Woocommerce Mailchimp integration

[DanH]

Hi, anyone use Mailchimp alongside Woocommerce who can help with this?

We bit the bullet and have just signed up to Mailchimp Standard to manage our newsletters. I have a slight issue and knowledge gaps that aren't being filled with Mailchimp's Amazon-esque support and rather sketchy online literature.

Problem 1
We have a Woocommerce installation with a few thousand customers. We have a newsletter mailing list handled by a 3rd party which we're now moving over to Mailchimp. Most of the Woocommerce customers will exist in the email newsletter subscriptions but there is nothing in the Woocommerce installation that indicates this. The only linkage between the third party newsletter subscription and Woocommerce is the customer's email address.

Part of the Mailchimp integration is their plugin that synchs the Woocommerce data and allows you to do targetted emails based on transactional data, which sounds great. However, I've been told that because the Woocommerce users are not signed up to marketing email within Woocommerce (wherever that exists), they get synched with MailChimp as 'non-subscribed contacts'. I've also been told that because they are non-subscribed contacts, I won't be able to update their status to subscribers via an import. This is unfortunate as I was planning to import the 3rd party newsletter data and link the matching subscribers to Woo customers. No-can-do, apparently.

My only option seems to be to start again, delete the plugin/synch and somehow update Woo customers with matching email to the 3rd party subscription email to show them as being 'subscribers'. And then start the synch process again....

Problem 2
Disregarding above, it seems that the Mailchimp/Woocommerce plugin provided by Mailchimp themselves seems only to supply an opt-in newsletter checkbox at checkout. Our website at the moment has a couple of embedded forms that add subscribers to the 3rd party newsletter service. I was planning to use Mailchimp's form builder to embedd forms as replacements for where I have them now. However, I don't know if the form are Woocommerce 'aware' so as to synch subscribers to customers to do all the transactional targetting stuff.

In a nutshell I need to know if there is a better way to match 3rd party subscribers to Woo customers and how best to manage the Woocoemmerce/Mailchimp signup forms so they behave as expected.

Thanks

Dan

 

[Solve My Problem]

Hi Dan

With a bit of jiggery pokery with the database etc... It should be possible to sync.

You can't auto opt in anyone so would need to rethink that option.

If you want to message we can look at this for you.

Darren

 

[Deleted member 335660]

Hi Dan,

I use Woo and Mail hemp and came across the same as you in Problem 1. I assumed all new customers would go on the Newsletter list. It seems MC are trying to abide by the rule that you cannot send a Newsletter to someone that has not subscribed to it.

I downloaded into CSV the unsubscribed people and sent them an email inviting them to subscribe.

I have in the past manually added people as subscribed, they tended to be friends that or contacts that I felt would not mind.

I think if you go for one of their integrated, maybe paid, options there is a way of mailing unsubscribed people rather than having to download. It seemed complicated and so I didn’t bother progressing it.

Again I think the data protection rules are it needs to be opt in, not opt out.

 

[DanH]

Thanks for the responses.

We kind of worked it out now without resorting to emailing 60k odd subscribers to resubscribe. Unfortunately we had to spend a few hours synching etc to work out what Mailchimp wouldn't/couldn't tell us.

So, for anyone who has the same questions as me relating to Woocommerce and migration from another mailing service to Mailchimp, this is what we worked out.

If the subscriber list exists in Mailchimp before the Mailchimp for Woocommerce plugin synchs, Mailchimp will match them automatically to the Woocommerce user so you get all the transactional history linkage. In our case we will be importing the 3rd party list into the relevant audience in Mailchimp first and then running the plugin's synch.

Our problem was doing it the other way round, synching with Woo and then trying to import a list of emails to update matching Woocommerce customers as subscribers. This, according to Mailchimp won't work as:

"If a contact has been synced as non-subscribed contact, an import will not change the marketing status of this contact, he/she will remain non-subscribed in this specific audience."

We also answered the question I had about forms too, but we did test the hypothesis to be sure. Basically, however the subscriber ends up in the audience via (any) form, if it is found to be matching a Woocommerce customer's email (now or later), it will synch up so you get all the transactional data. That means I can use Mailchimp's embedded forms on our Woocommerce site as well as the Mailchimp for Woocommerce's checkbox offering and Mailchimp will recognise that subscriber as a Woocommerce customer.

Dan

 

[Paul Kelly ICHYB]

You might want to consider running a mail app like Acymail or MailPoet on your system and then using Amazon SES, ElasticMail etc for processing.

Not THAT difficult to setup, it could save loads of money in the long run - I have run lists of several hundred thousand this way, however, for large sends, your server does need to have the right performance.