Geo target your emails

Why should you geo-target your emails and how Mailchimp can help?

Taking personalisation beyond just adding somebodies name should really be a bit of a no brainer for most marketers, yet I get emails daily advertising services, events and promotions that I either can’t viably get to or just aren’t relevant to me.

Now some of this could be down to them not having full details about where I live or where I am likely to be. Some of it could be that my details are out of date (I haven’t changed area that I live in for over 3 years now so there is no excuse not to have asked me to update my data #GDPR) and some of this is just a lazy blast with a faint excuse of an attempt at personalisation and geotargeting.

So why should we as marketers be geotargeting? In short, it is getting the right and relevant message to the right audience at the right time. Here comes the tricky bit though. What if you haven’t got geographic data? This is where Mailchimp’s new audience tool comes into its own and is able to help – both with targeting campaigns and also its campaign analytics.

As you can see from the above screenshot, Mailchimp has been able to narrow down the locations based on where the IP address resolves for the opener (accuracy isn’t perfect, but it gives you a good starting point). This is by country, for the entire audience. If you wanted to go a little deeper, you can go to the campaign level and see down to the country and even state/region.

From this level of detail, you can start building segments based on locations where you don’t have the contact details recorded.

This approach resolved over 3000 contacts from this particular audience, you can now send a very targeted email out to people who would be nearby, this is particularly useful if you had a physical presence and had for instance an open showroom or a special offer to promote.

Of course, the best way to do this is by actually recording the data and using user contributed information to build the segments but as we all know, getting people to fill in more than the basic required information can be very, very tricky (if not impossible).

So armed with this information, what can you do? Well combine this with predictive demographics and you can create segments of localised people split between genders and age groups as well. If your target audience is women over 30 and near one of your stores, great! You can use the location data of past campaigns plus predicted demographics to create a segment for just that email and with a good level of confidence get the right message to the right inbox.