In this article you’ll learn how to view and use geolocation information in your MailChimp account.
Geolocation estimates, where your contacts are located, so you can target your campaigns for specific regions.
Each time a contact signs up for your marketing through a hosted signup form or interacts with an email campaign, MailChimp will gather their geolocation data, so the more a contact interacts with your email campaigns, the more confidence we have in our geolocation data.
If you want to send targeted campaigns based on precise location data, we recommend you use your signup form to collect your contacts, mailing addresses, or postcodes. You can also add this data to your audience during an import.
We’ll take a look at three places where you can find geolocation data in your account, the audience dashboard, contact profiles, and your email campaign report.
Ready to begin? Let’s dive in.
Audience Dashboard
To view geolocation data in the audience dashboard, I’ll click the audience icon – since I have more than one audience, I’ll double check that I have the right one selected.
Then I’ll scroll here to top locations.
MailChimp estimates where your contacts are located based on their IP address, or the unique identifying number for a computer, tablet, or phone within a network.
I can see that most of my subscribed contacts are located in these areas, which is good to know for when I’m building my marketing strategy.
Keep in mind that subscribed contacts added to your audience through an import won’t be factored in until they’ve engaged with your email campaigns.
From top locations, I can also create a tailored segment for my marketing campaign.
This is helpful for when I have a business goal that involves targeting a certain region. To learn more about how to create location-based segments, check out the Mailchimp guides and tutorials.
Contact Profiles
Another area where I can find geolocation data is the contact profile. To get there, I’ll come back to my audience dashboard and click view contacts.
Then I’ll click a specific contact to view their contact profile.
When I scroll to the other section of the profile, I can see my contacts, time zone, and geolocation information.
This data automatically updates over time based on where your contact opens emails. Pretty awesome, right?
Let’s look at one more location where you can find geolocation data; your email campaign report.
Email Campaign Report
I’ll go back to my dashboard, and from here I’ll click the campaigns icon and click reports. Then I’ll click view reports next to this campaign.
On the overview page, I’ll scroll down to top locations by opens.
Here I can see where in the world my recipients are opening their emails based on their geolocation data.
Keep in mind that a contact’s estimated geolocation is influenced by things like whether they use a virtual private network or have opted into their email service provider’s privacy settings.
And that’s it. You’ve learned how to view and use your contact geolocation data. For more information on geolocation, check out MailChimp’s About Geolocation article.
