One of our customers recently wanted to run a Mothers Day promotion, but they wanted to restrict it to their recipients in the US (the holiday is celebrated in many other countries, but on different dates). Problem is, they don’t collect "country" info when people subscribe to their list. And for now, MailChimp’s built-in geo targeting is built for very focused segmentation (by city, not country). So how do you segment based on data that you don’t have? Easy. Pay gobs of money to do a "list append."

Okay, but let’s say you don’t quite have the budget to do that, and this is really just a low key, one-time thing…

Well, you could use our integration with Flowtown to grab country data from your subscribers’ public social profiles.

Step 1: Integrate with Flowtown (here’s a more detailed blog post on how you can use Flowtown). They even have a nice pay-as-you-go plan, if you don’t need to do this on a regular basis.

Step 2: Segment your list in MailChimp by country:

Be sure to read this Flowtown review by 6S Marketing:

By targeting specific users with relevant content to one of the social networks we knew our readers were on, we obtained our highest ever open rate (67.1%) and click rate (31.5%). Both of which, were well over the industry averages (17.9% and 4.1% respectively).

The customer I mentioned above ultimately had the resources to do it another way, but Flowtown probably would’ve been good for this particular giveaway, especially because the customer’s followers are "more social" than your average list.

No matter what, I always take geo and social data with a grain of salt. When putting together the content for a US-only Mothers Day promotion, I’d probably add in some copy just in case the data was wrong, and some recipients outside the US received the mail. Some fine print, like: "Mothers Day is celebrated on May 10th in the US. Not Mothers Day where you are? Go hug a mother anyway!"