May 19, 2010
Segmenting by Data You Don’t Have
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!"
ziggy
Why haven’t you published my 2 comments about being unable to segment by country? Any answers? Thanks.
05.23.2010
Ben MailChimp
Ziggy, you posted anonymously, so it goes waaaay down in the queue here to be completely honest with you. And sometimes the comment queue gets long, and we just have to start clearing them all out. Anonymous comments just don’t get a lot of weight here. IIRC, you had a concern about the fact that you had country data for each subscriber, but you thought MailChimp only provided text fields? You wanted pulldowns instead? Pulldowns are an option in our form builder
05.24.2010
ziggy
I have asked this a few times on your blog before and have never got a solution. I’ve also sent in a few help tickets, and never got a solution. Because of that we have never been able to progress beyond your basic account signup.
Can’t you please explain clearly how to meet this basic requirement at Mailchimp: how to input and use a long country list for subscribers?
>>you thought MailChimp only provided text fields? You wanted pulldowns instead? Pulldowns are an option in our form builder
Not for a long list of countries, you don’t, do you? The length is severely limited last time I looked. And no pre-filled country dropdown either?
And if hosting the form to get around limitations in your forms, how can we let customers edit their profile without getting bad/misspelled text in a country text field making it a problem for segmenting?
I just want to be able to segment and send an email to my customers in England or France or the US or Argentina, etc. How to do it? Please explain.
05.28.2010
ziggy
Any response and yet?
How to segment by country???
06.13.2010
Ben MailChimp
Ziggy, have you tried building a dropdown for your form, with the countries you want in the list?
06.13.2010
ziggy
Seriously? Still no answer for how to accomplish this basic task?
help tickets – no answer
question on blog post about location – no answer
getsatisfaction – no answer
How can you guys trumpet your customer service but refuse to answer a basic question?
06.19.2010
Ben MailChimp
Hi Ziggy, you just go into your signup form designer, create a pulldown, then enter each country as a value. There’s no limit to the number of pulldown options you can have. Earlier, when you said it was severely limited, that might’ve been because you were trying to enter these as “interest groups” for which we do have limits. But as a separate pulldown altogether, you can add all the countries you want. We plan to offer a separate pulldown with pre-populated countries with our next release, but if the list of countries you serve (ship to) is not that large, manual entry might be preferable.
06.20.2010
ziggy
http://blog.mailchimp.com/kb/article/is-there-a-limit-to-the-answers-in-the-drop-down-or-mulitple-choice-fields
***updated: 05/14/2010***
I recall trying to add a dropdown before and couldn’t do it. Or maybe just read that. Is this new, it says just updated last month?
If this has always been the case, why could I not get this answer 9 months ago when I was sending in several help tickets? What’s a waste of time.
So I can enter 195 countries in a dropdown list – obvious usability nightmare aside. C’mon guys, this one is so clearly needed as a preset it should have been there from day 1. Day 2 at least… :-)
06.25.2010
Ben MailChimp
It’ll be a preset soon. It’s just a feature that we often push back in priority b/c we have other ideas we’d like to launch too. It’s coming. Meantime, yes — it’s a drag to add all the countries. Do you need them *all* though? Some users only want to include the countries they actually serve or ship to.
06.25.2010
Kristopher
This is a heated exchange but I would like to +1 that it’s kind of a pain to have to manually enter +/- 200 drop-down options to allow for segmentation by country on a list where people might be from lots of different countries.
12.28.2010
Ben MailChimp
Kristopher, since this blog post was published, we’ve launched “pre-populated country drop-down” as a built-in feature for signup forms. Details here:
http://eepurl.com/Pwcv
12.29.2010
Kristopher
Thanks for the fix!
http://eepurl.com/Pwcv
12.29.2010