Location can be a powerful tool in driving relevance in email marketing. Whether it’s providing local information or personalizing your content to match local conditions, knowing where your subscribers are is the first step. Collecting this information isn’t always easy though, so we’re excited to introduce a new way to create mailing list segments based on the location of your subscribers: geolocation segments.

Whether you’re interested in targeting people from particular countries, or those living within a certain distance of specific locations, you can now do it with our geolocation feature. It automatically identifies the location of a subscriber and allows you to create a segment based on that information. That’s right, even if you haven’t collected the location of your subscribers you can use this feature to send geo-targeted campaigns.

We already calculate a subscriber’s location using their IP address to power features like Worldview and our subscriber notification emails. We do this by storing the IP address of subscribers that sign up from a form, or open or click a link in a campaign. We then look that up against an IP-to-location database. So basically, once we know the IP address used by a subscriber, we can tell roughly where they are located.

Now we’ve applied that information to segments so you can use it to target your email campaigns. You can search your subscribers and segment based on their location being known or unknown, their location being near somewhere, as well as them being specifically in, or not in, a location.

Here’s a few ways you might use the geolocation feature:

Targeting those in or near a location

Say you sell bathing suits globally. In the middle of January you could target customers living in Australia, where it’s summer, without bothering customers in the US, who could be living through a polar vortex.

Or, say you sell concert tickets for gigs across the US and there’s one coming up in San Francisco. You could use geolocation segments to only send an event announcement to people living near San Francisco.

Targeting those not in a specific location

Say you include banner ads in your emails. You have specific banners for US subscribers but then a generic one for everyone else. You could create a segment targeting everyone not in the US for the generic version.

Targeting those whose location is not known at all

Say you run a business events company and in your weekly emails you feature what’s happening in a subscriber’s city. You could target subscribers whose location is unknown, so you can send them a generic version that covers the top 5 events from across the country instead.

Location data is already being collected for everyone who’s ever sent a campaign. So you can jump in right now, check out where your subscribers are and start targeting by region today.