Need & Importance of Geofencing and its Various Benefits

Geo fencing has been considered pretty important for a long time now and there are plenty of things and places or business organizations which probably won’t be able to survive properly if there is no Geofencing facility.

The Geofencing or the mobile Geofencing technology is one of the most wanted and needed technology so far. There are plenty of things that you can do with the help of Geofencing and a there are a lot of advantages of using the same.

What exactly is Geofencing?

According to the definition, Geofencing is basically the use of GPS or RFID technology to create a virtual geographic boundary, enabling software to trigger a response when a mobile device enters or leaves a particular area.

So when you use Geofencing, you basically understand and know what are the places of interest near you; or people can get a track of the things or the services near them. As for a business, Geofencing technology helps the businesses keep a track of their customers and that way they can increase the visibility of their shops and services.

Advantages –

There are a lot of advantages of using Geofencing services. Here are a few just to keep you updated –

1.    For a business, it helps them get better visibility in the market. For example, if a customer is using the Geofencing service, he/she gets notified whenever they come across any shops or business premises. This way, your shops comes to the customer’s notice and you can get a chance to sell your products faster than those businesses, who don’t use the service of Geofencing. 

2.    If as a business, you are using the Geofencing service, it helps you keep a track of your customer. You can understand what kind of customers you have; you can keep a track of your customer’s whereabouts, their footfalls, how many times they have visited your store, or their buying capacity.

3.    When used properly, Geofencing can also help you gather information about your rivals’ sale data and the use them in order to improve your business. However, you must make sure to use the right technique if you are looking for results.

There are plenty of ways Geofencing helps you gather a lot of benefits. However, you need to make sure that you are using the Geofencing the right way. You need to make sure that the Geofence or the area covered through the Geo-fence isn’t a vast one and you need to inform your customers prior that Geofence has been used.

Some Common Question About Location Base Mobile Marketing

 With the explosion of mobile marketing, there have been an excessive number of location based SMS campaigns in the last few years. But still there are lot of question regarding this type of location base marketing can be seen, such as concept about geo-fencing and how they help to improve your campaign etc. Here are some things you should know about location base marketing:

1.    Geo-fencing: Mobile geo-fencing which is also known as Geo-targeting is a location base service. In this service brands are allowed to make a decision or take any action by location intelligence when a SMS subscriber enters a specific location. Mobile geofencing marketing is becoming part of every developer and brands as they are realizing the added value that mobile geo-fencing can bring.

2.    SMS campaign using geo-fence: Geo-fencing is a good way to increase SMS marketing open rates and SMS redemption rates as it allows the brand to tailor SMS promotions to an SMS subscriber in its real-time location.

3.    SMS subscriber location: Mobile geo-targeting or mobile geo-fencing is a layer of intelligence which allows brands to make decisions or take some action depending on a geographical area such as a retail store, a stadium, or even a neighbourhood. Brands can determine the location of a SMS subscriber by using a Network-based Geo-fence which uses a carrier-grade location data to determine the location.

4.    Opt-in option: Only those customers that have opt-in for communication will receive location base SMS from a brand. In other words to locate a mobile device you will need its permission first. There are various ways to receive the permission such as when a customer’s replying to a text message confirming they want to share their location with a brand or a customer giving permission within a web opt-in form that captures their mobile phone numbers.

5.    Tracking the location of the SMS subscriber: One of the fine ways to execute the use of geo-fencing is by sending locally-targeted, relevant content to your SMS subscribers which will increase SMS redemption rates.

6.    SMS subscriber location accuracy: The accuracy of the SMS subscriber depend on various facts such as if thewireless carrier of the SMS subscribers’ supports the use of A-GPS location capabilities as they give accurate result in outdoor environments and compared to this, mobile phones that uses G-CID, Cell ID and Enhanced Cell Ids are less accurate.

7.    Size of the fence: Depending on the business requirements such as SMS campaign requirement and expected accuracy, a geo-fence can be of any size and they can also create multiple SMS geo-fences in case they have multiple locations.