Marketing
29 Nov 2023
Location based marketing: 10 creative ways to build geofenced promotions
 "Reza Javanian")
Mohammadreza Javanian
Talon.One loyalty expert
 "Location based marketing")
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Understanding location based marketing and geofenced promotions
Why location based marketing? The benefits of geofenced promotions
Location based marketing: 10 creative ways to integrate geofenced promotions
Location based marketing in action: Geofenced promotions best practices
How to set up geofenced promotions in Talon.One
Understanding location based marketing and geofenced promotions
Geofencing technology has become the cornerstone of many businesses' promotion strategies, allowing them to establish virtual perimeters, or “geofences,” around specific physical locations like stores, competitors, or events.
Using GPS, RFID, or Wi-Fi signals, businesses can power their location based marketing approach by sending personalized promotions directly to users' mobile devices upon entering or leaving these designated areas. Geofencing is incredibly successful, too: 53% of shoppers have visited a retailer after receiving a location based notification, and leading brands from Burger King to Walmart regularly integrate geofenced promotions into their strategies.
Location based marketing not only enhances customer experience but also increases the effectiveness of your promotions, helping reach consumers at the right place and time. In this blog post, we’ll cover the benefits, use cases, and best practices of geofenced promotions, and show how to implement them with Talon.One.
Why location based marketing? The benefits of geofenced promotions
Benefits of geofenced promotions include:
Precision targeting: Geofencing allows businesses to target specific physical locations, ensuring promotional messages reach the right audience at the golden moment.
Real-time engagement: Brands can communicate with consumers in real-time as they enter or exit designated areas, fostering immediate engagement and increasing the likelihood of conversion.
Improved personalization: By leveraging location data, businesses can tailor promotions based on user preferences and behaviors, creating a more personalized and relevant customer experience.
Enhanced security: By ensuring that messages are delivered only when customers are within the predefined geographical boundaries, geofencing helps reduce the risk of coupon fraud and unauthorized access to deals.
Higher promotions ROI: The combination of precise targeting, real-time engagement, and improved personalization leads to a higher return on investment for promotional campaigns.
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Location based marketing: 10 creative ways to integrate geofenced promotions
Location based marketing opens up a world of possibilities to attract and retain customers. From the simple to the complex, we’ve rounded up 10 creative ways to integrate geofenced promotions.
Expand your market: Expand your brand presence and appeal to new customers by targeting specific areas and presenting location-specific promotions.
Create area-specific promotions: Create promotions exclusively accessible to a single block, street, city, region, or country.
Remove unavailable or unauthorized areas: Exclude specific types of promotions from regions with stricter laws or standards.
Set special rates: Set higher rates for transporting customers to and from specific destinations, like the airport or areas with substantial traffic congestion.
Target based on travel data: Use any travel-specific data such as weather, flight status, or destination data from a user to target promotions in areas of interest.
Activate point-to-point promotions: This is particularly beneficial in the mobility sector, where your clients can earn various rewards for transitioning from one point on the map to another.
Select location-specific notifications: Deliver unique notifications to your users when they log into your platform from any of the locations you've marked on your map.
Use geocaching: Create an adventurous geocaching challenge to captivate your audience's sense of adventure. Define points of interest on your map and provide users with clues as they tackle challenges on your platform.
Treasure hunts: Set clues to trigger at different locations around a city when users pay for a particular service or simply sign-in in a certain area. Trigger notifications for when users go off track or when they're getting closer to the prize.
Piggyback on events: Give customers targeted deals based on their involvement in parades, concerts, or city-wide events. This can be anything from a coupon for something to eat, to a challenge that gets new users to download your app.
Location based marketing in action: Geofenced promotions best practices
Looking for some examples of location based marketing in action? Major brands like Walmart and Target have used geofenced promotions to send exclusive discounts to shoppers as they enter the store, creating a sense of urgency and motivating immediate purchases.
Burger King’s whopper detour
The whopper detour serves as a standout example of the effectiveness of geofenced promotions. Burger King executed a clever strategy by setting up geofences within a 600-foot radius around various rival McDonald's restaurants across the US. Once users stepped into this designated area, they received a push notification to download the Burger King app and redeem a Whopper for just a penny. This creative campaign not only highlighted the precision of geofencing technology but also demonstrated its ability to boost customer engagement and drive immediate action.
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Burger King used its “whopper detour” geofencing campaign to drive immediate customer action
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Starbucks’ happy hour special
Starbucks uses geofencing to deliver timely push notifications to customers in the vicinity. This is especially effective for their happy hour promotion, where specific drinks are available at half price. Nearby customers receive tailored push notifications, alerting them to the special offer.Geofencing not only enables Starbucks to identify when a customer is in close proximity or enters the store but also allows them to target customers based on their beverage preferences.
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Starbucks uses geofenced notifications to alert customers about special offers.
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Alsaree3’s free delivery promotion
During the peak of COVID-19, Iraqi food delivery app, Alsaree3, used Talon.One’s geofencing feature to offer free delivery for customers in the Medical City district of Baghdad, a complex of several teaching hospitals. Users who opened the Alsaree3 app while in the Medical City district would receive a popup promoting free delivery in their area. Once an order was placed, their location was sent to Talon.One and validated in Alsaree3’s campaign conditions to subtract the delivery fee from their order.
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Alsaree3 uses Talon.One to power geofenced promotions
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"With Talon.One there’s less coding, less time to market, and a bigger impact."
 "Riddhi-Ojha_Alsaree3")
Riddhi Ojha
CTO at Alsaree3
How to set up geofenced promotions in Talon.One
For users looking to leverage location based marketing by setting up geofenced promotions with Talon.One, there are three key steps to follow:
Create the location attribute: This attribute will be used to store the session's location in Talon.One. Your customer attribute will have “session” as its associated entry and “location” as its attribute type.
Pass location data via the Integration API: Attributes of type location can be set via the “Update customer session” endpoint inside the attributes property.
Evaluate the position in a Rule: Any standard campaign with access to the attribute can now evaluate the location data.
Example: Let’s say you’re a retailer in Berlin looking to run a discount campaign exclusively for customers located in or near a specific district. With Talon.One, you would set the following rules:
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How to create geofenced promotions in Talon.One
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As more brands shift from generic to personalized promotions, geofencing is a highly effective way to deliver tailored messages to a carefully defined audience. Geofencing marketing is not merely a trend; it's a dynamic solution reshaping the incentives landscape.
Keen to know more about geofenced promotions, including their benefits, set-up, and use cases? Check out our geofencing page or reach out to our team.
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