What are the common use cases for geofencing?
Businesses across many industries can use geofences to collect data about their clients and engage with their audience based on their location and movement.
Geofencing is common in areas like retail, ride-hailing, on-demand delivery and more.
In retail, the most common use-case of Geofencing is location-based marketing, or geofencing advertising. This practice uses geofencing as a means to deliver location-triggered notifications to users when they enter or leave a certain area. These notifications can be for promotions, product releases, or even as a way to drag a customer away from a competitor. This practice has been growing in popularity tremendously over recent years as more and more companies look to achieve hyper-personalization in marketing. This means being able to delivery the right message to the right customer at the right time, as opposed to have a more one-size-fits-all approach to marketing. The ultimate goal of this approach is naturally to achieve a high conversion ratio, or click through rate (CTR). Roam's Geofencing and Marketing Campaigns APIs work hand in hand to support this goal and allow companies to take their marketing to the next level.
When it comes to ride-hailing, geofencing can be used to support hands free notifications. More specifically, developers can create ride-hailing trips where the pickup and drop off points can be populated with a geofence, and therefore trigger an event when either the driver or the user arrives or departs from the specific location. You would therefore be able to notify a user that they are getting close to the final destination, or that their driver is approaching the pickup location. This saves the driver from having to manually send both of these messages and enables them to focus on their driving.
Finally, delivery has a very similar use-case to ride-hailing when it comes to geofencing where the pickup and delivery location of food or grocery deliveries can be populated with geofences. The way this would work would then be to program notifications when the driver enters and leaves the pickup and delivery location to warn the user about the progress of their order. For example as the delivery driver arrives at the pickup location, you can warn the user that their driver is picking up their order, and when they leave the pickup location, inform them that their order is on the way.
There are many more use-cases with geofencing, but these 3 use cases are the most popular. They also happen to be use-cases we at Roam are very familiar with and have worked with before.
Other use-cases include for example workforce tracking, transportation, logistics, population control for safety purposes, or social apps.