Rockhouse Partners call themselves “a technology-based entertainment agency,” but what they really do is connect musicians, businesses, and entertainers with their fans. From Lollapalooza to the Tennessee State Fair, John Mayer to The Loveless Cafe, Rockhouse helps its clients find interesting and thoughtful ways to interact with their customers via email. A lot of the time, that means working with some tricky elements. How do you convince a concert goer it’s worth their time to drive in from out of state? Should a brick and mortar store craft two different emails for local and non-local customers? What kind of special offers would delight a customer who lives near a venue? These are the kinds of geo-specific questions Rockhouse use MailChimp to answer on the regular.

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Previously, if you wanted to send targeted campaigns to your subscribers by their ZIP code (or proximity to ZIP code), you needed to use a signup form that used our “Address” field. But the Address field came bundled with fields for street, city, state, etc. Our customers asked for the ability to simply add a “ZIP Code” field, all by itself. This is now available in v5.9, which is going live today and tomorrow:

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…

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