Hi Arif,

I remember the conversation with John about geotargeting.  I believe we both agreed it would be a good thing to do for an artist who regularly visits the same cities/regions.

I think the best approach is to take the bull by the horns and start building your email list at your live performances.  

If you set up a unique Aweber form for each show, you can give the form a unique id that let's you know which show it was and where.

That way, the next time you return to that region, you already know which of your subscribers to invite.  You might even consider coming up with some kind of "Bring-a-friend" bonus offer, for repeat visitors if they bring a new friend to the show with them.

Obviously this doesn't help you until the first time you do this, but it's certainly a good habit to get into.

Regarding house concerts, that was actually a public blog post John posted back in February of 2011.  Here's the link:
http://www.musicmarketingmanif.....ander-ark/

-Steve

Hey Arif,

Thanks for jumping in Steve. I actually have quite a lot of experience with Geo-targeting.

There are a number of ways to do it and what I typically recommend is that people create either location specific lists, or at least create unique web forms so that you can segment later. But obviously you are trying to segment a list you already have.

Aweber doesn't have a radius feature but you can easily segment by location IP. You can segment by region, state, country, area code, zip code, etc.

The problem with any kind of location segmentation is that IPs are often not available or inaccurate. So you will find that when you create a city based list segment, the list you get back is smaller than it actually is. In other words, not everyone you want to reach will be reached. The bigger you go in terms of range, the more accurate things will be. So I would try to go by state if at all possible. It's not as perfect as creating a location specific list from the start, but it's probably the best solution.

Hi Arif,

Sorry about that.

I know that Aweber and Getresponse both collect IP info during the sign-up process, by as John mentioned it's not accurate because I believe the IPs are assigned by the computer's location and you can change the computer's location on a whim, just because you feel like it (I could be wrong about this though).

For instance, I occasionally use a computer that seems to think I'm in a city halfway across the state from where I actually am.  This means if I was on your autoresponder list, I might get your invite for that IP region, even though I don't actually live there.

The point I'm making is to treat the IP data as if it is accurate and I'm sure people will get back to you and say something like, "Thanks, but I don't actually live near there."  Then you can just make an adjustment for the small few who are inaccurate.

Again, I don't particularly have a lot of experience with Geo-targeting because at this time I don't really have a need for location-specific info.

I'd love to see what turns up for you though.

Some people have asked over the years here at MMM if they should collect zip code info on sign-up, which isn't a terrible idea by any means, but asking for more info generally lowers conversion rates, so there's definitely a trade-off.  It's not a bad idea though if you have a particular usefulness for the data.  It might be best left for collecting from people who have just bought from you, rather than a squeeze page sign-up, simply because it's easy to get physical addresses from the checkout process.

-Steve

Thanks for sharing that Mike. Very helpful. Glad to hear you feel the same way about Aweber

Hey Dairenn,

You don't have to create different lists, only different web forms. They can all be in the same list and then you can create segments based on the web form.

If you did want to separate out the lists you could also do it that way and link the lists so that one autoresponder series would go out to all of them. That way you don't have to duplicate 20 different email series'.

Cheers.