Note: If you have not yet set up your Mailchimp integration, this article will explain how to do this.
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Great, you have got the MailChimp - Trail integration set up and data is flowing from your CRM into Mailchimp!

Now what?

Mailchimp is designed for sending and tracking marketing campaigns sent out to different groups of your contacts. In order to get the most out of the integration you will need to understand how to use the different fields of data from Trail to create groups.

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.

Audiences are the highest level of grouping that Mailchimp handles. You often will only need a single audience. If you need more than one each should be a very specific group that will have their own campaigns and metrics, you should not want contacts from one audience appearing in another as they have different needs. The integration with Trail will pass details to a single audience, this is likely to be your list of existing clients.

Within a list you are able to create segments of subscribers, these are groups of people based on their interests or needs, for example you may have a segment for first home buyers, and another for people who have an insurance policy with Asteron Life.

Creating a segment is an easy process From your Audiences tab select ‘Manage contacts’ and then click ‘Segments’ from the dropdown list.

From here click ‘Create segment’ and choose your filters. It is usually a good idea to use simple filters, that way it is very clear who will be in each list, but once you are comfortable with this you can tailor it down to a very specific subset of your contacts to make sure you are delivering relevant, high quality marketing.

Once you are done with your segment you can save it for later, or else you can preview the segment and send a campaign to that group without saving it for later.

Tags are similar to merge tags in that they are pieces of information on each of your subscribers which can be passed in from Trail. The benefit of them is that they act like predefined segments, you can very simply filter your list by the tags that they have, for example ‘First Home Buyer’.

From your Audiences tab select ‘Manage contacts’ and then click ‘Tags’ from the dropdown list.

 Once you have your desired audience you can send a campaign out to your subscribers.

In addition to manual campaigns, Mailchimp also supports powerful automated email chains, these will run based on certain triggers you set up, for example an approaching birthday, and can continue based on events, or actions taken by the contact.

To create an automation begin from your campaigns screen, click on ‘Automations’ and then ‘Create Automation’.

From here you will be shown a screen with some suggested automations, which you can use for generic situations such as a new subscriber, or a birthday message. For ones tailored to your business and this API integration click ‘Custom’, enter in the basic details of the campaign and then edit it to your desired settings.

The most common one to change will be the trigger, the condition that causes a subscriber to enter into this automation, you will most likely use either the ‘Added Tag’ trigger, or the ‘Changes in a subscriber’s audience field’.

From these you will be able to select from Trail’s custom data fields, such as pipeline stages, product providers or review dates. Once the trigger is chosen, carry on and configure the rest of the email template before activating it and watch as your subscribers start flowing into it.

Integrating Trail with Mailchimp

Using the Mailchimp Integration (you are here)

Mailchimp Field Definitions & Special Conditions
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