Leveraging Location: Optimizing Online Purchasing To Your Customers' Positions

Optimizing product offerings is essential in uniform marketing. Clients often struggle to manage spending on gear, especially if they allow employees to make purchases on their own. By showing employees only the products they are authorized to buy, you simplify your clients’ spending control efforts, encouraging them to return to your site. One of the most effective ways to do this, especially when marketing to large organizations, is to optimize product offerings based on location. Through the following tactics, you can limit the gear and uniforms that customers in any area can see, making their shopping experience more convenient while meeting their employers’ specifications.

Group Guidance

One of the most common ways to optimize product offerings by location is to create employee groups based on the city or state where a group of customers resides. First set your company website up so that employees must log into a group account in order to place orders. Once they log in, they will see a selection of gear and uniforms for that location, but not any other products. Customers will thus only be able to order products that are appropriate for the employers in that location.

Location grouping of this type is ideal if you serve different kinds of businesses in different locations. Say that your clients include a hospital in Raleigh, North Carolina and a police department in Richmond, Virginia. You can set your website up to show only police uniforms and gear in Richmond and only hospital scrubs in Raleigh. This strategy works best if you have a relatively small number of large organizations as clients. For larger numbers of smaller clients, you can determine what specific colors and properties businesses in each location look for in uniforms, and base your offerings on that. If North Carolina clients express a preference for light blue gear, for example, but Virginia clients don’t like that color, you can make light blue items available only in North Carolina.

Options for Optimization

Although many uniform marketers use employee groups to leverage location, this is hardly the only option. You may instead choose to follow a more buyer centric approach, which allows individual employees to create their own accounts. You can still leverage location for individualized accounts, allowing employees from particular areas to access only certain types of gear from their personal profiles. When choosing between the organized group and buyer centric approach, make sure to take into account:

• Simplicity- Organized group purchasing tends to be a simpler experience for both you and your clients, as it does not require as many accounts to be created and monitored.
• Uniqueness- In departing from standard uniform marketing practice, the buyer centric approach offers a fresher experience for your customers. If your goal is to excite clients or make them more likely to remember you, this is the better option. 
• Personalization- Most uniformed businesses choose a relatively small number of uniforms that many different types of employees wear, making a group approach ideal for them. If individual employees have vastly different uniform needs, however, the buyer centric approach is better, as group accounts will contain too many items to conveniently sort through.
• Frequency- Employees who order uniforms on a monthly or yearly basis have little reason to painstakingly optimize an account for themselves. The buyer centric approach is better for those who have to purchase new gear on a regular basis.

While leveraging location may improve user experience, what matters most is that you respond to your clients' specific needs. For more information on successful eCommerce, contact UniformMarket today.