Nearest Location: which store should you send your customers and prospects to?

How do you decide which store to send people to?

If your business has physical locations (stores or offices), the traditional way to pick the store is by using a zip code or regional map. In reality this means a customer three blocks from one store could get matched with a different one across town, because the ZIP code said so.

Two questions to ask your team this week

1. How was the store on our last mail piece chosen for each household?
2. How many of last quarter's paid leads lived more than 30 miles from the nearest location, and what did we pay for them?

For most teams, the honest answer is ZIP code — or no answer at all. That's not a process failure. It's that nothing in the stack connects where your locations are to where your customers live at the level of the individual, so every location-specific decision runs on a proxy.

At the heart of it, this is a context problem. You know where your locations are. You know where your customers live. Faraday's Nearest Location connects the two.

Dynamic distance tracking with Nearest Location

For every customer and prospect, Faraday measures the distance to each of your physical locations — stores, branches, showrooms, dealers, service areas — and returns three fields per person: their nearest location, your own unique ID for it, and the distance in meters.

It runs in reverse too. Draw a radius around some or all of your locations and build an audience of every household inside it, drawn from the 240MM US adults in the Faraday Identity Graph.

When a store opens or closes, or your customer list changes, Faraday will reprocess your data automatically.

The detail that matters: you get a real distance for every person, not a ZIP code approximation. So you set the cutoff. Twelve miles today, twenty-five next quarter — same data, you just filter it differently.

Four decisions this changes

Which location to route people to.

The original problem, and still the most common one. Attach each customer's nearest store, its ID, and the distance to it, then use that in your mail file, your email platform, or wherever you build audiences. No one receives promotions for a store that isn't their best option.

Whether a lead is worth paying for at all.

This matters most when the purchase requires someone to show up in person — glasses get tried on, flooring gets seen, bath fixtures and furniture get decided in the showroom. A lead 40 miles from your nearest design center is a different bet than one 4 miles away, and now you can tell which is which before you buy it.

Who's new to the neighborhood (and who has left).

Who to add to a location's list, and who to drop. Faraday shows you who just moved into range of each location — people still deciding where they shop — and who moved out of range entirely. Miss the second group and every store list you built keeps mailing people who left, which you pay for on every drop.

Where your best customers are (and where you need to be).

• You can build a list of everyone living near your locations and compare it against your actual customers. The groups where those two look similar are the ones you've already reached. The groups where they don't are the ones you haven't. That gap is usually where the next campaign should go — and it's invisible if you're looking at your customer file alone.
• The same radius, inverted across your whole footprint, gives you the people your locations don't reach at all. Useful when you're deciding where the next one goes.
• This is especially valuable for opening a new location. Identify the people who live near your new store location to determine who needs to receive a mailer about your opening.

How it works

Start with an Atlas: your list of locations, imported from a CSV or pulled from your warehouse. Each one carries a name, an ID you choose, and whatever properties you'll want to filter on later — region, store format, open or planned.

From there, two moves cover everything above.

Draw a radius. Build an audience of everyone living within X miles of some or all of your locations. Invert it and you have the people your footprint doesn't reach yet.

Attach the distance. Send any list of people through Faraday and each one comes back with their nearest location, its ID, and how far away it is. That's what drives routing, and what tells you whether a lead is worth buying.

Full mechanics are in the docs: Atlases and the Nearest Location walkthrough.

The compounding case: new movers

Distance doesn't change. Where someone lives does. Someone who moved into range last month hasn't picked a pharmacy, a dealer, or a furniture store yet — they're forming new habits right now, within reach of your stores. You can tell them which location is theirs today, before a competitor does.

Cross a radius around your locations with recent movers and that's your new-arrivals list.

Ready to get started?

Already a Faraday customer? Talk to your account team about turning on Nearest Location. New here? Talk to sales.