3 Clever Ideas for Geoanalytics in E-commerce
Geolocation of your customers may not be a priority in your marketing and sales strategy, but it’s worth knowing something about what it can do to boost results. It helps you obtain non-trivial insights in order to target your visitors based on their current location, allowing you to send a targeted message to people in a specific territory. The benefits of this are obvious. Geoanalytics makes it possible to tailor your messaging to your target group much more effectively in ways that you can learn more about below.
Send messages to customers close to your store
Information about a certain offer available in a specific location can be helpful for people who are nearby. By identifying a group located in a given location, you can create a dynamic segment and send them information about current promotions.
Such a segment includes only those who are or have been in a particular location during a certain time period—for example, in the last few days. By using geolocation as a criterion for a customer segment, you can also inform them about events such as opening a new store, special promotions, etc.
Note: if your company operates in the tourism industry, you can create a segment of people who have appeared in your area for the first time (and previously checked in for a long time in other locations). This lets you reach people who are probably on holiday, a business trip etc. and may be interested in relevant offers.
Challenge: Increase customer engagement
Solution: Personalize content based on weather data
Example company:
Trench Coat is a women apparel store that ships all around the world.
Trench Coat adapts its home page content to the current weather and season in a given place. During the holiday season, when rainfall occurs in a certain location, it presents attractive offers for bikinis and summer accessories. When it's snowing, it displays Emu boots and woolen coats. Thanks to this, the offers are much more appropriate and tailored to specific users.
Decide where to locate your store
When opening a new store, choosing a location is a primary challenge. To make the most accurate choice, it’s useful to know where your brand is already known. Select the first of the analyzed areas on the map and add additional criteria, like the number of page visits within the last six months, and repeat this step with other locations.
This will let you see which location shows the most interest in your offer. If you’re a recognized brand in a certain area, it is more likely to generate the expected traffic. You can also check them for other criteria.
Note: by introducing a new product or category to the market, you can check beforehand if similar products were bought previously in specific regions. You’ll be able to find out about the potential interest in a new brand and which store, country or region will be best to introduce it.
Challenge: Choose a place for a new offline store
Solution: Learn where your customers go through a mobile app
AwesomeElectronics launched a mobile app allowing customers to browse products and make wish lists. The goal was not only to increase revenue from mobile transactions, but also to gather new customer data for better insights. The company can find information about a customer’s current location, products they have bought online and the level of their engagement.
Based on this data they made a decision about the city in which they opened their store. After opening, they also sent a special offer to all online customers from this location to encourage them to visit their offline store.
Compare customers from different locations
Geoanalytics also allows you to compare clients from different areas. You can check where customers buy the most, visit your offline store most often or meet other criteria.
These insights will let you achieve various goals:
- identify the most profitable regions
- match promotions to the target group for specific stores
- determine the shopping paths of customers in given areas—whether they buy online or offline more often or enjoy discounts or loyalty programs
- compare customers from the same location but based on different activities by building more segments gathering customers from the same location based on their shopping activities
Challenge: Optimize promotional plans for specific products
Solution: Customer purchase path analysis
Thanks to the analysis of shopping paths, the company gains information on how products are selected, how much time customers spend on their selection and what products are usually chosen together. This allows them to create tailored promotions and product combinations that help to increase the average cart value.
By analyzing the movements of customers in physical stores, they are also able to predict the most frequent paths of people moving around the store and adjust the arrangement of products on the shelves.
Geoanalytics – how to get started
Dynamic segmentation is very important to geoanalytics. If the user changes the location to another city or even a different country, they can be automatically removed from the previous segment. If they start appearing in the same place again, they will be added back without any additional action, with everything happening automatically.
Wrapping up
Geoanalytics provides the opportunity to make better decisions related to the location of your customers, by providing advanced analytical capabilities. It is not just maps, but above all, advanced mechanisms that will reveal subtle geographic relations. Thanks to advanced analysis of your data you will be able to make better marketing decisions.