Mailchimp is the world's most popular email marketing platform, well-liked by businesses and charities alike. Its suite of tools makes it easy to create compelling email newsletters, automate drip sequences for new supporters, and report on the success of your team's email campaigns.

Beacon's integration with Mailchimp gives you the ability to use the wealth of information in your Beacon account to drive segmentation and selection for your emails, and also ensure that you won't accidentally email someone who's opted out of email communications.

Watch our summary video to understand how Beacon's Mailchimp app helps you to segment your audience and keep your contact consents up to date.

The Mailchimp app has a variety of features to make managing your email lists easy!

Here are some general recommendations that will help you to make the most of our Mailchimp app:

Connecting to your Mailchimp account is quick and easy!

Now that you're connected and any new subscribers will be added to Beacon, it's time to bring in your existing contacts.

It's pretty straightforward, and we've got a guide just for that here!

If you use a Mailchimp signup form for your newsletter or regular communications any new subscribers will also be added to Beacon. We'll bring across their first and last name, email address, and email consent (we'll also include their phone number or address if it's there).

If you'd like to add data to new subscribers from Mailchimp, you can include this fixed data in the app's settings:
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When sending a campaign (whether it's a 'send to all' newsletter, or hyper-targeted VIP outreach) it's best practice to start with Beacon, and then send the relevant contacts to Mailchimp ready to be emailed.

Head to your People list, and add filters to choose only those whom you are wanting to email. For a general newsletter, this would normally be:

For more targeted mailings, you would include additional filters for your segment. For example, if you were emailing only those who have donated this year, you'd add:

Now that you have your desired recipients for your email, let's send them to Mailchimp!

Your segment is now in Mailchimp and awaiting their email. Simply create your email content as per usual using Mailchimp's campaign builder, then select the tag you gave the contacts as the 'To' for your campaign:

You're ready to send!

Once sent, you'll see that Beacon has logged an Activity on each recipient's timeline for that email:

Unsubscribes in Mailchimp and opt-outs in Beacon will both be reflected in the other platform, ensuring you always have accurate information for whom you shouldn't be contacting.

Both Beacon and Mailchimp have automation features that you can use in various ways to improve your supporter journey and reduce the amount of time you need to spend sending repetitive emails.

Mailchimp has an automation feature to be able to start various 'Journeys' based on triggers for your contacts. You could use this to start a general "Welcome to our charity" drip campaign, or a journey specific to a segment of contacts.

You can see Mailchimp's various templated journeys, or build one from scratch, in Automations in your Mailchimp sidebar.

The two most common pre-built journeys we see customers using are:

You can trigger these journeys by exporting People from Beacon, either by regular manual processes or automatically with workflows ⤵️

Beacon's Workflows element can be used to automatically export a Person to Mailchimp, including tags of your choice, when particular actions happen in your Beacon account. These automated exports can then trigger your automated journeys within Mailchimp, making the process hands-free from start to finish!

For example, if you have designed a "Major donor journey" in Mailchimp that triggers whenever a contact receives the 'Major donor' tag, you can have a workflow in Beacon that tags that contact in Mailchimp whenever a person donates over £1000.

When selecting your recipients of a new campaign in Mailchimp you can naturally include or exclude based on previous campaign sendings.

But what if you want to filter for that within Beacon?

To filter people based on the campaigns they've received, you can include filters for 'Related activities'. You can then use the campaign ID to narrow it down to the specific campaign you want them to have received (or not received).

To get the ID of a campaign, open that campaign in Mailchimp, and you'll see the ID in the URL:

Filter for:

Filter for:

These are the results of various actions taken in Mailchimp and Beacon:

We've got a comprehensive guide on how to manage your legitimate interest mailings with Mailchimp!

Beacon works best with Mailchimp's recommendation to have one single audience for your contacts. You can then use tagging to easily segment them within that audience, using the vast information you have available in Beacon. You'll also avoid having contacts stored in many audiences (costing you more!), which helps to keep your data clean.

Mailchimp has a fabulous article about how to organise your audiences.

Sometimes when you export people to Mailchimp, you will get errors that come back when the export is complete.

Mailchimp doesn't tell us exactly what the errors were, but they are usually either:

The email address will always be imported into Beacon.

Additionally, we will bring in Mailchimp's standard "merge tags" when saving subscribers as people in your Beacon database:

Beacon will just export basic information to Mailchimp when exporting, as these are the only fields that are universal across all Mailchimp accounts:

If you'd like to add additional information to Mailchimp (e.g. you want to use data for merge tags in a campaign), you can create an export template and then manually import into Mailchimp.

Yes, and no!

No, bulk imports into Mailchimp won't trigger the subscriber sync to Beacon. Instead, simply import them into Beacon afterwards!

No. Beacon will only log the ad-hoc Campaign emails sent out. Automated Journey emails won't be logged.

Depending on your Mailchimp settings you may come across a contact in Mailchimp whose activity looks like the one below, where they are both opted-in AND opted-out:

Not to worry! This is expected behaviour, and the important thing here is that it doesn't affect the Beacon to Mailchimp integration.

Mailchimp has a couple of different ways of managing subscriber preferences;

You will only ever see the situation above if you're currently using #2; the GDPR Marketing preferences.

Since you're using Beacon to manage and store an individual's consent to email, you don't need to worry about storing that in Mailchimp as well.

If you'd like to stop seeing the above scenario, then you can simply disable the GDPR settings in Mailchimp - follow Mailchimp's guide for how to get there.

Yes, absolutely! You'll still have access to export (whether manually or via workflows) to any audiences in your Mailchimp account, regardless of whether you're monitoring them.