3 Time Savers When Integrating Mailchimp with Salesforce

One of my clients was committed to using Mailchimp for email campaigns as well as Salesforce for tracking leads, contacts, activities, and deals.  One of the requirements for this project was to optimize the integration and automate much of the process with Mailchimp.  Throughout the process of acclimating myself with the way these two platforms work together I have identified a couple best practices that I wish I knew at the beginning of the project but I know now so I would like to share them with you.

The integration is for the most part one directional.  Forget about a bidirectional sync with unsubscribe data and updating fields based on that in Salesforce or building any type of workflow based on opens or clicks or logging the emails as a completed activity and stick to using the integration for what it seems it was initially intended for which is pushing leads and contacts to Mailchimp from Salesforce and from Mailchimp to Salesforce.  There are many great things about Mailchimp and obviously we could go on and on about Salesforce but the marriage between these two needs a little TLC.  Below are 3 things to consider that I found while working on this project.

Sync Broadly

The best advice I have for anyone looking to synchronize their Salesforce contacts and leads is to push broadly and by that I mean do not think of the Member Queries function the same way you would building out a Salesforce report or a list view.  Push all of your contacts and leads into MailChimp and segment from Mailchimp platform instead.  I made the mistake of trying to create multiple queries and separate lists for each of my queries which was definitely the wrong approach.

Map your fields before you sync

This sounds simple enough but in order to be able to segment your list once it is pushed into MailChimp you will need to make sure the right field data is also pushed over to Mailchimp.  If you sync first and then add additional fields later, they will not update until your original query runs again which may hold up your process or force you to build additional queries to push the newly map fields.

Know the limitations

I think If I had a Wishlist for this integration that it would include being able to update fields such as the standard Email Opt Out field in salesforce based on unsubscribe data in Mailchimp.  Additionally it would be great if the data could be mapped to standard Salesforce campaigns to take advantage of the reporting.  Lastly it would be great to be able to see these emails as a logged activity against a lead or contact record, currently not supported.  I spent a considerable amount of time trying to track down this information and working with support but could have saved myself some time had I known ahead of time that these weren't features that were included.

In summary these are a few things to think about and Mailchimp still has a lot of advantages over the standard Salesforce email templates when it comes to design elements and ease of use when building and scheduling campaigns but when it comes to syncing the data back and forth I could see a couple features that I would love to see in future releases.