How to Connect Mailchimp

Connecting Mailchimp lets you send your segments to Mailchimp as audiences. Only customers who agreed to email marketing in Shopify are sent. You connect by signing in to Mailchimp and approving access; there’s no API key to copy.

Before You Start

• You need a Mailchimp login for the account you want to connect.
• You need the Manage integrations permission in By the Numbers. Without it, the Connect button doesn’t appear.

Steps

1. Open Integrations: Integrations, under Settings in the navigation.
2. On the Mailchimp card, click Connect. Your browser moves to Mailchimp.
3. Sign in to Mailchimp and approve access.

You can also connect from a segment’s Sync menu: How to Sync a Segment shows where. Mailchimp then sends you back to that segment.

What Happens Next

Mailchimp sends you back to Integrations, which shows Mailchimp connected. The card moves to Connected and names the Mailchimp account under Connected Account, as the login email and the account name. An older connection shows nothing there until you reconnect.

Connecting sends nothing yet. A segment goes to Mailchimp once you turn Mailchimp on for it: see How to Sync a Segment.

The card then shows Segments syncing, with a link to those segments. Contacts synced (30d) appears once contacts have gone out. Last successful sync shows a dash until the first sync succeeds.

Mailchimp has no settings in By the Numbers, so the card has no Configure button.

Which Customers Are Sent

A customer is sent when both of these are true:

• They have a valid email address.
• They accept email marketing in Shopify.

A customer who hasn’t agreed isn’t sent at all, not even as a contact who isn’t subscribed. Someone who signed up through a Mailchimp form, but never agreed to marketing in Shopify, is left out of the segment too. When a sync leaves customers out, its line under Recent Activity on Integrations says how many, for example 40 skipped (no marketing consent).

What Mailchimp Receives

• An audience. By the Numbers uses the audience named “[By the Numbers] Shopify Full Customer List”. When there isn’t one, it uses your Mailchimp account’s audience if the account has exactly 1, and creates the audience otherwise. The audience holds every customer who accepts email marketing, whether or not they’re in the segment.
• A segment inside that audience, named “[By the Numbers]” followed by your segment’s name. It holds the customers who are in your segment. If you rename your segment, the Mailchimp segment keeps its old name and keeps updating.
• Customer details as audience fields: first and last name, total spent, order count, average order value, lifetime value and last order date. The phone number is added when it’s a valid mobile number for the customer’s country.

A customer Mailchimp doesn’t have yet is added as subscribed. A contact Mailchimp already has keeps its status, so someone who unsubscribed in Mailchimp isn’t subscribed again.

With auto-sync on, each segment is sent again every 4 days, or when you click Sync now. A customer who stops accepting marketing isn’t sent again and is taken out of the Mailchimp segment at the next sync. They stay in the audience, and nothing is unsubscribed or deleted.

If the Card Needs Attention

If Mailchimp no longer accepts your connection, the card moves under Needs attention and shows Reconnect needed. Click Reconnect and sign in to Mailchimp again.

Without the Manage integrations permission, the card says it needs attention and asks you to find a teammate who has the permission.

Disconnecting Mailchimp

Choose Remove from the menu at the top right of the card. This removes every segment sync to Mailchimp. The audience and segments already in Mailchimp stay as they are, with the customers from the last sync.