By now, you've visited websites that seemed to have a special message just for people in your home town, or near where you work.
The popular discount offer website Groupon uses this feature constantly. They are able to sense exactly where you are and they provide special offers to you based on the town or region you are in right now.
You might think they are spying on you, but in fact this is something we call IP Based Delivery. Every computer in the world is assigned a unique number when it connects to the internet. This number is called an IP address and it's like a phone number for your computer.
Every IP address is assigned to specific towns and your computer's IP address can be looked up in fractions of a second to determine where you are.
The basic IP Based Delivery would simply return your town name inserted into a boiler plate sentence or a form field. Let's take another example using what might soon be an esoteric system: the yellow pages.
If you visit yellowpages.com, your town and state name will immediately appear in one of the search boxes at the top of the page. Sometimes the town name is not exactly correct, but at most it's a few miles away.
You might think this is all hocus pocus, but this IP Based Delivery method could be put to use on your own website with a bit advanced programming. You could program parts of your website to show content specifically for your surrounding towns that would better engage people within those towns.
Some examples:
* Testimonials from other residence of a local town
* Engagement announcements of people the visitor might actually know
* Special offers that appear only to people within specific towns on specific days.
There are plenty of fantastic uses for IP Based Delivery once you get it activated on your website. Just be creative and your customers will feel like your website was tailored just for them... and they'd be correct.
