Blog posts tagged with 'zip code'

Marketing by Zip Code

The idea that a business can reach consumers across the United States and Canada within a few minutes would have stunned early marketers. Before the rapid breakthrough’s in technology of the internet, television, radio, and freeways, marketing was confined to small geographic areas and was done primarily through word of mouth and local newspaper ads. Today, just the opposite problems exist, its too easy to reach people and so business find themselves competing for the attention of consumers. This has leads to more specific intention marketing. Rather than spend immense amounts of ad spend trying to reach everyone and hope someone notices you and then wants to take action and purchase, targeting specific people who are most likely to buy leads to increase ROI and greater overall profits.

There are many ways to target consumers. Age, gender, ethnicity, hobbies, and income are among a few, but if your product or service is applicable to any of these categories, then targeting by geographic area may be the most effective option. For your business, it may be easier or more cost effective to deliver or offer your product in particular areas, for example if your product is related to farming, you would want to target areas where farmers live and own property. While you could choose a county or city, you may still be paying marketing expenses for many people not in your target audience. Zip Codes group areas that are similar to each other, for example a business park may have its own Zip Code, or a group of apartments. Targeting by Zip Code more effectively allow you to reach the right geographic group that will give you the boost in new customers and sales your business needs.

When targeting by Zip Code, you can decide how specific you want your campaign to be by choosing to use a basic 5-digit Zip Code grouping, or a much more detailed 9-digit Zip Code. Both are created by the USPS, but the 9-digit Zip Code is specific to delivery areas and routes of the postal delivery workers. The 9-digit Zip Code will give you the most insight into areas that are very similar to each other, like neighborhoods with similar income residents, or an apartment complex. The 5-digit Zip Code breaks up areas of a city and possibly surrounding cities that tend to be similar, but doesn’t break the areas up to the same specific detail as the 9-digit Zip Code. 

The Magic of the Zip Code API

Zip codes seem pretty simple, they are just a set of numbers identifying a specific area, but without them it would take a lot longer to receive mail and with less address accuracy. By incorporating a zip code database into an API tool that can easily be added into your websites checkout page, customers can quickly type their address verify that your site has the correct address listed. The Zip Code API performs address autocompletion and validation, so you can verify the customer did not make a mistake in inputting their address. Simplifying the checkout process brings tremendous benefits as customers are less likely to become bored or frustrated making them less likely to leave your site without completing the purchase.

The Zip Code API can do more than just speed up the customer check-out process, additional benefits include distance, radius, and location tools so you can easily compute where your customers are located in relation to each other. The best part is the Zip Code Data is updated monthly so you never have to worry about inaccurate or changed zip codes.

See how the API tools works by visiting out website https://zipcodedownload.com/ZipCodeApi and entering your own zip code.

Why Do Organizations Need Zip Code Data to Succeed?

While developing and managing CRM systems for many years, it has become clear that organizations are missing out on substantial opportunities to grow sales. What are the main challenges at hand:

• The CRM database is growing rapidly and is becoming unstructured.

• We can not effectively run marketing and sales activities across cities, counties, or even metro areas.

• The sales team needs to know where to focus their efforts.

Without geo data to structure and enhance the existing CRM, and without market data to track against current market share, it’s impossible to effectively manage sales growth....Read more....

check zip codes at http://zip-code-database.com/

ZIP Code Download's Distance Wizard

Are you looking to calculate the distance between two points?  Anywhere?

ZIP Code Download's Distance Wizard provides functionality for calculating the distance between two points on Earth's surface. Combined with a database of ZIP code/postal code coordinates, The distance wizard can help perform many practical tasks, such as locating nearby storefronts or presenting geo-targeted ads to visitors.

Standard Edition is faster than competitors' products and easy to use.Professional Edition boasts ultra-high performance and is bundled with smart boundary technology to greatly enhance the speed of your database queries.

For example, to find all the postal codes in North America (US, Canada, Mexico) within 10 miles of 58271 (Pembina, North Dakota, USA, located a few miles from the Canadian border), your application would query over a million rows of data and process several calculations for each row to find maybe a dozen postal codes that are within 10 miles.

The Professional Edition calculates smart boundaries and exponentially reduces the number of rows involved from millions to just dozens, making it dramatically faster. View the complete examples to see how it works with some sample data.

These tools comprise a small code library of two main parts:

1. Distance Wizard - to calculate the distance between two coordinates.
2. Boundary Wizard - to find geolocational boundaries of a certain radius from a coordinate of origin.(Professional Edition only)

The ZIP Code Download Distance Wizard can be utilized in 16 different languages and platforms including:

• ASP
• C
• C#
• C++
• ColdFusion
• Java
• MS SQL 2000 (or later)
• MySQL 5 (or later)
• Oracle 9 (or later)
• Perl
• PHP
• Python
• Ruby
• VB.NET
• Visual Basic 6
• VBA (Microsoft Access and Microsoft Excel)

This documentation explains how to use the language of your choice to work with the API. It also includes usable sample source code.

There is a language filter at the top to display content for your specific platform.

What is a store locator and why do I need one?

Often whenever you read certain advertisements or catalogues, it will tell you that some items must be bought in store. They then tell you to see out your nearest local outlet to speak to their staff in person. However, it is often the case that people do not know where their local store is for particular goods. It is often recommended that the customer use an online store locator. This is a function with allows the customer to enter their address details into a database, and it queries the location of stores in relation to the address that is closest to the customer.

These are typically discovered on the websites of businesses who have multiple premises. This allows the visitor to locate the specific locations of their stores on a map. This type of system is very popular with chain stores, hotels and food outlets.

In addition to simply bringing up the geographical position of the store on a map, it will also produce useful contact information such as their address, postal code, open hours, phone number and for the particularly good example, software which shows you the directions to the store from your location.
Sometimes the search can be refined according to specialized criteria. For example you can input into your store locator that you only want stores that open during lunch hour. The search tool will them emit all results which do not conform with your criteria. The result is, you find the position of the store which is exactly what you are looking for.

This type of software typically makes use of the ZIP code data. This is a database which stores all of the ZIP codes in a given area into a list. The store locator has access to such a resource and it discriminates its results based on it.

Another popular method is to use the IP address of the device which is used to access the service. This give a position relating to your real time position, not just to the area defined by your postal code. This can be especially useful if you find yourself in an unfamiliar area.
So there you have it - that is a store locator.

Three and Four Digit ZIP Codes Appearing in Database

Many customers wonder why their data is including three and four digit ZIP codes. Of course, the United States Postal Service does not manufacture cities with only three and four digit ZIP codes. Most customers experience these because they are opening the data up with a program, such as Microsoft Excel, which has a default setting to eliminate zeros preceding a number. For instance, Holtsville, New York has a ZIP code of 00501. Excel will take that file, remove the zeros preceding the “5” and give you “501.”

Remedies

There are three main ways to remedy this issue:

1. Instead of downloading the .CSV version of the file from ZipCodeDownload.com, download the “Excel (97 or later)” version. This has been preformatted to accept leading zeros.
2. If you download the .CSV file, format the column by selecting the column and right clicking it selecting Format Cells> Number> Special> “Zip Code.”
3. Follow the same steps in way number two but instead do …> Number> Custom> and under Type enter “00000”.

Either of these three ways are acceptable, however, we strongly recommend that you download the file type specific to the program that you will use.

Mr Zip and the Zip Code Database

Drowning in mail and looking for a solution, over seventy years ago the USPS discovered and implemented a system to improve tracking. They started demanding a two-digit number between city and state on the address line of letters and parcels, which was a short-term fix; but the quantity of mail continued expanding. Five-digit codes were introduced within twenty years and made mandatory four years later: the first three digits send each piece of mail to a central sorting facility, where it is sorted according to the last two digits and sent to the appropriate post office for delivery.

As with many big initiatives, there was still the challenge of educating the public and helping them adopt the practice of adding numbers to the end of an address. Introduce Mr. Zip, accompanied by Ethel Merman performing ‘Zip-a-dee-doo-dah’ and bringing a friendly message to one and all. This little cartoon figure was so effective that now 95% of all addresses include the zip code, an amazing statistic. It goes to show you the impression of a marketing campaign in such a basic format for everyone to comprehend and enjoy.

Now, picture yourself trying to manage an ever-growing amount of mail and routing it correctly to millions of frequently-changing addresses every day. The challenge shifted to accuracy of address data, giving way to new solutions to be introduced. The first zip code directories were local, pencil-and-paper, affairs, ineffective, but the best thing available.

That quickly changed with the availability and power of computers, until today there are huge amounts of data accumulated in zip code databases nationally, internationally, for city and state levels and as part of every business or corporation. We can’t communicate without the location information they contain.

The national online zip code database constantly adds, updates, and verifies zip information for every person or business at every location in the country. Canada has a comparable setup; other countries have varying coverage. International corporations have them. To name just a sample, many businesses, hospitals, and educational institutes develop and use zip code directories.

There is a wide scope of capabilities that online databases provide in the zip code world. By accessing information from around the country from so many different sources, changes are quickly synched up and missing information or new addresses are added with ease. This first-time correct delivery gets mail to the right place more quickly and saves millions of dollars every year in the process.

There are zip code maps of all sorts, zip code ‘finder’ software, zip code directories, and online zip code search engines. We’ve come a long way from the Pony Express rider riding hard to deliver his cargo!