What is Mailchimp?
Mailchimp is a marketing platform used all around the world to easily create beautiful email campaigns and for marketing, re-engagement and newsletters, which can be personalized to your specific client.
Trail is able to pass a wide variety of information to Mailchimp allowing you to rely on it to keep your subscriber information up to date and ensure that your clients are receiving relevant, powerful emails designed by you.
Note: Mailchimp, and other email platforms are very conscious of having spam or scams sent through their systems, be careful about the content of your emails, especially when talking about loans or mortgages, read their acceptable use policy for more.
How it Works
A contact in Mailchimp is identified by their email address, so if you have more than one person in Trail with the same email they will be grouped together as one.
In addition to these default fields and their corresponding merge tags in Mailchimp:
Client First Name - FNAME
Client Last Name - LNAME
Phone Number - PHONE
Email Address - EMAIL
How to Set Up your Integration
Step 1: Set up your Custom Fields
Trail supports the following custom fields - for more details, jump here:
The first step is to ADD the custom fields to Mailchimp that you would like to be part of the integration with Trail. This is important to set up so that when we do your initial import, you can match the custom fields to be picked up e.g. that we include a client's DOB as part of the integration.
Go to your Audience dropdown - All Contacts - Settings - Audience Fields and *|MERGE|* tags:
From this page, you can then add in your chosen fields to be used as merge tags, by clicking "Add a Field" button at the bottom of the page:
For "Birthday" type field:
Please add the following as a "Birthday" type fields in MailChimp (not any other types):
After this, you can name the fields as per below:
Client's Birthday - CBDAY
which would look like this, and you can change the date format that it shows:
Partner's Birthday - PBDAY
same sort of thing as above, just labelled differently.
For "Text" type field:
Please add the following (bulk of the list) as a "Text" type fields in MailChimp (not any other types):
After this, you can name the fields as per below
Client Id - CID
which would look like:
Partner Id - PID
Partner First Name - PFAME
Partner Last Name - PLNAME
Joint Greeting - GREETING
Client Category - CATEGORY
Mobile Phone - MOBILE
Annual Review Month - REVIEWM
Annual Review Date - REVIEWD
Contact Type - TYPE
Client DOB - CDOB
Partner DOB - PDOB
Gender - CGENDER
Adviser Name - ADVISER
Insurance Provider - INSPROV
Insurance Renewal Date - INSRENEW
Insurance Policy Number - INSNUM
Mortgage Provider - MORPROV
Mortgage Interest Rate Type - MORRATETYP
Mortgage Interest Rate - MORRATE
Fixed Rate Term - MORTERM
Fixed Rate Expiry Date - MORFRR
Mortgage Advice Pipeline Stage - STAGEMA
Mortgage Servicing Advice Pipeline Stage - STAGEMS
Mortgage Prospecting Pipeline Stage - STAGEMP
Insurance Advice Pipeline Stage - STAGEIA
Insurance Servicing Pipeline Stage - STAGEIS
Insurance Prospecting Pipeline Stage - STAGEIP
Insurance Claims Pipeline Stage - STAGEIC
Investment Advice Pipeline Stage - STAGEVA
Investment Servicing Pipeline Stage - STAGEVS
Note: The integration does not support the Address field in MailChimp.
Two more important things:
Remember to click the "Save Changes" after adding these fields.
Ensure that these fields are not ticked off as "required" or the API may fail.
Trail will try to pass information to all the available fields in each contact, so before using the integration these should be added to the Mailchimp account, that is why this step is important to make sure the name of the field matches the ones specified in Trail.
Step 2: Getting your Audience ID
Mailchimp groups subscribers into 'audiences'. When you set up your integration you will have at least one audience in Mailchimp.
In Mailchimp, go to your Audience - All Contacts - Settings - Audience Name & Defaults.
From here, you'll be able to rename the audience so that it's clear that it's linked with Trail. You can will also need to COPY the Audience ID here:
Then paste this in Trail in your Settings - Integrations - Mailchimp:
Step 3: Get your API Key
Your API key can be found under Account & Billing - Extras - API Keys:
This will then lead you to a page where you can see "Your API keys". If you don't have one, then "Create a Key". Once you have one, copy the string of text here:
To bring this over to Trail, just copy this and paste here:
And then click - CONNECT!
Step 4: Complete an Initial Contact Export
Once you've clicked connect, you will need to do an initial export of your current contacts in Trail over to Mailchimp.
To export your contacts, use the below button located on the MailChimp integration page "Export Clients to Mailchimp".
This will trigger the initial export file, to be downloaded.
Next, in Mailchimp, go to your Audience - Audience dashboard - Manage Audience - View audiences:
Then go into the Audience you created earlier > then 'Add contacts' > 'Import Contacts'.
After this, select the 'Upload a file' option, and 'Continue':
Click on 'Browse' and select from your computer the export file you received from us > then 'Continue to Organize' > Select status as "Subscribed"
You can then continue to create any "Tags" you wish to. And proceed to match the column labels to any earlier "Fields" you've added!
And you're done!
After this initial upload, all your contacts will be automatically synced
every 30 minutes as they are modified in Trail.
Note: The rest of this article is more technical, read it if you are going to make use of Trail's custom fields, feel free to always get in touch with Trail's support team if you have questions.
All Trail Mailchimp Help Guides:
Integrating Trail with Mailchimp (you are here)