Consumers’ preferred shopping channels may alternate from year to year — according to Salsify’s latest survey, they primarily buy new brands and products at physical stores — but retailers generally have a pretty good idea of where consumers like to buy products.
Driving them in-store is more difficult, but location-based marketing is one strategy that can help boost foot traffic.
Figuring out when prospective customers are close enough to your store to nudge them with a promotional offer is a nuanced strategy that requires geolocation.
When used in tandem with other sales and marketing techniques, geolocation is a powerful tool for creating personalized shopping experiences. Here’s how.
Geolocation means wirelessly tracking the physical location of an object using technologies like GPS, Wi-Fi, or an IP address. Location-based marketing uses geolocation to deliver targeted ads, content, or promotions.
Imagine a prospective customer walking or driving by a retail store. When they get within a certain distance, geolocation tools send an alert to marketing tools, which then push a personalized offer to the customers’ mobile phones.
The notification catches their attention, and ideally prompts them to enter the store and make a purchase.
Despite the potential benefits, geolocation remains an underutilized engagement strategy for several reasons.
Geolocation for marketing relies on first-party or zero-party data. One of the fastest ways to lose a customer is by purchasing or using their location data without permission. Even if you intend to provide a better experience, the end result is often the opposite.
To avoid this issue, create comprehensive privacy, storage, and usage policies around location data. If you’re asking for location data, or if users choose to provide it, make it clear exactly how this data will be used and how it will improve personalization.
Location-based ads and offers must drive engagement to deliver value in marketing campaigns.
Ensuring engagement, however, can be challenging. For example, variations in mobile network coverage can result in missed opportunities for notifications. In addition, there’s no guarantee that customers will take intended actions. They may see and ignore notifications, or interact with messages, but never walk through the doors.
This can make it challenging to gather reliable data about customer engagement and ad preferences, in turn limiting opportunities for personalization.
Brands may also struggle to measure the return on investment of geolocation initiatives. This is because they rely on a combination of digital and physical interactions to drive conversion.
To ensure geolocation-based efforts are paying off, start with clear objectives: Is your goal to boost in-store traffic, improve in-app engagements, or increase conversions?
This helps determine your key performance indicators. If the goal of geolocation campaigns is to get more people in-store during a one-month effort, measure your foot traffic before the campaign starts, during the process, and once it is complete to see the difference (if any).
Finally, decide on your attribution model. If your only goal is understanding the role of geolocation in decision-making, consider last-click attribution to determine how many users took the last action of clicking your triggered notification.
If you’re looking for a more in-depth assessment of customer behavior, opt for a multi-touch attribution model that follows the customer journey from engagement to purchase.
According to Salsify’s “Ecommerce Pulse Report: Q4 2025,” many customers buy more often because of personalized product recommendations, including 53% of Gen Zers and 48% of millennials. More than 50% of shoppers also now use AI chatbots to provide more personalized search results.
Consumers crave personalization, and geolocation allows brands to create a more curated experience.
Say a brand sets up geofencing to detect when users pass through a specific point, such as the entrance to a shopping center or within a defined radius of downtown shopping areas. Passing this fence triggers an alert, such as a text message or app notification, that contains a personalized product offer at a nearby store.
The result? Shoppers who aren’t even thinking about your brand can be redirected into your store to make a purchase. Maybe you’ve even done merchandising to promote that particular product, which the customer can then immediately try on and test out.
It’s also possible the notification won’t bring them in, but encourage them to shop online when they return home. Make sure offers are applied regardless of location so you don’t miss a sale.
So what does geolocation look like in practice? While there’s no right way to enhance personalization with geolocation, here are some common approaches.
Send push notifications to customers as they pass by (or near) your brick-and-mortar location. You can use this same approach to send online promotions.
For example, if geofencing detects that a customer passes within a predetermined range of your store, you can trigger an email message that contains a personalized offer they can use right away, or on your website.
Buy online, pick up in-store remains a popular middle ground for customers who enjoy the ease of shopping online but prefer to pick up items in person.
Using geolocation, you can track buyers on their way to pick up items and ensure packages are ready to go upon arrival. You can even recommend additional items they can bundle at a discount to increase order volume.
Geolocation can also improve the in-store experience with “store mode.” Typically part of a company’s mobile application, store mode activates when users enter a brick-and-mortar location, and it provides a real-time view of where products are located, what’s in stock, and what’s on sale.
By combining geolocation with evolving technologies such as AI, companies can leverage personalization data to improve inventory management.
By tracking where users are when they make purchases — such as in-store, on mobile apps, or at home — and capturing data about what they choose to buy, brands are better prepared to meet evolving inventory demands.
Consider a shoe brand running a promotion on its newest lineup. Using AI to analyze geolocation, purchase, and available stock data, the company finds that 50% of all purchases are happening in-store.
As a result, they divert more of their inventory to brick-and-mortar locations to keep pace with demand.
For retailers, the message is clear: If they can get customers through the door, they’ve got a better chance to make the sale. The problem? Potential buyers often pass nearby, unaware of any deals or discounts they could get.
While you can’t control where your customers go, you can make sure they feel your presence when they get near.
This is the power of geolocation and personalization. By combining knowledge about what customers want with automatically triggered location events, brands and retailers can create organic experiences that capture consumer interest and encourage them to interact with your brand.