The geo-targeted direct mail campaign by our partner Spinas Civil Voices showed amazing results and was recently awarded by the Swiss association “Schweizer Dialogmarketing Verband”. The campaign for Helvetas Swiss Intercooperation received Gold for “Creative Use of Data and/or Marketing Automation” and Bronze in the “NPO campaigns” category.

Their goal was to raise awareness on drinking water scarcity and collect donations to give more people access to clean water.

A map on the envelope shows the neighborhood of the recipient and the route from their home to the closest drinking water fountain. The distance and time it would take to walk there by foot is also provided. The headline translates to “You would have to walk this far for water if you did not have any at home”. Inside the recipients find a letter and additional informative material, as well as a free reusable bamboo straw.

The results: 22% higher response rates than average and 12% higher donation rates!

What’s behind this success? Let’s zoom in:

Geo-Personalization

Personalized maps instantly attract attention. It is something special to find a printed map with your own neighborhood and home address in your mail box. Location is powerful: We want to make sense of where we are. One glance at a map and we immediately connect with the places we see. It brings back memories and evokes emotions, which is a lot more effective than only reading our name on a marketing piece. The recipients feel personally addressed and are very likely to have a closer look.

Information

This map does not only display a certain area and locations, but also the route to the nearest water fountain. With the headline explaining that this is the distance you would have to walk in case you had no access to water at home, an entire story is told. The recipients immediately understand what it is about and make the connection to water scarcity in other parts of the world. Imagining the walk to the nearest water fountain engages them right away and will remain in their memory. We understand maps intuitively and gather all important information at one glance, which makes them highly effective for marketing campaigns.

Automation

Behind the scenes: Using location data for marketing purposes is easier than you might think, and most of the work is done automatically, saving time and effort. Most geomarketing projects begin with our client sending us lists with customer and business addresses. In this case we started with Reverse Geocoding: We determined postal addresses for drinking water fountains in Switzerland from coordinates of OpenStreetMap. The next step was to assign the closest water fountain to each recipient’s location and create personalized maps with routes, travel time and distance. These print-quality maps can now easily be integrated in any marketing piece – in this case they were printed on envelopes.

Addresses can be assigned by distance or travel time, with up to five locations per recipient address. We also offer optimization of address lists, which means checking for duplicates or incorrect entries.