Tracking Customers

Geo-Fence Marketing:

Thirty percent of the world population are already using location based marketing services, and 80% of them want to get location-based alerts from businesses like yours.

A geo-fence can be looked upon as a virtual perimeter that you can draw around any location on a map, and then target customers that enter that location.

1. WHAT IS A GEO-FENCE?

Beacons are great for proximities and knowing at a very granular level that someone is near a certain object or product, and geo-fences are generally for larger areas where you want to know if someone is walking by your store, by a competitor's, or coming into a particular location.

You would go onto a Google Map or some kind of other mapping product, you would identify the area that you want to geo-fence, and then the idea is you're creating these circular regions, or in some cases, creating shapes or polygons or in the buildings or locations you want to target.

Then the phone or your app is monitoring for that geo-fence, and as I go about my business, day to day, it's tracking that location in the background. You know immediately when someone breaches a fence, when they dwell there, or as they are about to leave.

Geo-fences can be used to target customers in physical locations, allowing you to trigger the right message, the right campaign, at the right time and place.

2. WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF GEO-FENCING TO MY APP?

Some of the benefits include increasing your sales and loyalty, and this can be done by bringing in your CRM data.

So when you know customers are near, that haven't been in your store, haven't been in your location, or haven't transacted in a while, this might be a great time to do a win-back campaign and say, "Hey, we've missed you, we want to show you the love, come on in for a free coffee." Remind them what their loyalty balance might be. Or tell about new lines that have come in to the store, new products that might interest them, based on that past purchase data that you've brought in.

3. CAN YOU GIVE ME IDEAS FOR MY APP FOR USING GEO-FENCING?

In terms of use cases, and you can do incentives, you can remind them of rewards, you can also survey customers when they leave. So when you get an exit event for your geo-fence, it's an excellent time to say, "Hey, first name, thank you for coming in to our business today. What was your experience like? How would you rate us? Is there anything that we could have done better?" Don't forget to offer some kind of an incentive or reward for completing the survey.

Tracking competitors is something that's kind of interesting as well. You can't really bug out your competitors' stores with beacons, but you sure can add a virtual perimeter, a geo-fence.

You do need to put this in your privacy policy, that you're geo-fencing not only your own locations, but possibly other locations that don't relate to your business. Maybe you don't have to list them specifically as competitors, but I would mention something.

You can do the geo-fences around your competitor's store and around the locations, so then you know, out of your loyalty base, what customers also frequent your competitors' businesses.

You can use this to again score, increment or decrement a score on your customer table or database. Then you can use that, bring that back into your strategy to inform future action as to what way you would interact with that customer.