’t have the coordinates, you can simply draw your geofenced area directly on your map as well.
In essence, Netmera’s geofencing technology redefines precision, convenience, and automation, making it the best choice for businesses seeking to harness the full potential of location-based marketing.
Final Thoughts
From setting clear objectives to optimizing geofence sizes, we have covered valuable tips about Geofencing. At Netmera, we offer precise location targeting and we’re here to help our customers master Geofencing along with Omnichannel Customer Engagement. If you want to know more about Geofencing and to drive success for your brand, contact us.
