What Is the Mailchimp Integration and How Do I Add It?
Mailchimp is a broadcast email tool allowing you to send communications en masse to large numbers of individuals. The Mailchimp integration in ISP allows you to automatically create and update a Mailchimp audience based on the contacts in your database. From Mailchimp, you can also choose between mailing to your entire database or audience segments based on saved searches.
Please note that Mailchimp accounts are created with different pricing plans, including a free plan. Each plan comes with its own limited number of allowable Audiences. The free plan allows only ONE Audience. You may need to delete your audience if you created one prior to setting up this integration. The integration will not work if you have already reached your limit of used Audiences in Mailchimp, regardless of the pricing plan you are on.
How do I add the Mailchimp integration?
Navigate to the Integrations tab and select Add/Remove Integrations. On the resulting page, scroll down to the Available integrations and click on Mailchimp. You’ll then see a window appear with required account and committee information, as well as options for adding specific messaging.
Fill out all the required fields marked with an asterisk and click Add Integration. You’ll then be automatically redirected to the Mailchimp login screen and asked to log into your Mailchimp account.
Please keep in mind this integration requires you to have an existing Mailchimp account. If you do not already have a Mailchimp account prior to adding this integration, you will need to remove and re-add this integration after you have created the Mailchimp account.
After you log in, you’ll be automatically redirected back to your database. At this point your integration has been installed and you should see a new Mailchimp menu option under Integrations.
How does it work?
Only the primary email on individual records in ISP are synced with your new audience in Mailchimp. This process can take some time, approximately 5 to 10 minutes. Vendors and other organizations with emails will remain only in ISP. With this integration, your Saved Searches in Advanced Search will automatically be created as Tags in Mailchimp. This means if you create a custom Saved Search in ISP to narrow your list down further, that will become a Tag you can use in Mailchimp. There are also a few default tags that are part of the Quick List in ISP that will become Tags too. To view those lists in Mailchimp, click the Tag option on the left hand sidebar. You can use Tags in Mailchimp to keep them organized based on your Advanced Searches and contact only those in that specific Tag via Mailchimp.
If you make updates to Individual records in your database and the changes have a direct impact on contacts in Mailchimp, those changes will happen overnight and be reflected in Mailchimp the next day. You can also force it to sync by navigating to the Mailchimp page under the Integrations tab and clicking the Force Sync button at the bottom of the screen if you need it urgently. Again, this can take 5 to 10 minutes to sync.
Make sure you don’t add data directly into the ISP Audience in Mailchimp! Any data added that way will be overwritten when data from ISP is synced. Any individual records in ISP that are made inactive are not included in the Mailchimp sync. If an individual record has its email deleted, it will also be removed from the Mailchimp sync.
Currently, data only goes from ISP to Mailchimp as part of this integration. More features are planned and we will update this page as they go live.
Why should I use Mailchimp?
Over time we’ve heard from a number of clients that using other services besides Mailchimp results in a large number of emails ending up in Spam or not delivered at all. So while Mailchimp has a cost for larger volumes of data, the increased deliverability has proven to be worth the cost and satisfaction of clients using it for their email communications and lists.
For more help with Mailchimp, please view their help file system.
