6 Examples of Personalized Geolocation Promotions

A few years ago location-based promotions weren’t as popular as they are now, though even back in 2019 they were considered highly useful or at least promising. Nevertheless, only huge companies had budgets big enough to run such geolocation promotions due to costs of software that could use geolocation services and data in advertising.

Things have changed over the years – in 2022 personalized, location-based campaigns are easily accessible to most companies on the market. It’s nothing unusual to see a geofencing campaign launched by local cafeterias or small shop networks. That’s mostly because promotion engines – such as Voucherify – are now within reach of many companies, both cost- and technology-wise. And they offer geofencing among many other features.

Location-based rush

A recent study shows 80% of social media activity is now done on mobiles. A smartphone’s built-in location tracking capabilities enable marketers to launch truly personalized ads on scale. Another report shows that 40% of all mobile ads are location-based! This number is going to double by 2021! No wonder as location-based messages are timely and targeted - in other words: they convert.

This trend comes from the fact that marketing technology skews the playing fields in business’ favor. With the democratization of so-called martech tools, companies can start exploring the location-based channels to improve customer acquisition and retention. And it’s not only about retail. So, how to start?

Here are 6 basic location-based promo campaigns you can build with a little help from marketing software.

Promotion toolkit for successful geolocation marketing

First, let’s quickly explore the promo toolkit - what incentives, channels, formats you’ll find helpful? Every location-based promotion consists of three key instruments:

Incentive type – what’s in it for your customer?

• Discount coupons – a discount for any goods or services carried with a promo code.
• Cart-level discounts – a discount auto-applied when cart-structure satisfies predefined conditions.
• Gift card credits – additional credits for performing an action.
• Referral programs – a reward for referring a brand to friends and family.
• Loyalty programs – a reward for showing the brand your trust.

Format – how easy is it for them to enrol in the incentive?

• Unique text promo code.
• QR/barcode promo code.
• A link to a landing page.

Channel - where does the customer interact with your brand?

• Email
• SMS & push notifications
• Bluetooth beacons
• Social media ads
• Groupon-like services
• Wifi hotspots

By shuffling these three segments, you can come up with countless personalized location-based promo campaigns. The key point in the LBM promotional strategy, though, is to run several small-scale, highly targeted campaigns in parallel.

This way, you will be able to test which actions yield the best results and multiplicate the best performers across the whole audience. Many of them won’t be bringing ROI immediately, that’s a normal thing and you shouldn’t worry - the traction starts as a trickle before it becomes a flood. Again, the crucial thing is to ensure that you track the ROI from the very beginning.

Now that we have the tools under our belt, let’s discover some examples of what we can build with them.

Prerequisite: to overcome technical challenges in the campaigns below, you should get promotion management infrastructure in place. Don’t have one? Learn how to choose one.

Creative location-based promotion examples

Local coupon deals sites

Tap into well-positioned deal sites to deliver eye-catching offers for the first-time shoppers. Think of the following workflow: you post an ad on Facebook groups and Groupon alternatives which redirects users to a dedicated landing page. Each page serves unique coupon codes which can be used by a local community only, e.g. ldn-whd8v, ldn-s9d7ff (...), oxfrd-2nzrt5, oxfrd-5hipw (...), crdff-wsn45 (...) and so on. When people come to your store, you immediately know which channel had the impact. Zalando does this with great results.

Technical challenges:

• Every landing page should distribute the coupons for a particular city/place only.
• To control the promotion budget, you should validate if the shipping address belongs to this city.

Geofencing

One of the best tactics to increase customer retention. Given that you have some way of contacting your customer (email, phone number, push notification) and you’re able to detect their location (website: IP recognition, mobile: GPS), you can send a number of highly converting promo codes. Here are some ideas:

• Sending a promo code with an SMS when a customer enters a specific boundary.
• An email with a QR promo code when a customer visits a place for the nth time.
• A push notification with a coupon for 10% off their favorite product.

But what is geofencing exactly? It’s a service that uses location data to track users and trigger a personalized notification whenever they enter the desired area. The boundaries of such an area are called the geofence, and it can be set up using API around any geographic location. The perimeter might be small (for local stores located in busy places or in shopping malls), but it might also cover tens of miles (for example: the whole city center).

Technical challenges:

• Coupon delivery infrastructure must be integrated into SMS/Email/Push notification platforms.
• Coupon validation rule engine has to be aware of customer attributes and habits (customer segments).

Geofencing examples

There are plenty of geofencing examples around the web, with Uber and Starbucks leading the way. The key to success in a geofencing campaign is picking the right place and sending the right message.

For Uber, there aren’t many places better than airports or hotels. With the geofence spread around the major airport, Uber can grab the attention of passengers leaving their planes and send them a notification informing them that there’s an Uber driver waiting nearby.

The similar mechanism works for Sephora as well – if a user allows the Sephora app to track their location, the app can send a push notification informing them they're close to the shop. Adding an incentive makes it an offer hard to reject:

Creating highly customizable geofencing advertising in 2022 is not as challenging as it used to be a while back – especially if you’ve got the right tools to do that. Using Voucherify geofencing feature, you’ll be able to create tailored geolocation-based experience for your customers. Send push notifications, SMS messages, email notifications or generate social media ads that would appear for users while scrolling through their feed.

What kind of targeted promotions can you combine with geolocation? All of them! With Voucherify you can send amount discounts, cart promotions, site-wide promotions, digital gift cards, referral and loyalty schemes as well as giveaways and sweepstakes to customers nearby. Use your special offers and encourage customers to visit your places whenever they’re around.

There’s no end to what you can achieve with properly set geofencing. Build a geofence around your competitor’s place to show passers-by that your place (with better offer and a special discount code) is just a few steps away! Watch our short video guide to see how to set up a fence in an interesting location:

Micro influencers

Engaging local heroes in your campaign can be strenuous. It’s hard to reach out to them and even harder to track their marketing “performance”. Referral codes are a perfect way to deal with the latter. Find an influencer and assign them a unique code which they can share with their fans. In this way, you will start a sort of referral program. Hint: come up with various discounts assigned to the code to figure out what’s the best incentive.

Technical challenges:

• If you launch a lot of these micro-campaigns, it might be difficult to control them. With fraudulent actions, both referrers and the audience can do harm to your marketing budget. So, it’s better to cap the number of participants in your promotion platform from the outset.

WiFi hotspots

Airports, hotels, restaurants, or even taxis. More and more places are being equipped with access points. Internet access login websites are the perfect place to catch customers’ attention. Especially, if your ad is actually a personalized incentive. Putting in a small gift like a coupon for some products the customer can find nearby is an effective way to attract new customers and increase loyalty of those people who already know your brand.

Another idea worth mentioning is advertising a specific place (a restaurant or a store) located in a mall or on a railway station. Thanks to WiFi hotspot advertisements, people can actually learn that there’s a place they might want to visit nearby while connecting to the mall’s free network.

Technical challenges:

• WiFi advertising platforms require API integration with a promotion infrastructure if you want to deliver specific coupons automatically.

Local holidays discount

Black Friday and Xmas aren’t the only periods to run promotions. National holidays and local events are a great way to engage the community too. Imagine you give a 15% off auto-applied discount on St. Patrick’s Day only for the folks from Ireland. And it’s available only on 17th March. Or, how about giving $10 off over the course of a great festival or the marathon in the city? You’re limited only by your creativity - and promotional budget of course.

Technical challenges:

• Activating dozens of event-focused promotions and remembering when to stop them requires ultimate discipline and both developer and marketer effort. You have to find a programmatic way of doing so.

Incentivized Facebook Ads

If you spend a large part of your promotional budget on Facebook, make sure you get the most out of it. By interweaving personalized promotions like unique coupons, auto-applied discounts, or referral programs into your posts, you can maximize the chances for the ROI. First, people love promotions - even a small-yet-personalized incentive will stand out. Second, it gives you a reliable way to measure the performance of your ads.

Technical challenges:

• Personalizing FB ads requires API integration and dedicated landing pages which handle the mechanics of promotions

LBM – do it yourself!

Geolocalization and CRM automation enable marketers to create more and more personalized promotions. In the examples above, we have demonstrated how you can plug your promotion efforts into location-based marketing channels. Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg. With a promotion management platform in place, you can tap into new channels and new promotion types. You can mix various incentives and test how they impact your customers in different segments localization-wise. This will give you powerful machinery to drive customer acquisition and retention.

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