Location Data: How to Improve eCommerce Conversions, Personalization and Measurement
6 Minute Read
Looking to use Location Data for your next marketing campaign?
The rise of eCommerce is well documented. Increases in mobile technology, as well as logistics and other infrastructure advances have contributed to a $3.5 trillion online shopping industry.
Consumers can now shop for whatever they want, whenever they wish.
As opening times and physical stores bare less importance in our digital world, people have become constantly engaged shoppers. And retailers need to be prepared to facilitate for these purchases.
This rise of eCommerce does not mean that real-world consumer behaviour should be overlooked. In fact, due to the rise of mobile (and it’s impact on the eCommerce industry), retailers are benefiting in many different ways.
Mobile can act as an anonymous way to gauge consumer behaviour. For eCommerce brands, this can be a great way to gather poweful insights, improve Personalization and allow retailers to adapt to the consumer’s changing environment and preferences.
This article will look into how eCommerce retailers can use Location data to transform their current marketing strategy.
What is location data?
Location data is the aggregated data points from smartphones that provide insights into how people move and behave in the real-world.
Mobile device location data can be very accurate and provides a detailed snapshot of consumer behaviour. This data can then be aggregated to provide significant scale insight into audience movement and consumer behaviour. These insights differ from online and digital because they are based on real-world movement.
For eCommerce?
The shopping experience is no longer centred around the store – online or offline. The consumer is at the centre of the shopping experience, meaning more eCommerce brands are focusing on the individual needs of the consumer.
Today, eCommerce brands have the tech available to build highly Personalized experiences for visitors. All the way from site greetings to personalized email offers. This means that a lot of eCommerce brands are primarily focusing on their visitors online behaviour, rather than offline.
This is where location data can come in useful. Mobile device location and behaviour can be very useful in many different areas. Let’s take a look at these in a bit more detail.
Segmentation, Targeting and Relevant Offers
eCommerce brands are beginning to use location data as a way to identify consumer behaviour.
These behaviours can be segmented into smaller demographics who share similar characteristics. A prime example of this could be shoppers who visit your flagship store often.
Another way to use segmentation could involve looking at the devices that visit your competitor’s stores, then building an audience off of this. This group can be targeted with promotions to encourage them to visit your stores instead. You’re effectively switching their store preference – even if they come to your eCommerce store instead!
This segmentation of customers allows you to be more tactical about how you convert website visitors. If you have detailed behavioural insights into a portion of your traffic, you can better target the messaging to increase your chances of boosting conversions.
Behavioural-based eCommerce targeting is useful because it allows you to reach consumers with relevant offers and promotions. You could build a segment based on customers who often visit electronics stores – targeting this segment with similar products in your weekly newsletter will be far more fruitful than a generic list.
Engagement and Personalization
This same location data can be used to help increase engagement and make Personalization tactics more effective.
Identifying the interests and behaviour of your visitors can create an eCommerce experience that is relevant and personal.
Providing a dynamic and customised eCommerce store is something that most eCommerce retailers strive towards. Using location-based data can deliver an improved customer experience. Offline insights, when incorporated into your Personalization strategy, can drive engagement and improve conversions.
This goes beyond delivering a website in a locations language, using detailed behavioural information to provide a fully personalized eCommerce experience. This could be from pre-filled click & collect details based on a user’s frequent visits to a store, to dynamically loading categories based on a customers regularly visited sections in a physical store.
One innovative and effective tool that retailers are finding success with is Personalize. Using behavioural data, this allows eCommerce stores to deliver the most relevant content at the most suitable time.
Omnichannel for Driving Traffic
For the eCommerce brands with a physical store presence, connecting the dots between online and offline is an important task.
It’s difficult to close the attribution loop. It’s even more challenging to measure how online ad campaigns can convert into physical store sales.
One solution is loyalty, tying purchases to a single identity across online and offline shopping behaviour. But this isn’t always simple or effective – customers can be unlikely to opt into this kind of thing.
Device behaviour is a powerful way to fill these gaps. Measuring the effectiveness that online advertising and marketing has on physical store visits and behaviour.
This same data can help to understand consumers across multiple touch-points and attribute sales to different sources – also moving customers more effectively along the path to purchase.
For example, a customer might find your store because of an ad on an OOH screen or billboard. They might then visit your store and use the in-store display to identify the products that they’re most interested in. Next, they go home and eventually make a purchase on your eCommerce store.
Without an omni-channel view, this customer’s purchase journey may look like a direct site purchase. When in fact, there was a complex omni-channel process that guided the customers purchase.
Location data can achieve a more holistic view of consumer behaviour. The more data an eCommerce business obtains about how consumers behave and interact in the real world, the easier it is to understand which element of their marketing strategy are working and converting.
In addition, cross-channel interactions allow brands to further understand the effectiveness of each touch-point. This contributes to a more personalized and engaging experience at each stage of the buying journey.
Understand user profiles with detailed segments
In a world of customer-centricity and people-based marketing, it has never been more important to understand the following:
- Who is your customer?
- How do they behave?
- What do they desire?
- How do they want to consume?
Supplementing online profiles with offline behaviour is a powerful way to take customer insights to the next level.
These insights can help in several key areas for eCommerce brands:
Product Decisions
Developing a deeper understanding of your customers will help you to understand which categories should be developed and explored more thoroughly.
For example, location insights could be used to check where your customers spend most time. If you’re an online grocery store, there may be a common theme that your customers over-index in coffee shops. Based on this data, you could push more products which fall into this category.
Understand personas
When you’re developing your customer personas, only using site behaviour can give a narrow view of an individual’s preferences. But the addition of real-world activity allows you to create far richer consumer profiles and personas.
Developing these behavioural personas is important for developing your marketing strategy, forming campaign targeting, optimisation and even site copy and personalization.
Lookalikes
The richer these personas are, the easier it is to scale eCommerce sales and target newly converting customers (who’re far more likely to buy your products).
Building lookalike audiences based on your outdated customer profiles can lead to a wasted ad budget.
Location data is real-time and current. It’s a great indicator of customer intent and your audience can be easily overlapped with new location-based audiences to scale your online store.
How to activate location data?
To activate location data, you need to find a provider that is accurate and has scale. Online retailers can deploy location in a first-party way with Mobile Commerce or their app.
Third-party location data can be used to achieve the same goal, integrating the data into a centralised data centre or customer management solution – like a CRM.
Location data is centralised around a mobile advertising ID. This is the identity that can be stored in CRMs or other data systems. It can be tracked across the web and sent into the programmatic advertising stack.
Final word…
Ultimately, location data is a powerful tool for any eCommerce retailer. It can contribute to providing much more detailed insights into current customers to deliver a more personalized eCommerce experience.
Analysing real-world movement can further connect the gap between eCommerce and physical stores. And who knows, you may just discover a whole new bunch of customers whilst you’re at it.
*Make sure to head over to Tamoco to find out more about integrating Location into your marketing strategy.
