Segment readers near a location

If you publish for a region — a metro daily, a set of neighbourhood titles, a paper with a city edition — you often want to reach the readers who are actually there. A location segment does that: you search for the place, say how far out to reach, and Letterhead gathers the readers inside that radius.

You don’t have to ask anyone where they live. Letterhead works out roughly where each reader is from the way they read your newsletters, so the segment fills itself in.

Building a location segment

1. Go to Audience and open the Segments tab.
2. Click Create segment and give the segment a name.
3. Choose how criteria are matched — Any (a reader qualifies by matching any one criterion) or All (a reader must match every criterion).
4. Scroll to the Location section and click Add criteria.
5. Start typing in City or town and pick your place from the list that appears.
6. In Within (miles), type how far out from that place to reach — 50 for a wide regional catch, 10 to stay close to the centre.
7. Click Save.

That’s it. A segment for everyone within 50 miles of New York is a place and a number.

As you fill the rule in, Letterhead shows how many readers it currently reaches, and updates that as you change it. So finding the right distance is a matter of trying one and watching the number, rather than saving and coming back later.

Reaching more than one place

Click Add criteria again for each additional place you want to include, and set its own distance. Whether the reader has to be near one of your places or all of them follows the Any / All choice you made at the top of the segment — for several separate regions, you almost always want Any.

You can also combine a location criterion with anything else the builder offers — tags, profile fields, engagement — to get something like readers within 25 miles of Chicago who opened something recently.

Sending to the segment

A location segment behaves like every other segment. When you schedule a newsletter, click Preview and schedule and pick the segment from the Audience dropdown. See How do tags and segments work? for the rest of the segment toolkit.

One thing worth separating: the count you see while building the rule is worked out there and then, but the count shown against a saved segment in your list can take up to 3 hours to catch up. Either way you can send to the segment straight away — it includes the right readers at the moment it goes out.

Where the location comes from

Letterhead works out roughly where a reader is each time they open or click one of your newsletters, and settles on the place they read from most often — not just their latest activity. Two things follow from that, and both are worth knowing before you lean on a tight radius:

• A reader has to have read something first. Someone who has never opened or clicked has no location yet, so they won’t turn up in a location segment. Newer readers fill in as they start reading.
• It follows where the reader usually is, not their home address, and it moves gradually. The location reflects where they read from most often, so a reader who commutes or travels occasionally won’t jump segments on a single trip — it shifts only once a new location becomes their typical one. It’s a good read on where your audience usually is, rather than a mailing address.

Letterhead also ignores automated opens — the kind mail apps make on a reader’s behalf when they pre-load images — so a location reflects a real person reading rather than the data centre their mail passed through.

Because of the first point, the Location section tells you how much of your audience Letterhead has a location for — something like roughly where 62% of your contacts are. That figure is the ceiling on any location rule: a segment can only ever reach readers Letterhead can place. It’s the quickest way to tell a radius that’s too tight from an audience that simply hasn’t been read from much yet.

The city and region on a reader’s profile come from the same reading signal, so a profile is a good way to sanity-check what Letterhead knows about an individual reader.

Choosing interests from a list

The same segment builder has a related improvement worth knowing about. When you filter on the interests Letterhead infers for your readers — under Dynamic Fields — the value is no longer something you have to type from memory. It’s now a list of the topics your readers actually carry, commonest first, each labelled with how many readers it reaches, like climate (128 contacts).

That matters because a typed topic that doesn’t quite match anything builds a segment that quietly reaches nobody. Picking from the list means every choice in front of you is one that reaches a real audience. If none of your readers has an inferred interest yet, the field stays a plain text box.

See View reader interests on subscriber profiles for how Letterhead works interests out in the first place.

FAQ

Which places can I choose? Start typing and you’ll see matching places: US cities and towns down to about 5,000 people, plus larger cities worldwide. Small markets are covered, so you can usually centre a radius on the town you actually publish in rather than the nearest big city. Accents don’t matter — typing montreal finds Montréal.

Can I set the distance in kilometres? Not yet — the distance is in miles.

Why is my segment smaller than I expected? Check the coverage line in the Location section first. Only readers who have opened or clicked at least once have a location, so if Letterhead can only place a small share of your contacts, that caps every location rule no matter how wide. If coverage is high, the radius is the thing to widen — and you can watch the count move as you change it.

Does the segment keep itself up to date? Yes. It re-evaluates as readers engage, so someone who starts reading from inside your radius joins it without any editing. The count against a saved segment can lag by up to 3 hours.

Can I use this on a single newsletter’s audience? Yes — the same Location section appears in the segment builder on an individual newsletter’s Audience page, where the segment is scoped to that newsletter.

For the rest of what you can do on this page, see Working in Audience.