Your click-through rates will tell you that people are opening your emails – so why are there no customers in your shop?
One possible reason is that you’re targeting the wrong people. Rather than communicating to consumers on the other side of the city, perhaps it’s time your email marketing campaign went hyperlocal.
What is a hyperlocal email marketing campaign?
Hyperlocal marketing involves deliberately limiting your audience of prospective customers to specific geographical areas. In simple terms, you’ll be targeting local people – consumers in nearby office buildings or surrounding apartment blocks. The focus is on locality more than other demographic factors.
You can see hyperlocal marketing in effect when searching for nearby cafes or similar businesses on a mobile device. Google will present ads targeted to your locality, competing for your foot traffic.
In the context of email, marketers should be narrowing the mailing list down to consumers whose physical address is listed within a chosen locality to generate foot traffic to the business.
How do I know if hyperlocal is right for my business?
In the digital age, it’s easier than ever for small businesses to appear on the global stage. That said, how relevant is worldwide visibility to your brand? As a fledgling business, odds are you’ll be benefiting more from the attraction and retention of local customers. After all, TimeTrade reports 75 per cent of consumers still prefer to buy things in-store. Furthermore, a whopping 90 per cent of consumers will at least sometimes make offline purchases after seeing items online. For these reasons, directly addressing customers positioned to make in-store purchases may improve your marketing results.
Of course, local marketing may not only benefit small businesses. Franchises might seek to promote individual branches by launching relevant hyperlocal email campaigns.
How can I develop an effective campaign?
It’s worth noting that a successful campaign should involve more than limiting recipients in your email marketing platform – rather, you should be creating genuine localised content. This means contextualising your copy according to local events, offering email vouchers to be redeemed in-store and cultivating an image that supports local people.
Like any campaign, you should be promoting these to help populate your mailing list. Advertise mailing list-exclusive deals on social media and use paid functions to limit the geographical reach of the ads as necessary.
To get your campaign started, it helps to have a curated mailing list.
