How to Use Geographic Targeting to Supercharge Your Email Marketing with DailyStory

Email marketing is one of the most powerful tools in your digital marketing toolkit—but its effectiveness depends on how well you tailor your message to your audience. That’s where geographic targeting comes in.

By targeting your emails based on location, you can send more relevant, timely, and personalized messages that resonate. Whether you’re promoting an event in a specific city or offering a region-specific discount, DailyStory’s email marketing platform makes it easy to deliver the right message to the right people—wherever they are.

What Is Geographic Targeting in Email Marketing?

There are different ways to use geographic targeting in your email marketing campaigns (as well as other campaigns such as SMS marketing). In all circumstances it requires starting with geocoding your contact data.

Geocode your contact data

Geocoding your contact data is the process of assigning a latitude and longitude coordinate to a contact. For example, the geographic coordinates for someone that lives in Seattle, Washington is 47.60621, -122.33207.

There are several ways to obtain the geographic coordinates:

Google Maps API – using the Google Maps API you can provide an address and it returns the geographic coordinates. However, it is not a free service.
Open Street Map – provides free, rate-limited APIs to get geographic coordinates from addresses.
Public source – for example, the US Post Office provides .CSV files that contain geographic coordinates for zip codes.

DailyStory automatically attempts to geotarget any and all contacts with address information as it is brought into the platform.

The difference between the sources mentioned above is the granularity of the geographic coordinates. For example, Google Maps will provide coordinates to within several meters of the location. Whereas a public source, such as the US Post Office’s geographic data for zip codes only provides the center point within the area of the zip code.

Using segmentation to group contacts by geography

Once the contact data is geocoded, you can create segments of contacts based on their geographic location. For example, below is a segment created by a DailyStory customer that is targeting anyone within a 150 mile radius of the zip code 78753:

DailyStory’s segmentation tools include heatmaps to help you visualize the geographic location of your audience.

Why Location-Based Targeting Matters for Email Marketing Success

Location-based targeting isn’t just a buzzword—it’s a proven way to increase engagement and drive results in your email marketing strategy. By delivering content that’s relevant to where your audience lives, works, or shops, you create stronger connections and boost conversion potential. Whether you’re running local promotions or managing multi-location campaigns, geographic segmentation helps you market smarter, not harder.

Relevance That Drives Engagement

When your emails speak directly to a recipient’s local context, they feel more relevant—and relevance increases open rates and click-throughs. A location-based email campaign that mentions weather, local events, or nearby store locations makes your message feel personalized rather than generic. For example, a gym could promote a new class schedule to subscribers within a 10-mile radius, while an e-commerce brand could highlight products popular in a specific region.

Timing That Aligns With Your Audience

Geographic targeting allows you to schedule emails based on time zones and regional habits. A 9 AM email might work great for customers in New York, but it could hit inboxes too early for your audience in California. Hyperlocal email marketing ensures that your timing matches when people are most likely to open and engage, leading to better performance across the board.

Personalization That Converts

Personalization goes beyond using someone’s name—it’s about context. When you customize content based on where someone is located, you’re speaking directly to their needs and environment. Whether it’s highlighting local store hours, showcasing nearby events, or featuring products that are trending in a user’s city, location-based email campaigns make every message more meaningful—and more likely to convert.

How DailyStory Enables Powerful Geographic Targeting

While DailyStory support geographic targeting across the platform, there are some unique capabilities with regards to email marketing. These unique capabilities go beyond segment-based geographic email marketing. Instead each email recipient receives a uniquely targeted email based on their geographic location.

Include weather forecast for the geographic location of the recipient

Weather base geographic targeting includes a configurable weather forecast, as shown below, for each recipient. This is especially useful for events or other activities where weather may impact the event.

This widget is used by our professional sports customers as well as many of our amateur sports customers as well, such as pickleball and tennis leagues.

Hyper local and personalized event targeting

A common use case for email marketing is to promote an event, for example: concerts, tournaments, expos and more. For brands that are national or global, solving this gets increasingly more difficult as the number of contacts in their database grows along with the number of locations.

The common way to solve this is to use geographic segmenting and then create a unique email for each segment. At a small scale, this is simple, but at a larger scale with hundreds or even thousands of events it is complex.

At DailyStory what we’ve done is provide capabilities to allow customers to either create manually or through an API events. An event could be anything that takes place at a specific location at a specific date and time. Each recipient that is sent an email then geta a unique version of the upcoming event entirely based on their location:

We’ve detailed this use case further below.

Geographic lead routing

Another powerful geographic targeting feature that DailyStory support that deserves a mention: geographic lead routing.

Geographic lead routing is a feature used by DailyStory’s franchise customers. The franchisor can host a single lead generation DailyStory web form on their website or standalone.

When the web form is submitted, the lead is then routed to the franchisee that is geographically closed to the person submitting the form. This makes use of a reverse lookup of the IP address of the submitter that provides basic geographic data for the location of the IP address.

Use Cases: Creative Ways to Use Geographic Targeting

One of DailyStory’s customers, pickleball.com, makes extensive use of the geographic email marketing features built into DailyStory.

Pickleball.com maintains a database of Pickleball players across the world. They also manage and promote Pickleball events that take place around the world. Using DailyStory’s hyper local and personalized event targeting they send millions of emails per-month each with its own personalized list of upcoming Pickleball events.

Emails leveraging this geographic targeting have higher open and click rates, but most importantly: higher conversion rates.

Best Practices for Geographic Email Segmentation

To get the most out of your email segmentation by location, you need more than just zip codes. Successful geotargeted emails depend on clean data, thoughtful messaging, and smart timing. Here are some best practices to guide your strategy and help you deliver more relevant, engaging campaigns.

Collect Accurate Location Data

Your segmentation strategy is only as good as the data behind it. Make sure you’re collecting accurate geographic data from the start. This can include zip codes, cities, regions, or even real-time location data captured via website behavior or mobile interactions. Use sign-up forms that ask for location in a non-intrusive way, or enrich your contact profiles through integrations and analytics tools.

DailyStory’s integrations always attempt to include address data and automatically geocodes based on whatever location details it finds.

Personalize Based on Regional Relevance

Once you have location data, use it to tailor your content in meaningful ways. For example, feature store locations that are nearest to the subscriber, highlight local events, or reference regional preferences and trends. Geotargeted emails that include familiar city names or local imagery can make the content feel more personalized and relevant, increasing the likelihood of engagement.

Time Your Sends by Time Zone

Timing matters in email marketing—and when your audience spans multiple time zones, it’s critical to adjust your send times accordingly. Schedule your emails so they land at the right time locally, not just in your business’s time zone. Email platforms, including DailyStory, offer time zone-based scheduling to ensure your message reaches people when they’re most likely to read it.