October 24, 2018 | Posted in Geo-Locations, Mobile, Push Notifications | By B2the7

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Bringing your brand and customers together with Geofencing

by Bernie Fussenegger SPN

There are many industries that can benefit from Geofencing, but today, I’m going to focus on Geofencing and Marketing.

What is Geofencing
To get us started, Geofencing is a location-based tool that gives brands or marketers the ability to define geographic areas.  Geofencing also provides the ability to message customers as they enter or exit the defined geographic area.

The Geofencing software interacts with your Native Apps via the app SDK (iOS and Android) to deliver the message to the customer.

Geofencing has two types; active and passive. Active is when a customer has your app open and passive is running in the background collecting data.

Benefits of use Geofencing

Geofencing can be a competitive advantage when you are up against the strong competition. The tech can also be used in many industries such as QSR, retail, florists, stadiums, and automotive/car dealerships, to name a few. This tech will also allow you to:

• put your locations to work for you.
• conquest customers when they are at a competitor’s location.
• create customer segments and then to target those segments with messages and offers that are relevant.
• push messages based on past behaviors or past orders – this can really be set up to trigger off any number of set criteria.
• collect data on your customer to use later. Now, you don’t always need to take action when a customer is at your location.
• increase customer retention of the App.
• do more than just an alert. The tech is smart so it uses customer data to send the right messages at the right time.
• send an entry/exit message to customers.

Type of message you can send with geofencing include

1. Alerts
2. Notifications
3. Offers/promotions
4. Branded messages
5. Personalized
6. Targeted
7. Display content

Information you can gather

There is so much information you can gather and learn from your customers from their behaviors

1 – Determine your customers home and work locations

2 – Determine if your customer is traveling

3 – Sales data

4 – Behavioral data

5 – What stores are performing better

6 – What customer segments are performing better and what message is driving action

7 – Determine who your customer is and tie the App data into your overall data to get a full 360 view of the customer

Geofencing Example

Walgreens is a great example of how geofencing works. I was driving past a location recently and got the following push notification saying I was nearby and to stop in.

Was this creepy? Maybe five years ago it would have been, but not in today’s digital age.

It did several things including:

• Let me know I was close to a Walgreens thus creating awareness.
• I got me to open the app to see the coupons and my rewards which were targeted for me.
• Trigger my thinking of what I actually need to buy.
• Help make up my mind to go inside and buy something.

The timing was perfect so kudos Walgreens!

Conclusion

Not every brand has a need nor does it make sense for everyone. However, you can increase your brand awareness while being very targeted and personalized with your customers using this tech.

When thinking of mobile and native apps, think about all the possibilities and how they can work for your business or brand.

If you have any questions around GeoFencing and how it could help your brand, shoot me a message on LinkedIn or Twitter.

With more than 25 years of experience in marketing, Bernie is a Director of Digital – Customer Identity. His current focus is building and scaling a progressive digital marketing foundation that balances the needs of both consumers and national/local stakeholders —  all while delivering measurable ROI to the business. All comments, opinions, feedback, and views are his own.