Small Business Design Resources

Can email marketing target a specific geographic location?

In one of my previous posts, I talked about how geotargeting – targeting specific geographic areas – can be a great marketing technique for small business owners. I’ve also talked about the importance of email marketing and building an email list from scratch, which isn’t nearly as intimidating as many people think. Many of you have been wondering if there’s a way to put these two marketing techniques together—can you target a specific location using email marketing?

This is a great question, and the answer is yes. You can – and in some cases should – use geotargeting for your email marketing campaigns. There are many email marketing situations where it’s helpful to target specific locations:

• If your small business is only set up to serve local customers—for example, a dry cleaner or pet grooming business;
• If you sell products that are only useful in certain climates, like winter gear;
• If your product is only available in certain areas, or has varying release dates—for example, a clothing line that will be released locally several weeks before it’s available nationwide;
• If you sell internationally and want to personalize emails with the appropriate language or pricing structure depending on the country.

These are just a few reasons you might want to target a specific geographic location with your email marketing—you can probably think of a number of other ways email geotargeting can work for you.

How to target a specific geographic location with email marketing

To be geographically specific in your email marketing, you will need to collect your visitors’ location when you collect their email address. There are a couple ways you can do this:

• Include a field in your email sign-up form for location. Because having a large number of fields to fill out makes people less likely to sign up, it’s best to keep this short and simple. Asking for a zip code is one of the easiest ways to collect geographic location.
• Target email subscribers based on their IP address. IP addresses can be traced back to a geographic location with a large amount of accuracy, providing you with the country, state, and even city of your subscriber. Email marketers like AWeber, the company I use, make it very easy to segment your email list by location using IP addresses.

Targeting Specific Geographic Locations for your Small Business

Once you publish your small business website to the internet, anyone across the globe with internet access will be able to see it. But perhaps you run a local service and you really only care about local traffic in your neighborhood. You might be asking yourself if it is still worth maintaining a small business website. The answer is – absolutely! When people are researching a business, the internet is the first place people go – even for small and local businesses. They want to know whether you are a legitimate business, what times your business is open and what services you offer.

The internet if the first place people go when they want to find out if a business exists in their local area. When people see that you have a website, it makes them feel that you are a legitimate and reliable business. So running a website is an important part of doing business in today’s market place whether you are a big business or a small, locally-based business.

You may be missing valuable traffic by not marketing your website to your local users. Geotargeting lets you target users in a specific geographic location. If you maintain a user list for your web users to sign up, geotargeting ensures that you are finding people in the right area for your mailing list.

Geotargeting Techniques

Geotargeting means finding ways to advertise your services to your local customer base or customers in a specific geographic area. It might be that you want to reach people who live in hot climates or people who live in areas where a specific type of plant grows well… there are hundreds of reasons why you might be seeking a customers that live in a certain area of the country or a certain part of the world.

There are actually several ways that you can use geotargeting to reach your local users.

Online Geotargeting

• Internet Service Providers (ISPs) assign an address to your website. This address can be assigned to your geographic location so that the geographic location of your business can be identified. Then you can target traffic locally. Talk to your ISP provider to find out more.
• When you sign up for your internet service you usually provide the zip code of your business. Your zip code can then be used to geotarget your customer audience rather than your IP address.
• Use a tool such as Google’s Webmaster tools to define a geographic location to the search engine. For more information visit: Google Geo Targeting

• Find other local online businesses, such as your local newspaper online, or businesses with services that are in line with yours (but not in direction competition of course) and become an affiliate. You can advertise each other’s sites by providing linkbacks free of charge.
• Use Google Adwords and other pay per click advertising to target your demographic.

Offline Geotargeting

1. Offline geotargeting means creating an advertising campaign to local users like sending out postcards or broadcasting a radio advertising campaign to get your internet address out there. You can combine this with a special offer to draw attention to your business.
2. Take advantage of local marketing publications, flyers and circulars by purchasing a local advertising campaign.
3. Get in involved in community events and look for opportunities to put your website address on the back of T-shirts for charity events, local fundraisers and so on.
4. Subscribe for free to other websites that can help. Try Sharon Fling’s website at: www.geolocal.com

Geotargeting is especially well suited to small business who would like a web presence but don’t necessarily want to sell their products or services nationwide or worldwide. Of course, you don’t want to rule out opportunities for worldwide traffic, but it’s nice to know you can exercise some control in your advertising campaigns.