While technology has made it easier for shoppers to discover and purchase products from many corners of the world, shipping these products long distances can be a discouraging step in the buying process—especially when a shopper is unclear of how much it will cost them.
For instance, if your business currently ships internationally or offers discounts to visitors (93% of shoppers are encouraged to purchase if offered free shipping!), then it’s necessary to promote this information as prominently as possible. This starts with understanding where your shoppers are located—both on the map and in their journey to conversion.
To make it easier for first-time visitors and prospective shoppers to understand their shipping options and drive them closer to purchase, you can create segments of shoppers based on specific geo-locations (ex: creating a segment for new visitors from North America who’ve never purchased from you).
To better visualize this strategy, let’s look at what the process is for setting this up with Nosto and what the end result would be.
Narrowing down users based on a combination of purchasing lifecycle and geo-location
Let’s say you want to target customers in North America who haven’t bought from your store before. With Nosto, all you’d need to do is go into the Segmentation & Insights section of your dashboard, create a new segment, and add rules for Geo-location=United States and Number of purchases=0.

After the segment has been created, you’ll then create a Placement. This placement will dictate where your content appears on your site and will dynamically appear only for site traffic that fits your particular audience—Americans who haven’t purchased.

To make sure your shipping information is front and center, the best thing to do is choose Banner as your Placement type. With Banners, your content will appear at the very top and center of the website when a user matching your segment parameters visits. Depending on the location you’re geo-targeting, it often helps to make the banner as localized as possible.
We can use Nosto’s Onsite Content Personalization suite to create such a dynamic banner. In this example we’ll do a very simple banner using HTML and CSS. You can find the code for this example at the end of the article to copy and paste if you want to try it out.
Create a campaign that uses both our newly created segment and placement:

In the below image, you can see from the content that the banner itself not only declares the location of the user, it also shows the flag for familiarity and delivers the promise of shipping to that country for free. That promise of free 1-2 day shipping across all 50 states, is an incredibly powerful conversion driver.

We can also create new segments for visitors from different countries (like the UK, in the below example), hook it up to our previous American segment and just change the campaign contents to show different experiences based on the geolocation values:

For shoppers outside of our shipping area we can then gently disqualify so as to not create a less-than-ideal brand experience for them:

Eager to try this out in your online store? Simply copy the following snippet and change the attributes and content of the code example to better reflect your shipping policies:
<style>
.shipping-banner{
display: flex;
align-items: center;
justify-content: center;
background-color: #fff;
z-index: 999999;
position: relative;
color: #333;
font-family: “Work Sans”,”HelveticaNeue”,”Helvetica Neue”,sans-serif;
font-size: 0.9em;
border-bottom: 1px solid #e8e9eb;
padding: 25px 0;
}
.shipping-banner p {
color: inherit;
}
.shipping-banner-right{
padding-left: 25px;
}
.shipping-banner-left{
padding-right: 25px;
}
.shipping-banner img{
width: 28px;
vertical-align: middle;
}
</style>
<div class=”shipping-banner”>
<div class=”shipping-banner-left”>
<p>It seems you are based in the USA!</p>
</div>
<img src=”https://cdn1.iconfinder.com/data/icons/rounded-flat-country-flag-collection-1/2000/us-01.png”>
<div class=”shipping-banner-right”>
<p>We provide free 1-2 days shipping across all 50 states!.</p>
</div>
</div>