The MapQuest Platform: Advanced Mapping Solutions to Help Transform Online Inquiries into Higher Store Traffic

In today’s highly competitive retail environment, increasing traffic — both online and in your store locations — is the key to maintaining a strong retail brand and building a loyal customer base. With the MapQuest® Platform, you can build online mapping solutions and link your online presence and your brick-and-mortar retail store locations in a way that capitalizes on their mutual strengths to provide customers a more consistent experience that encourages buying behavior.

A successful location inquiry is a critical step in motivating customers to visit your retail stores. The more dynamic, compelling, and informative you can make a customer’s experience with your website, the higher your likelihood of converting a casual location inquiry into a store visit. With the MapQuest Platform, you can add highly reliable retail store location and mapping services to your website, so your customers find exactly what they’re looking for, presented in a way that builds loyalty and promotes repeat business.

You pave a smoother path to purchase when you make it as easy as possible for your customers to find you. MapQuest provides you with mapping APIs and the tools you need to add business locator capabilities that dramatically enhance your customers’ experience with your website — an experience that creates a seamless transition from your website to a retail store visit and differentiates you from your competition.

Find Store Locations on Your Trip - Vera Bradley, Inc.

The MapQuest Platform: Going Beyond Maps and Store Directions for Better Retail Results

With the MapQuest® Platform, you can build a website that does more than tell customers where to find you. It can also show them the best way to get there and how to make the most of each trip, each minute, and each drop of fuel. The MapQuest Platform gives you a range of capabilities to develop custom retail mapping solutions so your customers can tailor their inquiry and find the information they need for a more meaningful interaction with your website and store locator.

• Advanced Routing and Searching – Your customers can easily get driving directions to your stores based on shortest trip time, shortest distance, and avoiding highways or toll roads. They can even find locations based on the optimum walking route. Advanced trip planning enables your online visitors and your employees to map out efficient routes that span multiple retail store locations. Visitors to your site can find the store locations that best suit their needs using criteria such as radius, zip code, and drive time or distance. You can build applications so customers can also pinpoint what they want by searching on neighborhoods, brand, product line or SKU, hours of operation, special services, and more.
• Points of Interest – MapQuest Platform Services offers an extensive database of millions of Points of Interest that can help your customers find other relevant services and attractions along their route for a richer shopping experience.
• Interactive Maps – Aerial and satellite imagery, hybrid views, and drag and pan capabilities allow customers to explore your retail store location and the surrounding neighborhood in detail.
• Send to Cell – You can offer your customers the ability to send maps and driving directions from your website’s retail store locator directly to their Web-enabled wireless phones and devices.
• Multi-Language Support – With the MapQuest Platform, your website can offer your customers driving directions in multiple languages from a single retail store locator solution.

Territory and Location Management

The same routing, mapping, and searching capabilities your customers use can also make your day-to-day internal operations more efficient. With the MapQuest Platform, you can build online mapping solutions with easy-to-use features that allow employees to map out multi-stop routes for delivery, give managers the ability to visually analyze franchise locations, and enable your sales teams to have a better understanding of the make-up of specific territories and regions.

Location-based Inventory Inquiries

By linking an inventory search with a customer’s store location inquiry; your customers can literally know what’s in store for them at one of your retail locations before they hit the road. MapQuest provides a complete toolkit and an array of mapping APIs, so you can build a custom website application that allows your customers to find the closest retail store with the item they want in stock.

Enhancing Promotions with Location-specific Information

You can build mapping solutions with the MapQuest Platform that give you the flexibility to link coupons and other location-specific promotions and events with a customer’s store locator inquiry for highly customized one-to-one marketing opportunities. You can also customize applications to track the buying behavior of customers who enter coupon codes on your website’s store or zip code locator for a clearer understanding of your marketing ROI.

Advanced Location Information for Better Retail Strategy

In addition to helping your customers connect with your business, the MapQuest Platform can help you visualize your existing market coverage to determine optimum new store locations. You can research potential new locations using your own data or an extensive Points of Interest database. You’ll have a better understanding of prospective locations based on drive times, competitor locations, and a range of other criteria. You can even use the MapQuest Platform to build custom applications that automatically highlight soon-to-open and recently opened store locations to build anticipation and awareness.

Streamlined Data Management

MapQuest provides access to simple tools to upload and manage information on your store locations to help keep your website and retail store locator accurate and relevant. You can also manage your MapQuest account online and sort and view your data to meet your specific needs.

Building Your Brand with a Reliable Partner

MapQuest’s reputation as an industry leader can strengthen your own retail brand. Independent studies have shown that the MapQuest brand stands out as the most trusted, most visited, most reliable, and easiest to use online mapping service.* The MapQuest Platform allows you to incorporate the MapQuest® brand into your retail website so you can benefit from this association.

Want to Improve Your Visibility with Your Customers and Hone Your Retail Strategy?

Contact MapQuest Platform Services for more on how you can use the MapQuest Platform to build mapping solutions that can increase your profile in retail markets, boost store traffic, and inform your market strategy.

* Keynote Systems Survey, September 2006; Landor & Associates, Brand Asset Valuator Study, June 2007 and comScore media metrics, US Mapping, 2004-2007 rates MapQuest as having the most Unique Visitors.