Sending email campaigns to your interested supporters is straightforward - add them to Mailchimp and off you go! But what about when you don't have their consent for marketing, but are instead using legitimate interests to get in touch?
Recommended approach
For GDPR reasons you won't want to add these people to your main Mailchimp audience, as you'll run the risk of them being included in your regular campaigns.
We recommend creating a specific 'Legitimate interests' audience in Mailchimp to send any bulk messages.
This will give you a few key benefits:
You won't ever mix lists of people with varying consent in your primary audience
It will keep these campaigns completely separate from your main marketing list
You don't need to manage complex tags and conditions to exclude some of these contacts for your everyday newsletters
You can still export to this list directly from Beacon as easily as you do with your main list (including workflows)!
Note: For emails to a single recipient it's easiest to either email directly from Beacon, or from your own email provider
Set up your second audience
Follow the steps in Mailchimp's guide to create a new audience named something like 'Legitimate interests'.
Tip: Use the 'Remind people how they signed up to your audience' box to make it clear why they'd be receiving emails from this audience in general. e.g. They have been involved in an activity with you, like registering for an event or they signed up to volunteer.
Should I monitor this audience in Beacon? See our FAQ
Sending a legitimate interest email
Use filters to find the People that you'd like to email (e.g. attendees for an upcoming event)
Select them
Click the bulk actions button (the three dots) and click 'Export to Mailchimp'
Choose your new legitimate interest audience
Add a tag to identify these people in Mailchimp (e.g. 'Event XYZ')
Click 'Export'
Log into Mailchimp, compose your message, and send to those with the tag you added!
Done!
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I allow Beacon to monitor this new audience?
Monitoring the audience will mean that anyone you add to it will have 'Email' consent marked in Beacon (which is not necessarily the case), so we recommend NOT monitoring this audience.
There are a few different considerations to think through when deciding whether to monitor this audience, so we have done our best to summarise them here:
Monitoring
Mailchimp campaigns will log to people's timelines
People unsubscribing from a legitimate interest campaign will be removed from your main audience, and will remove 'Email' from Beacon contact consents
Deleting or archiving contacts in your legitimate interest audience will act the same as an unsubscribe and remove them from your main audience and will remove 'Email' from Beacon contact consents (Tip: to archive contacts so you don't have to pay for them, simply turn off monitoring for this audience briefly when archiving in Mailchimp!)
Adding people to this audience will add 'Email' to their contact consents in Beacon
Adding people to this audience directly in Mailchimp will add 'Email' to their contact consents in Beacon
Not monitoring
Mailchimp campaigns will not log to people's timelines
People unsubscribing from a legitimate interest campaign will not be removed from your main audience, and no changes will be made to Beacon contact consents
Deleting or archiving contacts in your legitimate interest audience will not remove them from your main audience and will not change Beacon contact consents
Adding people to this audience will not add 'Email' to their contact consents in Beacon
Adding people to this audience directly in Mailchimp will not add 'Email' to their contact consents in Beacon
What happens if someone clicks 'Unsubscribe' in one of these emails?
At the bottom of all of your Mailchimp messages will be an 'unsubscribe' link, which will remove them from this audience. What happens next depends on whether you are monitoring this audience:
If you are not actively monitoring this audience in your Beacon settings, then no changes will be made to their contact consents in Beacon - this means they will still be subscribed to your main marketing audience.
If you are actively monitoring this audience in your Beacon settings, then 'Email' will be removed from the contact consents of anyone that had it - and this will then also remove them from your main marketing audience.
I don't want to pay for these contacts twice, can I archive them after I've sent a campaign?
Yes, absolutely! Because you don't need contacts to sit in this audience for regular messages, you can remove anyone from this list after you have completed your messaging to them. Mailchimp won't charge for archived contacts.
We don't recommend deleting the contacts, as this will prevent you from re-adding them for another mailing in future.
Warning: If you are monitoring this audience in Beacon, you should remove this audience from being monitored before you archive or delete these contacts, so that it won't affect anyone's existing contact consents. See above!