2-way Pipedrive-Mailchimp integration

Sync contacts and engagements between Pipedrive and Mailchimp.

Updated over a week ago

While Pipedrive’s native Mailchimp integration does make it easy for you to add Pipedrive contacts to Mailchimp, the data about opens and clicks does not loop back to Pipedrive. It’s ‘stuck’ in Mailchimp.

One of the things Outfunnel allows you to do is to “complete the loop” and show email engagement in Pipedrive -- right where it's most useful for your sales team.

Other things Pipedrive users often struggle with:

  • Some integrations only sync Person fields to Mailchimp (and not Organization fields)

  • Handing duplicate contacts in Pipedrive and archived contacts in Mailchimp is suboptimal by other tools

  • Other integrations create a new contact in Mailchimp if the email address changes in Pipedrive, effectively creating a duplicate contact in your marketing tool.


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How the 2-way Pipedrive-Mailchimp integration works

  • Make all Pipedrive contacts or subset(s) you define with filters available in a Mailchimp Audience along with your fields and custom fields.

  • Keep the two databases in sync going forward. E.g. if a custom field is updated, this is recorded in Mailchimp automatically.

  • When people open or click on email campaigns, this data will be recorded on contact profiles in Pipedrive. Outfunnel supports Mailchimp single email campaigns, automations, email journeys and A/B tests.

  • New Mailchimp subscribers can be copied to Pipedrive as Contacts. Alternatively, new contacts can be copied to Pipedrive only when they open or click on an email campaign.

pipedrive mailchimp

Set up contact sync

Sync contacts from Pipedrive to Mailchimp and create contacts in Pipedrive from new Mailchimp subscribers.

Watch this quick integration how-to video or follow the steps below.

1. Authenticate your apps. Head to Outfunnel > App connector, select Pipedrive and Mailchimp and authenticate as per on-screen instructions if you haven't done so already.

2. Select the connection type. Click on Connect and choose Contact sync as the connection type

3. Set up contact sync rules. You can set up the contact sync from Pipedrive to Mailchimp or Mailchimp to Pipedrive.

  • Sync contacts from Pipedrive to Mailchimp.
    Choose whether to sync all Pipedrive contacts or only contacts you’ve defined with a Pipedrive Person filter and select the Mailchimp audience you'd like to sync them to. Outfunnel keeps fields up to date, subscribes contacts that match the filter to Mailchimp and unsubscribes them when they stop matching. As you are syncing contacts, not Deals, then only Pipedrive People filters are visible in Outfunnel. Learn how to set up Pipedrive People filters.

    You can sync different Pipedrive filters to different Mailchimp Audiences (eg. separate email lists for different regions or pipeline stages) or you can sync multiple Pipedrive filters to the same Mailchimp Audience (eg. a filter with open Deals for each sales rep, all synced to one big newsletter Audience)

  • Sync contacts from Mailchimp to Pipedrive.
    Choose an audience that you'd like to record new subscribers to Pipedrive as contacts and specify the contact owner. Once the contact is created in Pipedrive, a "Contact Created" activity is added under the contact profile.

    • Outfunnel creates contacts in Pipedrive. Lead creation support is coming soon.

    • Contact import functionality in Mailchimp is not supported and does not trigger the contact sync

💡 Adding contacts

  • Outfunnel subscribes contacts to the Mailchimp list.

  • Outfunnel does not resubscribe contacts that have unsubscribed in the past unless you have manually unsubscribed them.

💡 Removing contacts

  • If a contact is deleted or removed from the Pipedrive filter, Outfunnel unsubscribes the contact from the respective list in Mailchimp.

💡 Things to keep in mind

  • Contacts do not get unsubscribed from Mailchimp if you remove the contact sync rule or change the target segment.

4. Set up field mapping. Navigate to the field mapping step to select which fields or custom fields you’d like the sync to consider. You can choose up to 30 fields from all your Person and Organization fields and custom fields.

5. Activate. Activate the connection. The first sync can take up to 5 minutes based on the number of contacts in the sync. From there, Outfunnel checks for segment changes once every four hours. For example, if you add or remove a contact from the target segment then it will take a maximum of 4 hours for the data to sync. Field changes for contacts that are already in sync are updated in real time.


Set up engagement sync

Outfunnel supports recording engagement from Mailchimp single email campaigns, automation, email journeys, and A/B tests. If you've already set up a connection, skip to the second step.

1. Authenticate your apps. Head to Outfunnel > App connector, select Pipedrive and Mailchimp and authenticate as per on-screen instructions if you haven't done so already.

2. Select the connection type. Click on Connect and choose Engagement sync as the connection type

3. Choose the audience. Choose the Mailchimp audiences for which you’d like to record email engagement (opens, clicks, unsubscribes, etc).

4. Define how engagement gets recorded. Then define how you’d like email activities like opens, clicks, bounces, or unsubscribes recorded in Pipedrive – or simply use our default settings.

5. Set up field mapping. When Outfunnel syncs an engagement for a contact that does not yet exist in Pipedrive, a new contact can optionally be created with the defined field mapping. Navigate to the field mapping step to select which fields or custom fields you’d like the sync to consider. You can turn off creating contacts from email engagements on the same page.

6. Activate. Activate the connection. By default, Outfunnel records engagement from emails that have been sent after activating the connection but you can also choose to sync engagement events from the last 30-days when activating the connection. The sync runs every 4 hours automatically thereafter or you can trigger an instant sync anytime by clicking on Sync now.

PS. We also offer retrospective sync on demand for an additional cost. Please refer to this article.


See what has synced

Once the connection is live, navigate to the Status tab to see how many contacts are in-sync, how many are errored (and why), and when the last sync ran.


Tips, observations, and useful definitions:

General

💡 Pre-create field values. Single and multiple option fields need to have the options pre-created in Mailchimp and Pipedrive (case insensitive)

Contact sync

💡 Outfunnel supports two ways to manage your contacts between Pipedrive and Mailchimp

  • Option A. Master database of all contacts in Pipedrive, contacts synced to Mailchimp for emailing via Outfunnel. To enable this, first collate your whole contact list (Pipedrive + Mailchimp) into Pipedrive and sync all contacts, or a selection you define with Pipedrive filters, into Mailchimp with Outfunnel.

  • Option B. Contact list in Mailchimp is separate from prospect/customer list in Pipedrive. If a contact, defined by their email address, exists in both Pipedrive and Mailchimp, we log email engagement to Pipedrive to the right contact.

💡 Best results with a new Audience. We recommend setting up a brand new Mailchimp Audience to ensure everything works flawlessly, but syncing data to an already existing Audience works as well in most cases.

💡 Duplicate contacts. If you have duplicate contacts in Pipedrive, then Outfunnel only syncs the first instance of the contact to Mailchimp. This is because Mailchimp only accepts one unique email per audience.

💡 Merging contacts. Outfunnel supports merging contacts with the same email. After you've merged a contact you may see the contact getting unsubscribed from Mailchimp if the contact you merged to was not in sync but they will get resubscribed in the next sync given that the email address is the same.

💡 Contacts with multiple emails. Outfunnel only syncs the first email address of the contact to Mailchimp. Other addresses will be ignored.

💡 Archived contacts. Outfunnel unarchives contacts in Mailchimp once they match the target connection rule segment. To avoid resubscribing archived contacts, simply unsubscribe them from Mailchimp or remove them from the Pipedrive segment.

💡 Make edits in Pipedrive only. Outfunnel currently treats Pipedrive as the “single source of truth”, and any changes you make in Pipedrive will be reflected in Mailchimp. This doesn’t work the other way around. If you’d like to edit the contents of a field in Mailchimp, please make the changes in Pipedrive and let Outfunnel take care of syncing this to Mailchimp.

💡 Supported field types. Outfunnel currently supports syncing the following field types: text, numbers, single selection fields, multiple selection fields, phone numbers, dates, addresses, and monetary values.

Please note that multiple selection fields are synced to Mailchimp as a text field as Mailchimp does not offer this field type.

Engagement sync

💡 Supported campaign types. Outfunnel comprehensively tracks and records data for Mailchimp’s single email campaigns, automations, email journeys and A/B tests.

💡 Activities are added to my calendar. Please note that if you've set up calendar sync in Pipedrive, then all activities are automatically added to your Google or Outlook calendar. To turn this off simply uncheck Outfunnel activity types in Pipedrive > Company Settings > Calendar Sync

These are the types that Outfunnel creates: Newsletter Sent, Newsletter Opened, Newsletter Clicked, Newsletter Bounce, Newsletter Unsubscribe, Contact Created, Newsletter Reply, Form Submitted, Visited Website

💡 Unsubscribe recording. Outfunnel only records end-user initiated unsubscribes in Pipedrive and manual unsubscribes in Mailchimp are not recorded. When a contact is unsubscribed manually but they still match a filter in Pipedrive that is targeted by an automation, then Outfunnel will resubscribe them in Mailchimp. If you'd like to manually remove a contact in Mailchimp, they need to be permanently deleted under the contact profile in Mailchimp

💡 Email activity is registered on a Contact level as well as a (single) Deal level. When you send an email campaign to someone, or they open or click in an email, this is registered independently of the deal stage or pipeline in their Contact profile. This is also registered in a Deal in the pipeline you can define in the Mailchimp to Pipedrive Automation setup screen.


💡 Notifications. If you’d like to receive email notifications about people opening and/or clicking your newsletters, you’ll need to turn on Email notifications feature in Pipedrive. (See how). Once enabled, each user can turn on Email notifications by going to Settings > Personal > Preferences > Notifications.

Do you use web forms to collect leads to your lists? See the following integrations to automate lead capture sync to Pipedrive:

Don't see your preferred web forms listed above? Browse the upcoming connections and sign up for early access.

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