Tactic 4 - Sitecore Location Personalisation (GeoIP)
Using a Geo-location service, you can pull information from your visitor's IP address such as their Country, State, Region, City, and Postcode (Zip). You can even pinpoint them fairly accurately [within a few feet] using their current latitude and longitude, which is also freely available information provided by any device visiting your website.
With that being said, it’s time to have a think about how your website might provide more value to customers and prospects using the personalisation by location feature!
It’s easy to imagine how an airline/travel website might use this functionality to personalise the experience for their customers: Prospects visiting the homepage from a cold country (such as Iceland) might be delivered beautiful background pictures of hot sandy beaches, where website visitors located in the South of Spain might see pictures of snowy mountaintops, inviting them to escape the heat with a skiing trip!
…Perhaps they might even take it up a notch, ensuring that prospects visiting from London (England), are automatically served promotions of cheap flights from Heathrow or Gatwick (their local airports).
But the chances are you don’t work for a travel company, so how else might you use this functionality? Here are a few ideas I’ve put together for inspiration:
Physical Stores:
If you have physical stores that customers visit, it might be worth investing some screen real-estate on highlighting the exact location of the closest store to each prospect. You could even serve store specific promotions, such as time-limited coupons. EXCLUSIVELY available for use at the “Watford” store only!
Parks:
If you happen to work for an amusement park, you could use the customers pinpoint location to offer an onsite schedule of rides or shows that are happening within their immediate area…Although Bluetooth beacons might be a nice alternative to the use of internet enabled personalisation here. If this tingles your taste buds, you can read more about Bluetooth beacons here.
Multi-lingual Customer base:
If you serve a multi-national marketplace, you can use personalisation to automate which language the website is displayed in, but more than that, you can also serve relevant local news articles, making them far more targeted and engaging for any prospects that are passing through.
Professional Services
Taking the example of a law firm website, perhaps you could use the customer’s physical location to offer a direct link to the prospects local solicitor.
Delivery Services:
If your customers are in a specific region and you run an online e-commerce site, why not use their location to show the item availability in your local store! Fast food delivery services also require you to select your local store. Why not have personalisation make the purchasing process that little bit easier by automating the store selection process.
Hopefully, some of the ideas above have provided some level of inspiration as to how you might use location based personalisation to your benefit, even if none of them directly apply to your line of business.
As we’ve learnt throughout this mini-series on Personalisation tactics, and all of our previous blog posts on personalisation, offering more relevant content is always likely to enhance your conversion rate. Location based personalisation is a VERY powerful, yet simple way to achieve that, so start today!
Configure this in Sitecore:
It should only take 30 minutes to get some level of location based personalisation set up in Sitecore. It's especially easy if you have purchased Sitecore’s IP Geolocation Service. Then, all it takes is to enable personalisation based on geolocation. i.e. select the rule:
If you purchase look-ups based on the Sitecore IP Geolocation Service, your geo-intelligence data will be enriched and will be available for use with personalisation. To personalise a page or component based on geolocation, just create an appropriate rule.
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