Blog skyhook logo 5 Examples of How Geofencing Can Enhance Your App's User Experience

Jan 30, 2014 1:30:00 PM

5 Examples of How Geofencing Can Enhance Your App's User Experience

Posted by Skyhook

Read All Posts

Mobile users are just as attached to their apps as they are to their actual devices. Apps have colored their lives with on-the-go entertainment, easy navigation, reminders and constant social connection. People spend the majority of their time attached to their phones and engaged with apps. This is a great opportunity to reach them with relevant content about your brand or app that will drive foot traffic to your local stores or partner locations. 

To enhance the user experience for mobile app users, apps are now embracing geofence targeting in order to entice customers with optimized deals and reminders. This geofence targeting allows apps to market to customers in relevant, personal and actionable ways through their mobile devices. With geofence capabilities your app can deliver a more frictionless user experience that improves your key metrics: customer satisfaction, retention, and engagement.    

Geofencing_location-how-it-works

Here are 5 existing app examples of how incorporating geofencing functionality on different types of applications can improve user experience:

1. To Do List and Reminder Apps:

By incorporating geofencing in To-Do-List and Reminder applications, these apps can match up errands that users are running with the venues that are nearby, reminding them to create a list based on where they are or reminding them to buy certain products based on local venues.

Two apps that supply location-based reminders through geofencing are Checkmark and Apple’s Reminder app. A user can create reminders to buy milk on the app, and as they drive by the grocery store the app sends a reminder to buy milk. Checkmark allows users to set timers on top of their geofences so they can remind themselves to go to the gym 15 minutes after they leave the office.   

2. Mobile Payment Apps:

Payment apps can use geofencing to maximize the use of their products. For example, the payment app can send messages to user’s phones telling them that the store they are in accepts that form of payment. This enables shoppers to use their payment apps whenever they are in a store that accepts them and ensures that users will use the payment method more often.  

Square is a mobile payment app that uses geofencing to easily detect nearby businesses that accept payments through the app and reminds users to pay with Square at these stores.

Cardstar geofencing for mobile apps3. Coupon Apps:

Coupon apps can use geofencing to notify users when there are relevant deals and coupons based on the stores they are near.  

Cardstar enables shoppers to store all of their loyalty cards and key tags on their mobile devices. They deliver a dynamic location-based user experience that improves the app’s usability by decreasing time spent manually searching for cards.  Incorporating contextual geofencing on the app enables Cardstar to geofence every supported card, such as every US-based CVS pharmacy location. Furthermore, the active geofences are personalized based on each user's loyalty card set.

These unique capabilities have created a new revenue stream for CardStar in the form of hyperlocal advertising with sponsored deals, bringing loyalty cards to the top and generating an easy shopping experience for consumers. CardStar users receive personalized and relevant deals from their favorite merchants on their mobile app based on the context of their location.  

4. Brand Apps:

Brand apps can use geofencing to send out reminders, relevant coupons, and items users might like based on their last purchase in the store. Every time a user walks into the store, their brand app will optimize their shopping experience.

For example, the Walgreens app has adopted Apple’s Passbook feature which uses geofencing to remind users to refill or pick up their prescriptions when they enter a Walgreens store.   

5. Safety Apps:

iHound is an app that helps you protect family members and the mobile devices they use. The app uses geofencing technology to help loved ones communicate where they are and when they get somewhere with the touch of a button.  Geofencing allows users to receive notifications when a child or spouse leaves a location and enters a new one.  

Geofencing can dynamically change your user experience, open new revenue streams and boost your advertising capabilities with triggered content and experiences based on your user’s location and mindset. Skyhook enables app developers to build, measure, and optimize an infinite amount of geofences and deploy contextual user experiences at any brand’s location or category of venues with custom polygon geofences. geofences2