Quick Wins: Amplify Email Relevance with Location Targeting

If you’re trying to break through all the noise and truly connect with your audience, relevancy is the name of the game.

Just getting your audience to open that email is a challenge, never mind reading it… That email better contain something that makes that open worthwhile, or you may lose an open next time… It could be their name, a personalised image, a recent product they were interested in, or a sale at the store closest to them.

Location targeting in emails provides not only relevance but can also increase foot traffic to brick and mortar locations.

Let’s just be clear: while email marketing also requires strategy and technique to maximise results, using location targeting provides quite a superior quick-win for marketers. Using software such as the Reignite platform dramatically simplifies the process of adding location targeting to emails.

In this article, we’ll dive into what location targeting is, why it can be difficult to use, the benefits, ideas for how to use it, and how you can simplify the process.

What is location targeting?

It’s really quite simple: location-based marketing is simply using the recipient’s location to create a personalised email that adds value, or which provides relevant information. Location targeting can be used in a variety of ways.

Why brands are slow to incorporate location targeting

For brands where location of stores, products and services is important, personalising by location is often the most difficult to crack.

To cater for the different location versions of a campaign to promote in-store offers, nearby deals from their local airport or store, or different pricing or even language for different international markets, marketers have to use blunt instruments of lots of small segmented emails, or more commonly skip the personalisation altogether and rely on their recipients being happy with content for the most popular region, or a mix from everywhere.

The end result though, is less relevant content, and lower performance in an era where relevancy is key.

One key reason why location targeting is a trickier aspect of personalisation, is the nature of location data. Location data of both the customer’s location and the location you are promoting is often stored in a mix of unstructured ways – some in postcodes, and some simply as town name or with precise longitude and latitude.

Joining the customer location and your location is much more complicated than say, matching customers to their favourite product categories.

There is also the problem that many on your customer database may not have a location.

Source data and how to simplify location targeting

So bearing in mind all the ways that location targeting can be problematic in emails, and with all the smart technology that’s available, there must surely be a simpler way of adding location targeting in emails?

The good news is that there is a way around this dilemma with specialist tools like Reignite that offer simplified location targeting capabilities. Reignite can take a location – perhaps a postcode, and look within a given radius for any matching stores, products or whatever type of content you wish to personalise.

In addition, if you don’t have locations, the software can use the live IP address as the customer opens the email to determine their current location to find the right location-targeted content in real-time.

Where location-based marketing works

Location-based marketing works best for businesses that have physical locations. This includes retail locations, tourism, food and dining establishments, grocery stores and so on.

Typical use cases

Location-based marketing can be used in various ways:

As a store locator

You may wish to highlight new stores, notify customers of stores closing down and where they can shop instead or simply provide a list of nearby stores in every email tailored to the

customer’s location. You can even utilise a map to show the exact location, helping raise awareness of additional outlets customers might not be familiar with.

UK footwear retailer, Brantano, used this method to assist with the ongoing store changes to help automate new store openings and closings rather than manually create each email.

Promote nearby deals

Maybe you are promoting nearby restaurant deals or upcoming local live events or maybe flight deals from the customer’s nearest airports.

Combining the customers’ location with a product feed allows you to personalise the deals you show based upon their location.

In this example coach tours brand Diamond Holidays used the customers home location to promote tours departing within 10 miles of their home.

Availability at specific locations

If your customers browse online but prefer to buy or collect in-store, then products can be

filtered by their nearest stores and messaging such as ‘available in our Leicester store’ can be shown.

Languages and regions

International brands can enjoy enhanced efficiencies by creating one version of the email for all markets but personalising it to suit the region.

This can be seen with Cruising Excursions which have customers in dozens of countries, each with their own local pricing. They are able to simply send one email but dynamically tailor the currency shown in real-time, saving huge amounts of resources that would usually be necessary to create and maintain separate international versions.

Conclusion

Many brands are wary of utilising location targeting in emails because it is challenging. But there is a solution, and that is to use a specialist email personalisation platform like Reignite.

If you’d like to see for yourself just how easy the Reignite platform makes adding location targeting to your emails, we’d love for you to request a demo.

Alternatively, download a copy of our “Quick Wins for Marketers” whitepaper to find out other quick and easy methods of personalising emails that help to amplify email relevance.

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