InsightIQ Blog

How Far Will Your Customers Travel?

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May 11 2009

NYC Zip CodesIn this era of making smarter revenue generating and cost control decisions, there is one easily accessible and informative marketing tool ready to tell you a bit more about your customers' behaviors.  If you know your customers, you can certainly do a better job finding prospects with similar purchase patterns.  I'm not talking about models or demographic enhancements (which are all extremely valuable of course). The tool I have in mind uses U.S. postal zip codes as well as longitude and latitude coordinates to map consumer behavior.   I realize that sounds pretty basic and it is.  This simple and powerful tool can show you how far your customers and prospects will travel for your business or service. 

Retailers and Bankers have been calculating the distance a customer or prospect would travel to their location to determine store/branch openings and closings for years.  Consumers are highly convenience-oriented and it doesn't make sense to be on the wrong side of town or even at the wrong intersection.  It also doesn't make sense to have two locations so close together that they are competing against each other for market share.  Zip code-based behavioral information can help marketers better understand how important location and convenience are in their target consumers' decision making process.

These behavioral tools are all available to you for reporting and analysis through CSG's Quaero marketing services team.  Using this behavioral information to produce area maps (city, county, region, state etc) can be a high-impact way to display your results visually, making discussions about your consumers simple and efficient.   If mapping doesn't work out for you, that's okay.  Calculating the distance between two zip codes and/or performing a radius search will help you with everything from lead generation, branch or office location decisions, target marketing, trending, consumer data and more.

Find out how far your customers travel. Start looking at different radius bands (i.e. 5 miles, 10 miles, over 10 miles) and you might be surprised at what you find.  Don't rely on outdated maps or assumptions about different areas, keep up with the trends and use the current and convenient zip codes and start calculating distance today. (By the way, you can use Canadian postal codes known as FSA s Forward Sortation Areas but they aren't updated as frequently and it costs just  a little more).

 

Image by Niznoz on Flickr; Available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

 

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