For example, I sent this MailChimp Newsletter to a little over 10,000 recipients a week ago, and 48 people have since unsubscribed.

To see the reasons, I go to my campaign’s report, click on the “unsubscribes” link:

and you’ll see everybody that unsubscribed after receiving that campaign, and why.

Notice these stats are downloadable to Excel spreadsheet.

Hmm, when I downloaded my unsub-reasons, I sorted by the “Member Rating” column. This is our measure of engagement, and I just think it’s weird to see that my most engaged subscribers would choose to unsubscribe.

Turns out they were also some of my most enRAGED customers. Check out some of their reasons for leaving:

this, of course, prompted me to check our customer service ticketing system to see what might’ve happened. Nothing there.

So I checked our Abuse Desk ticketing system. Yep, turns out we had to say goodbye to them for some abuse related issues. Guess they weren’t happy with that.

Here’s one where someone was really angry, and said he switched to one of our competitors:

Again, abuse related issues. Backtracking through the tickets, I saw that their campaigns caused problems, our Omnivore system flagged their account, and our abuse desk staff reached out to him and tried to help him resolve the issue. But in the end, the account was closed. Wish we could’ve kept these customers, but we can’t please everybody.

And as you can imagine, when they get a MailChimp newsletter about how happy our little family is over here, they’re not very happy for us. I’m tempted to ask our abuse staff to just unsubscribe anybody from all our newsletters if we have to shut down their account. That would certainly prevent anyone from maliciously reporting us to their ISPs or the spam cops of the world.

In fact, when I search for these members across all my other lists:

I see that these very same (now angry) people had also signed up to receive some of my other newsletters (my MonkeyWrench Newsletter is published on a different schedule than our company newsletter).

Dilemma. I’m planning to send my next MonkeyWrench newsletter within the next few days. Surely, they’ll complain again when they receive that one. They’d almost as likely complain if I unsubscribe them w/out their permission though. Hmm, what to do.

Luckily, MailChimp keeps records of opt-in IP address, along with a timestamp, so we have plenty of proof that they opted in on their own free will. When I click into their profiles, I get their opt-in proof:

This is exactly why we always advocate using the double opt-in method for subscriptions. They can prevent false spam complaints from ruining your deliverability.

As you can see, unsubscribe “exit surveys” can tell you a lot more than whether or not subscribers like your content.

But over time, we added engagement scoring, geotargeting, and the ability to download segments in MailChimp.

The combination of all these new tools changed my outlook completely…

Okay, first things first.

This stuff is new. There are “experts” riding on the social bandwagon who recommend you send targeted offers to the more “social” members on your list, because they might be “more viral.” I can see that working once. Not twice. Forget that. Social media is not about spamming people just because you found them on twitter (”hey, I’m on twitter too!”). Social networking is about — well, being social.

Thing is, I’m not a very social guy. I’ve been called “snuffleupagus” by someone in the email industry (and I really, really, love that name, DJ) because I rarely go to email marketing events. Or any event for that matter. So on those rare occasions when I do go somewhere, I need all the help I can get.

Facebook (no, an actual face book)

For example, I’m going to be speaking at an event in San Francisco next month. Now, I’m absolutely horrible with names, but I’m great with faces and even better with company names. It would be great if I could invite my customers who live in San Francisco (or within a 50 mile radius around the city) to attend that event. Maybe give away a guest pass, or send them a discount code. And if they do attend, it would be awesome if I could recognize them. Maybe even memorize a stat or two about them or their company (yes, I actually do that).

So I log in to MailChimp, go to my Lists tab, click on my “MailChimp Newsletters” list (which I assume only my loyal customers would actually subscribe to) click “view all members,” and run this segment:

These are my most engaged subscribers to my MailChimp Newsletter list, who live within 50 miles of San Francisco (using our new geolocation service). Sending them an invitation is super easy now. But wait.

Notice the Excel icon there? I can download this segment. Then, I imported it to Flowtown, and created a new group with this list called, “engaged subscribers in SF.” It churns away for a few minutes (about 2 seconds per email address), and I get something like this:

Each one of those icons is clickable. Yeah, that’s pretty cool, right?

Anyway, the first thing I do here is ignore Facebook. It’s not like I’m going to try to “friend” all these people. That’s just annoying.

But I do click into a bunch of profiles to learn more about my subscribers. Before you begin, you might want to sort “by Klout,” which is a service that scores people based on how connected they are. I’m not that interested in their connectedness, but I’ve found that the higher their rank, the more likely they are to have more of a public social profile (more pics to look at). Click the little “K” logo, and boom:

Once I see the most connected people sorted towards the top, I open them all in new browser tabs.

Mainly, I look at their twitter avatars. I always want to see what my subscribers look like, “IRL” as the kids say.

When I click into a profile, it looks something like this:

What Flowtown knows about yours truly

Wow, that guy’s handsome! Okay, that’s just me, but imagine a page like that for every one of your email subscribers. You can learn so much about your readers this way. I opened up a couple dozen tabs in my browser all at once, and just clicked through them, memorizing faces and business information of my subscribers.

I actually recognized quite a few faces from a little happy hour that we threw in SF a few months ago. Makes sense. They’re customers, they’re engaged, so they’re most likely to attend one of our events. I wish we had these tools back when we actually threw the event!

So I spent most of my time learning about those customers. I remembered a lot from talking with them over some drinks and food. I remember some were new, some had been with us since 2005. Some were non-profits, some were startups. Flowtown refreshed my memory of those customers. I made a mental note that if our DesignLab creates new t-shirts, we should send these guys the first run.

Segment by Gender, Age, Location

Speaking of t-shirts, we recently ran a promotion where we gave away 1,000 MailChimp t-shirts via twitter, facebook, and email (we learned a lot;  here’s the case study). Anyway, on our t-shirt promo landing page, we collected emails from people who wanted to be notified when we had more t-shirts available. I’ve actually integrated that “t-shirts list” with Flowtown, so that in MailChimp, we can segment our list based on gender. Really handy if we have a ton of extra ladies shirts. Here’s a segment I created by gender from that list:

Flowtown integration also lets me segment by age and location, too. So if I want to send our whacky wolf-meme shirts to a younger female crowd, but only want to pay for shipping in the states, I can do that:

You’ll notice that the segmentation criteria above start with FT-. That tells you it’s pulling that data in from Flowtown. This is really handy information. I can print this list and ship t-shirts to them as a surprise. Or, use the segment to send a quick, personal note asking them for their t-shirt sizes, shipping address, etc. I’d most likely ask them to fill out a Wufoo or Formspring form (they both integrate with MailChimp too, btw) with that info, so I can very easily print shipping labels with them.

Okay, where were we?

Oh yeah, I was looking at loyal subscribers in San Francisco in preparation of this event I’m speaking at…

For some of the profiles on my list, I could click to see their flickr photosets and learn a little more about their interests. By the way, I spend a significant portion of my days watching customers talk to us on Tweetdeck, and I often click into their twitter profiles, then to their company websites, about pages, linkedin profiles, and on and on. Just helps me understand my customer. Flowtown makes this process much easier, especially with their flickr integration:

I see some customers are into cars. Awesome. I’m like Rain Man when it comes to memorizing cars, so I can talk about classic Porsches with one customer, and GT-Rs with another. Some are into travel, some are foodies, and some like parrots. Note to self: include parrots in a future email newsletter.

Demographic Insights

One nice feature in Flowtown is their “Contact Insights” link. It shows me general demographic information about the San Francisco segment that I imported:

Just for kicks, I imported a segment of my most engaged subscribers from the Atlanta area and compared them:

It looks like San Francisco has more people in the 55+ age bracket than Atlanta. Hmm. I would’ve thunk they were all 20-somethings building the next big twitter over there. Upon closer inspection of profiles, I realize that San Franciscans just lie more often in their social profiles than Atlantans.

For example, I know this guy’s not 55:

So yeah, as with all stats, take these with a grain of salt.

Flowtown Helps You Write Better Content

You know what the secret to being a good email marketer is? Send useful stuff. Don’t have anything useful to send? Shut up until you do. That’s all I have to say about email marketing anymore (see why I don’t go to email marketing events?).

Anyway, one secret to sending useful stuff is to know what your subscribers like.

MailChimp’s reports already help you see what links people are clicking in your newsletters. Over time, you can tailor your content to their tastes. MailChimp will even show you where they’re opening from on a map, so you can decide whether or not you should include, say, automagic translation options for your campaigns.

But when you combine MailChimp with Flowtown, you get even more insight about your subscribers. Down to a one-to-one, human level.

Flowtown Helps You Be More Social

What do I mean by “more human level?” Well, I currently use Tweetdeck to monitor mentions of @mailchimp, and I always take note of who (in my hometown of Atlanta) tweets something about @mailchimp.

But Flowtown makes this process so much easier.

I can segment my MailChimp subscriber list like this:

and just generate a big report in Flowtown, then look at all those faces.

Here’s the human part I was talking about. When I’m out and about, and I see one of those subscribers — um, people at the local coffee shop, I buy them a drink (yes, I actually do that). If I run into them at a meetup, and I recognize their avatar — um, their face, it’s much easier to start up a conversation with them. If one of them invites me to sponsor some local event, I just might be more likely to do that. And if one of them works for an advertising agency, and she invites me to come in and pitch our services, even though we’re a completely do-it-yourself product with 260,000 users and I haven’t given any form of pitch whatsoever in years (and all my dress shirts are in boxes somewhere), I absolutely go! Why? I just want to learn who my customers are, so I can write more useful content for them, or build more useful features into our product. Also, to thank them for being a subscriber. IRL.

Basically, be more social.

They’re turning it into a challenge.

They’ll only launch the newsletter if they can get 10,001 subscribers (see: The 10,001 Subscriber Challenge).

We’d love to see them hit that goal, because they’d be using MailChimp to send those emails (yay!).

But I’m actually writing about all this because they’ve got an excellent use of a feature that not a lot of people know we have: the subscriber chiclet. You can grab some code from MailChimp, and put your current subscriber count on your website, just under your signup form. Oh, just in case you want to show your subscriber count inside your email newsletters, there’s a merge tag for that (look for the one called “LIST:SUBSCRIBERS” on our merge tag cheatsheet.

[UPDATE] It’s been fascinating just refreshing their page with the signup form, because I can see how fast their list is growing. Currently, it seems like they’re adding 1,000 subscribers per hour.

Another global enhancement is the ability to set your default date format as either mm/dd/yyyy (if you’re in America) or dd/mm/yyyy if you’re one of our European or Australian friends. It’s super easy; here’s how:

1. In your MailChimp Dashboard, click on the Account link at the top left of the screen.

2. In the right hand column, click the My Defaults link.

3. Select the default date format you prefer and click save at the bottom of the page.

That’s it! Now you’ll see your chosen date format reflected throughout the application.

learn more about industry comparisons

But I send a lot of campaigns. Because I use MailChimp’s RSS-to-email tool wired up to this blog, I send almost daily. And I look at my stats all the time. So I already know my average open rate, and I already know my click rate, and I already know that I’m usually a few percentage points above industry average (c’mon, step it up a little Internet & Software industry!).

Nowadays, I find myself seeking anomalies in my stats instead…

In other words, I just want to know if something’s changed about my performance.

So my new favorite campaign stat is MailChimp’s performance advice:

MailChimp gives a little advice

You may have noticed that little link inside your campaign reports. Click it, and MailChimp will tell you (with little red or green arrows) if your stats are trending up or down.

In the screenshot above, it’s telling me that my open and click rate are lower than normal for me. That would normally make me wonder if my content triggered some spam filters. In which case, there’s not a lot you can do with RSS-to-email. I’m not going to worry about how spam filters think while writing for my blog. But if it were a normal campaign, and I didn’t do this before sending, I might run it through our inbox inspector or delivery doctor tools to uncover any problems.

I tend to not worry so much about my content, though. I’m on a dedicated IP address (I send a lot, and my team uses my account as a guinea pig for stuff), which means I tend to look for infrastructure issues more than content triggers.

So I look at my domain performance report to see if I’m getting blocked by any particular ISP:

In particular, I’m looking to see if there are an inordinate number of bounces from any single domain. Nothing here.

Hmm.

I go back to my performance advice, and notice this little link advising me to go download my master campaign report (hey MailChimp team, didn’t I ask to name this our B.A.R.F. report?):

So I download that big giant spreadsheet, which contains ALL my stats across ALL my campaigns ever sent.

This way, I can slice and dice numbers any way I want, and build my own custom graphs (see how you can use this report to calculate your best day to send).

I sort my columns so that I can focus on my daily blog updates, and immediately, I notice my open rate declining in November:

Whoah. I was in the mid-30’s there for a while, then bam—mid 20’s. Did my content start sucking?

No, because it always sucked.

If you look at the 3rd column in that screenshot, that’s my list size. You’ll notice that something happened between November 5th and November 7th that grew my list by around 50%. Yowzers.

Could it have been some spike in my website traffic? Some amazing blog post that I wrote that got the world excited about email marketing, and so they stormed over to my blog and signed up to hear more from yours truly?

That’s when I remembered that we introduced a new report called Site Analytics360 a while back (note to self: blog about Site Analytics360). It takes your Google Analytics stats, and overlays your MailChimp and twitter stats, so you can see how your email campaigns are driving traffic to your website, and spot trends or anomalies along the way. You can find it under the Reports tab in MailChimp.

Just look for this button:

So here’s a screenshot of my blog stats, overlaid with my MailChimp stats.

Nope. No spike in traffic to the site, and definitely no spike due to my blog content. Shucks.

So what was it? Why’d my daily updates list grow 50%, thereby reducing my opens and clicks below my usual average?

Ah. I remember now.

Some time in early November, I imported 300 seedlist addresses to track my deliverability through ReturnPath.

So I’ve basically got a bunch of “fake” subscribers on my list, weighing down my engagement levels.

I go to my list and search for “returnpath” and sure enough, I see subscribers like this:

who were all imported on November 5th, 2009. It’s all coming back to me now.

By the way, if you import any seed lists, you might want to “tag” them in some way. I gave them all sequential ReturnPath1,2,3… FNAMES, so I can easily mass unsubscribe them later.

So now I’ve solved the mystery of my declining open rates. Feels good to know why it happened. Hopefully, if you ever get a client or boss breathing down your neck about declining email performance, this tutorial can help you uncover any problems.

You’ll add the quick poll merge tag when you get to the third step of the campaign builder and are populating your template with content.

The syntax for the merge tag is as follows:

*|POLL:RATING:H| *
How likely are you to recommend our service to a friend or coworker?
*|END:POLL| *

H is for horizontal
V is for vertical (if you want to place in your template's side column)


As you’ll notice, you can use this merge tag more than once. Just be sure to close each * |POLL:RATING:H| * tag with a corresponding *|END:POLL| *

Once you’ve sent your email and are ready to take a look at your poll results, you’ll find them on the Reports page.

As you can see below, you’ll get a grid of answers for each of the poll questions you ask, including the number of votes, the overall percentage of answers, and a time stamp for the last time someone selected that option.

A couple caveats to be aware of:

• you must be a subscriber to vote, and you can only vote once
• you’ll only be able to vote by clicking 1-10 in the actual email; this merge tag will not work on the campaign archive page
• polls will still work regardless of whether or not you’ve enabled click tracking

Now, we’ll handle your email content too. Here’s how you do it…

First, you’ll need to go to your list, then click on the “forms” link:

In the form designer, check the box to “auto-translate:”

Click the “Save” button, and you’re done.

There’s nothing else to do. Design your email and write your content in whatever your preferred language. When you send it, we’ll automatically translate it to the default language of each recipient.

Here’s my campaign in MailChimp:

and after I send it to my list, a recipient with Korean set as their default language sees it like this:

It’s translated from tippy-top-to-bottom.

No, automated translations aren’t perfect. But have you ever traveled afar, and needed help from a stranger? You at least made an attempt to speak their language, right? They appreciate the attempt. Much better than you blabbering on in your own language, and assuming they understand you. If you’re lucky, they actually tell you “Don’t worry, I speak English (or whatever) and then you can ask them your question. But starting off in their language is just being courteous.

Same thing here. Your subscribers navigated your website and can probably speak your language (well enough to opt-in to your list). But why not make that first inbox impression a nice one? If they prefer, they can click your campaign-archive link at the top of the email, and see your campaign in its original language. In my case, that Korean-speaking recipient would just view the online version in English.

If you run an e-commerce or eBay store, and have an international audience, this is a great option for you, especially since your emails are probably mostly composed of product images and prices (not so content-heavy).

While we’re on the topic of translation, now’s a good time to go into your list settings, and turn on your campaign archive toolbar. It will appear at the top of all your archives (for that list), and allow your recipients to then translate back to any other language you want (and share with friends, subscribe to your list, and view past issues).

You also might want to look into our translate merge tag, which you can place in your emails and let recipients manually choose when to autotranslate.

Down the road: segment by language

Since we store each recipient’s default language preferences, the obvious next step for us is to allow you to segment your list by language, and send your own human translated versions. This would be for those cases where it’s essential to have perfect translations.

But diagnosing the exact reason your email was blocked can be extremely difficult.

The only way to really figure out why your message was blocked is to systematically test each variable: change your subject line, and send another test email. Go check all your test accounts. Did it get blocked again? Well, change this link. Still blocked? Change another link. Wasn’t your links? Swap out the images. Not it? Change your content. Over and over, till you find the culprit. Then, do all that again for the next spam filter. Complete p.i.t.a.

So we automated all that with our new Delivery Doctor tool. Push one button, and we’ll automagically slice and dice and analyze your email and run dozens of tests until we find the root of your block.

Then, we tell you what to fix…

Delivery Doctor's Diagnosis of your problem

You’ll find the Delivery Doctor at the bottom of the Pre-Delivery Checklist screen (the last step before sending out your campaign).

Click the button, and we’ll start analyzing. Depending on how many tests we have to run, it could take a while. So we send you the results via email. Please don’t sit there and watch the spinning animation (if you really enjoy spinning animations, this one’s much more fun).

Keep in mind that if you have a problem with your email, and you run the Delivery Doctor, we actually send this to real accounts (setup with consumer ISPs and B2B filters). We test for common issues, like subject lines, links, email content, images, and more. This means that, depending on the nature of your problem, as many as 44 different tests might be run on your email.

Because it’s such an intense diagnosis, we can’t offer this to everybody. It’s totally free to use, but is only available to users on paid plans (not to our freemium users). Also keep in mind that this tool is still in beta. We’re already seeing hundreds of tests being run, just hours after launching it, and due to heavy loads we’ve had to remove a few of the tests we perform (slow down, people!). It’s beta. In due time, we’ll add more test criteria and really refine the product.

Which means you can now schedule your MailChimp campaigns to automagically deliver based on each subscriber’s timezone.

No more timezone differences! 9am means 9am now, whether you’re on the east coast or west coast. Or anywhere on the globe, really.

We call this new feature TimeWarp, and here’s how it works…

Whenever you create a new campaign, just activate TimeWarp on the Campaign Setup screen.

Look for this little checkbox:

When checked, we’ll ask you for date and time. Notice there’s no pulldown asking for timezone, because that’s the magical part of TimeWarp.

Then, just build your campaign as you normally do, and on the final pre-delivery checklist screen, you’ll see this new item:

Time Travel Takes A Little Adjustment

When you TimeWarp your campaigns, you’ll want to remember that depending on how geographically widespread your subscribers are, campaigns might take 24 hours for all of it to get delivered. That’s because, scientifically speaking, we’re traveling to the future to deliver your emails. I know what you’re thinking and the answer is NO; we are not altering the past when we do that. MailChimp uses a special type of flux capacitor so that our emails don’t break the time-space continuum. Just something to keep in mind.

All joking aside, you should take note of the bottom of your campaign’s TimeWarp map, because we break down how many members of your list are in each timezone, and we show whether or not your email has been delivered to them yet:

Within each timezone, you can see how many are still pending for “future” delivery.

You can also hover over each timezone to get the status of your campaign:

Stats are slightly different now

This also means that campaign stats like opens, clicks, bounces, etc., could take longer to show up than you’re used to.

If you think about this hard enough, you’ll understand why this wasn’t something we could add to our RSS-to-email campaigns (although that would be super cool).  It’s possible for someone to update their RSS feed (blog) with a new post before a TimeWarped campaign has even completed sending. Yep. That would warp the time-space continuum.

How Accurate Is All This?

More accurate than what we all had before TimeWarp — which was nothing.

Okay, to be more specific, this is based on the IP addresses given to your subscribers by their ISPs. So keep in mind a subscriber might be using an ISP located several cities (or states) away from where they actually live. But even if their ISP is in another city, it’s likely to still be in the same timezone as the subscriber.

The real question to ask is “what percentage of my list actually interacted in a way that allowed MailChimp to track geolocation?” For example, if your last open rate was around 40%, we have geolocation data for at least 40% of your list.  So when you select “TimeWarp,” that means roughly 40% of your list will get the email at the time you specified in their timezone. The remaining 60% of your list will get it based on your timezone (just like they always did before).

Remember, we track IPs when people:

• go through the double opt-in process, or
• open your email (and display images), or
• click a link in your email

So if you manually imported your entire list, there’s no double opt-in activity there, hence no geodata. Then, let’s say you send your first campaign to that list and get a 50% open rate. Now, 50% of your list has geodata. Nice. The other 50% will be defaulted to receive emails based on your timezone (as it was before).

And as discussed in our geolocation article, MailChimp actually keeps track of each recipient’s geolocation, so we know if they’ve moved and live in a new timezone.

Timezones are whacky

Have you ever looked at a timezone map? No, I mean really, really looked at a timezone map?

Here’s the one you’ll see in MailChimp:

Sure would make life easier if all the lines were just straight verticals.

Instead, we get strange regions like this:

Yikes!

If you live inside that zig-zaggy region under the red arrow, or in that little red circle where all those lines sort of intersect, you probably have no idea what time it is anyway, so we’re going to just “round you off.” Anyone in a fractional timezone, such as GMT +8.75, will be rounded off to GMT +9.

BTW, you might want to look into getting one of these awesome futuristic PanAm watches from the past:

Anyway, if you look at the timezone map, you’ll see there are 24 timezones. If you’ve actually got subscribers in every one of those timezones, that means we’re going to have to slice up your campaign into 24 little campaigns (don’t worry, because all your stats will be rolled up into one report). If you add A/B testing on top of that, things gets a bit “resource intensive.” So for now, we’re reserving this feature for our users on pay-as-you-go or monthly plans. It’s a free feature, but is not available for users on our freemium plan.

And to think. All these timezones never existed before railroads started “transporting people across great distances quickly.” We had to change the way we think of time, because we could leave home in the morning, travel all day, and get to our destination in –  well, the same morning. Will the ability to make an email appear simultaneously in inboxes across the globe, no matter where people live, change the way we think of time again? Only time will tell. Note to self: travel back in time and fix that lame conclusion someday when I’m not so busy writing about all the other new features in v5.

Geolocation tracking added to MailChimp

We’ve been scheming at this TimeWarp idea for a long time now. But in order to make that work, we first had to get geolocation data for our users’ subscribers. That took a while to collect and add to our system. For the uninitiated, here’s an article from ReadWriteWeb where they dream about the possibilities of a geolocation-enabled twitter. Here’s one trendy way twitter ended up using geo, and here’s a fun article on how Foursquare got kind of catty over Yelp’s entry into geo.

So geo’s kind of a big thing. Apparently. We just needed it to make email marketing a little better.

Anyway, after we got TimeWarp working, we decided to add geolocation as a segmentation option too. So you can now send a targeted campaign to subscribers inside a 150 mile radius around any point on the globe.

Here’s how that works…

GeoTargeting in MailChimp

Previously, in order to do any kind of location-based targeting, you’d have to add fields to your signup form asking subscribers to enter their mailing address or postal code (see: MailChimp’s ZIP code targeting). Now, you can let MailChimp automatically pinpoint their location. It’s not as perfect as getting their address, but it’s pretty close.

Here’s how you send a targeted, location-based email with our geolocation service:

1. Segment your list by specifying some region:

Choose a 50, 100, or 150 mile radius around that location.

2. We’ll show it to you on a map for verification (and for dramatic effect):

3. Click the “use this location” button, and you’re ready to go.

You might want to hit “refresh cont” on that segment to see how many people we pinpointed. For example, I’m kind of delighted to see that of my list of 25,000 MonkeyWrench newsletter subscribers, 323 are within 50 miles of me:

When I click the “view segment” link, I see lots of familiar names from business colleagues, personal friends, and customers. Made me smile.

By the way, it’s also possible to go to –> Lists –> View all members, run the very same segment criteria, then download that segment as a spreadsheet:

With the spreadsheet, I can create a new list in MailChimp. Or, I’d more likely try to do some further analysis of the list to learn more about them. For example, there’s a company called Flowtown (which integrates with MailChimp), and, if I understand this Daily Sense article correctly, can tell me which local residents are the most “influential.” I wouldn’t advocate sending them more email marketing, or emails with “hey, social dude, let’s get all social and stuff.” Don’t send stuff like that just because you know more about them (that’s creepy). But I’d probably buy them some beers, or coffee if I see them around town, or send them some extra special mailchimp shirts, or maybe even a hand-written note. That’s what “social” means, right?

We could also hold a local event just for local customers, and send them an invitation using our Eventbrite integration. Just to thank our customers and followers. We did all this manually when we took our trip to San Francisco recently and threw a little party (here are some pics, btw). But for future events, this geo thing is going to come in really, really handy.

How it all works

Whenever someone double-opts-in to your list, or opens or clicks from inside your email newsletter, they get redirected through our servers (which is how we track opens and clicks for you). As your subscribers pass through, one very common piece of information that comes with them is their IP address given to them by their ISP. We basically do a reverse lookup to find out the general region they’re in, so that you can use that information to send localized, targeted information.

Constantly Updating Geolocation

People travel, and they sometimes check email from mobile devices. Also, their ISP changes when they check email from work vs. at home. So their geolocation data changes constantly.

Yes, MailChimp tracks all that. We basically keep tabs on their location over time, and we “average” it out for you. For example, if someone normally checks their email from London, and one day she opens one of your emails from Miami, we know she’s just on vacation, and we don’t update her profile. But if, on average, most of her email interactions start coming from Miami, we will assume she’s moved, and we’ll update her geolocation profile for you accordingly.

Data is Backfilled

The nice thing about all this is we’ve been tracking geolocation data for more than a year now, and have already backfilled it for you. We’ve processed just under half a billion subscriptions. As you send more campaigns, we’ll gather more data, but you’re set to go right now.

Keep in mind that subscribers that have engaged with your emails, or double opted-in to your list, will now have geolocation data in their profiles. But if your list was imported, or if members on your list aren’t engaging, there is no geo data to track. On average, you can probably expect around 20-25% of your list to actually contain geodata.

Guess it’s a big deal

Like I was saying, TimeWarp was our real goal, because we just wanted to make email scheduling easier across all the timezones across the globe. And I’m pretty sure MailChimp Labs took this project on because someone said it would be extremely useful and cool, “but probably impossible to automate.” So it’s really nice to stumble upon this whole “geolocation” thing and then discover how fascinating it is to so many people in the “social” world.

And to be able to offer it free to email marketers is just icing on the cake!

Also see:

• ZIP code proximity targeting in MailChimp
• GigaOM interviews Gowalla CEO Josh Williams, discuss stumbling into geolocation, and the future of geolocation