For the past few weeks we’ve been working with a small group of pilot customers to beta test a new feature called Locations. Things have been going so well that we are ready to introduce Locations to the world!
What is Locations? It helps your multi-location business better communicate with customers at a local level vs. forcing customers to only have a relationship with a brand, not a store. While people certainly have preferences for brands (“I love In-N-Out Burger. Animal style FTW!”), they have experiences with stores. When you want to buy gas or grab a burger, you don’t buy these things from a brand, you buy them from stores near where you live, work and play.
Based on that, we aimed to create a solution by which the multi-location marketer can allow people to build relationships with the stores they frequent most and subsequently create campaigns that are targeted locally, not nationally. Here’s how it works.
With Locations, you can import all of your stores into Signal based on name, address and any store ID you might have. These stores can then be mapped to Lists, which allows your customers to subscribe to receive information from the specific stores that they frequent.
The real magic happens when you assign attributes to these locations. You’re probably familiar with our awesome segmentation tools, which allow you to target your campaigns based on data you know about your subscribers, such as demographics and preferences. Locations allows you to segment based on attributes of a location, which are unique features that some of your locations might share. For example, if you’re a convenience store business, you may have some locations with an attached car wash and others without one. If you want to offer customers a $5 off coupon for your car wash to drive interest, you wouldn’t want customers who visit locations without car washes to receive that offer. Locations allows you to create a segment of just those stores with car washes and target your campaign to only customers who visit those stores.
Locations segmentation also allows you to group your stores based on geography. For example, if you plan to send a campaign that’s only relevant to your stores in Illinois, you can create a Locations segment for just your Illinois stores, which would prevent people who visit stores in other states from receiving the message.
Here are some more examples of what Locations empowers you to do:
- Target geographic groupings of stores (e.g. send to all locations in Iowa)
- Send messages to stores based on specific qualities they share (e.g. send to all stores with ATMs installed)
- Send messages based upon multiple location-specific attributes (e.g. send to locations with a car wash and are in Minnesota)
- Differentiate your messaging strategy based upon the uniqueness of your individual locations (think global, act local)
- Track customer engagement & marketing ROI at the local level (e.g. Compare locations to determine which ones are having the most success)
- This applies not only to the store level, but by geographic groups of stores such as regions, cities, and states
- Review and manage your locations database in simple way. Editing and adding locations is easy, as is reviewing existing locations by city, state, or segment
Whether you’re a casual restaurant who wants to target an offer solely to diners of your newly opened Memphis stores, or a convenience store who wants to message subscribers of your stores that carry Bud Light Platinum, Location segmentation will allow the targeting on the geographic (in Dakota) and physical data (has an ATM) required to meet your needs.
Locations opens up tons of interesting targeting & reporting opportunities, such as:
- Deliver a coupon or notification to all people subscribed to locations that have a car wash
- Deliver a coupon or notification to all people subscribed to locations in Indiana
- Send a survey question to all people subscribed to locations in Indiana
- Test effectiveness of content in different locations (same subject line different regions / different message, different cities, same region)
Next Steps:
Watch the introduction video below, read the KB article and let us know if you’d like access to Locations for your account. While it is obviously advantageous for businesses with over ten locations, businesses with less than ten can usually manage their segmentation capabilities easily as is. We’re excited for the direction of this feature, and look forward to evolving it with you (the users) over the next few months!
Feel free to leave feedback below or shoot me a line julian (at) signalhq.com. For all the latest news on Signal, you should also sign up for our newsletter here.
