Less Annoying CRM has integrated with Mailchimp for many years now, and it allowed for our users to sync their groups over to an audience in Mailchimp so that they can send out marketing emails to their contacts.
Over the years, Mailchimp's functionality has changed, and we frequently heard great new ideas from our users on how to improve our integration to keep up with it. So we went back to the drawing board and completely rebuilt our integration with Mailchimp from scratch, and we're proud to announce that it is fully live today.
There are two categories of upgrades here: new features, and performance/debugging improvements. Here's how it all works:
New features
1. Sync with Mailchimp tags as well as audiences.
The first and probably most obvious upgrade is that Less Annoying CRM can now also sync with tags in Mailchimp, instead of only audiences.
When we first built the integration, LACRM's groups would sync with audiences in Mailchimp. At the time, Mailchimp allowed for unlimited audiences, and Mailchimp audiences as a tool worked exactly the same way LACRM groups do. However, Mailchimp introduced different types of list segmentation tools as the years went by, and then restricted free accounts to just a single audience. This meant that new users would have to be on a paid tier of Mailchimp if they needed to sync more than one group in Mailchimp, and existing users often had contacts in multiple audiences if those contacts were in multiple syncing groups in LACRM.
By syncing with Mailchimp tags as well as audiences, LACRM users will be able to manage all their email marketing with just one audience, even if they have multiple groups of contacts in LACRM that they want to email out.
Now, all you have to do is manage a single audience in Mailchimp, separate them with tags based on however you like to categorize them, and each of those tags can then be synced with your LACRM groups to keep everything updated and organized automatically.
2. Decide if you want to log Mailchimp campaigns on your contact/company Histories.
Our first integration with Mailchimp automatically logged all your sent emails onto your contacts/companies. If someone is in a Mailchimp-synced group and they receive an email blast, that email will be logged onto the contact, always. This worked well for most users since it allowed them to see who has received what email blast. This became an issue, however, for email marketing-focused users who regularly send multiple email blasts per week or even per day -- their contacts' Histories ended up filled with email logs instead of important notes.
With the new integration, you can easily decide whether or not you want LACRM to automatically log each email blast that gets sent. It's turned on by default, but you can simply uncheck it, and you can always come back and edit your choice if you change your mind.
3. See subscribes and unsubscribes on a contact/company's History.
In the past, when a contact unsubscribed from or subscribed to a Mailchimp audience, that contact was either simply removed from the Mailchimp-synced LACRM group, or added to the group. This worked fine for users who don't need to keep track of subscriptions but became a bit of a hassle for users who wanted to see where a contact came from, and whether a contact had unsubscribed from a mailing list.
The new Mailchimp integration will now create an entry in a contact/company's History when they subscribe or unsubscribe from a Mailchimp audience that you have syncing with your LACRM group.
Now you'll be able to clearly see if someone has unsubscribed from your email list, and also when a new person gets added to LACRM because they signed up for your emails.
4. Easily see which groups are syncing with Mailchimp at a glance.
Because you can have multiple groups syncing with Mailchimp and, depending on the permission setup of your account, your teammates could add contacts to Mailchimp-synced groups, it could get a little tricky to know which group you should be adding a contact to if you wanted that contact to be added to Mailchimp.
This upgrade will now show you when a group is syncing with Mailchimp via the Mailchimp logo, so you can easily see which groups are syncing with Mailchimp and be sure that the group you're adding the contact to will send that contact's information over to your Mailchimp audience.
Performance/debugging improvements
In addition to all of the new features above, rebuilding the entire integration allowed us to knock out some syncing kinks we had in the past in order to improve the sync's performance.
LACRM's sync with Mailchimp is now not only more reliably passing information between the two systems, but it's also providing more useful debugging information to our CRM Coaching team if anything does go wrong. Previously, the old sync left our hands tied when issues arose and required a lot of digging to find out why something wasn't syncing. This new integration will now share more debugging information with our team, allowing us to more easily and efficiently solve any sync problems that arise.
We're so excited for this new integration and we hope you are too!
For more information on how the sync works and how to set it up, take a look at our tutorial video here, or read our updated help article here.
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