What is the Mailchimp integration?

Mailchimp is a cloud-based newsletter and marketing platform used to manage email campaigns, audiences and automations. The Daylite app Marketing&Chat lets you connect your Daylite system directly to Mailchimp. Contacts are synchronized between both systems, Mailchimp audiences are mapped to groups in Daylite, and changes are kept automatically in sync.

Table of contents

Setting up the Mailchimp integration

• Creating and entering the API key
• Activating and connecting the Mailchimp integration
• Setting up automatic synchronization

Managing Mailchimp audiences in Daylite

• Adding an audience to Daylite
• Subgroups of an audience
• Removing an audience from Daylite

Synchronizing contacts

• Assigning people to an audience
• Running the synchronization
• Using campaign analytics
• Importing new subscribers
• Automatically creating a task for new contacts

Merge tags, tags and segments

• Using merge tags
• Creating Mailchimp tags directly from Daylite
• Creating a segment in Mailchimp

Mailchimp on the person record

• Using the Mailchimp integration on people

Unsubscribing and archiving contacts

• Unsubscribing contacts from an audience
• Archiving contacts

Troubleshooting and FAQ

• Why are some contacts not synchronized?
• Updating a contact with the status “Cleaned”
• Why isn't a company transferred to Mailchimp?
• Avoiding duplicate contact records
• Why doesn't the mailing show up in the Daylite history?
• Can I send mailings through Marketing&Chat?
• How does double opt-in work in Mailchimp?

Setting up the Mailchimp integration

Creating and entering the API key

To synchronize Daylite and Mailchimp, a so-called API key from Mailchimp needs to be created once and entered in Daylite.

Proceed as follows:

1. Log in to your Mailchimp account in your browser
2. Click your account name in the top right corner and choose Profile from the menu
3. In the profile overview, navigate to Extras and click API keys
4. Click Create A Key to create an API key
5. Name the API key, for example „Daylite“, and click Generate
6. Copy the generated API key to the clipboard

You can find out how to bring a Mailchimp audience into Daylite as a group in the section Adding an audience to Daylite.

Activating and connecting the Mailchimp integration

Once you have copied the API key, connect Daylite with your Mailchimp account:

1. Open Daylite, select Plugins from the menu bar and navigate to Marketing&Chat -> Preferences… -> Mailchimp
2. Activate the integration with the toggle switch
3. Choose Log on and paste in the API key
4. Click the Connect button

Setting up automatic synchronization

Audiences no longer need to be synchronized manually. Automatic synchronization can be enabled in the Marketing&Chat preferences:

1. Navigate in Daylite to Plugins -> Marketing&Chat -> Preferences… -> Mailchimp
2. Enable the automatic synchronization option
3. Choose the desired synchronization interval: once a day or once a week

Managing Mailchimp audiences in Daylite

Adding an audience to Daylite

To bring a Mailchimp audience into Daylite as a group, a corresponding group has to be created via the plugin preferences.

1. Select Plugins -> Marketing&Chat -> Preferences… from the menu
2. Navigate to the Mailchimp integration and choose the Lists tab
3. Select the desired audience and click Create Group in Daylite

After you have created a group in Daylite, the appearance in the Mailchimp preferences changes. The audience is now shown in bold. For the selected audience, a group named „[MailChimp] <your audience name>“ with several subgroups has been created in Daylite.

Subgroups of an audience

• The Errors subgroup collects contacts for which an error occurred while synchronizing them to Mailchimp, for example a missing or invalid email address, or the email address bounced
• The Unsubscribed subgroup collects contacts who have unsubscribed, or been unsubscribed, from the corresponding audience
• The Archived subgroup is used to archive contacts directly in Mailchimp, or to reflect contacts already archived in Mailchimp
• The Tags subgroup lists the individual tags of your audience as their own subgroups. More on that in Creating Mailchimp tags directly from Daylite

Removing an audience from Daylite

1. Select Plugins -> Marketing&Chat -> Preferences… from the menu
2. Navigate to the Mailchimp integration and select the corresponding audience under Audiences
3. Click Manage
4. Click Delete Group in Daylite
    
   1. The Delete option removes the link between your Mailchimp audience and the Daylite group, as well as the group with all its subgroups. No contacts are deleted
   2. The Unlink list option removes the link between the Daylite group and the Mailchimp audience. The group remains in Daylite

Synchronizing contacts

Assigning people to an audience

After you have created a Mailchimp group via the plugin preferences, you can assign people in Daylite to this group. These are then transferred to Mailchimp as subscribers during synchronization.

There are two ways to assign people to an audience:

Via the Edit menu:

1. Select the desired people in Daylite
2. Click Edit in the right-click menu, then Link to…
3. Search for the desired Daylite group and select it
   Tip: simply search for “Mailchimp” and the desired group will be listed.

The people are now linked to the group and can be synchronized with Mailchimp.

Via right-click, directly to the audience:

Selected contacts can also be assigned directly to an audience via right-click. Select the desired people, then use the right mouse button to open Mailchimp -> Select audience -> Subscribe to audience. 

The people were created in Mailchimp directly.

Running the synchronization

To manually synchronize data between Daylite and Mailchimp, proceed as follows:

1. Navigate to the Mailchimp icon in the left sidebar
2. Select the Synchronization tab
3. Select an audience
4. Click the Synchronize Audience button

The assigned people are transferred to Mailchimp, and new subscribers from Mailchimp are created as people in Daylite. See Importing new subscribers for details.

If you'd rather not trigger the manual synchronization yourself every time, set up automatic synchronization instead.

Using campaign analytics

Alongside Synchronization, the left sidebar under Mailchimp offers its own Campaign Analytics tab. It lets you evaluate the results of individual Mailchimp campaigns directly in Daylite, without having to look them up separately in Mailchimp.

1. Navigate to the Mailchimp icon in the left sidebar
2. Select the Campaign Analytics tab
3. Select the audience whose campaign you want to evaluate
4. Select the desired campaign
5. Filter the contacts by number of clicks, click rate and/or number of opens

You can then use the filtered results in three ways:

• as a Daylite people list
• as a Daylite subgroup
• as a CSV file

This lets you, for example, save particularly engaged recipients of a campaign – contacts with many clicks or a high click rate – as a new audience for a follow-up action in Daylite, or export them as a CSV file for further analysis.

Importing new subscribers

If you gain new subscribers for your newsletter, for example through your website, they are initially only visible in Mailchimp. With Marketing&Chat, you can bring these contacts into Daylite automatically.

As part of synchronizing a Daylite group with the linked Mailchimp audience, new newsletter subscribers are transferred to Daylite. By default, the fields first name, last name and email address are transferred. A duplicate check is also applied to these fields, checking whether a record with the exact same first name, last name and email address already exists in Daylite.

The newly created records are tagged in Daylite with the category Mailchimp and the keyword Mailchimp. Additional fields from Mailchimp can be transferred through the corresponding configuration in the plugin preferences.

Automatically creating a task for new contacts

When a new contact is created in Daylite from Mailchimp during synchronization, a task can be created for it automatically, for example to review or reach out to the new contact.

1. Navigate in the Daylite menu bar to Plugins -> Marketing&Chat -> Preferences… -> Mailchimp
2. Enable the option to automatically create a task for new contacts
3. Set the desired category for the task
4. Set the desired owner for the task

Merge tags, tags and segments

Using merge tags

Many newsletters or similar mailings use so-called merge tags. In Mailchimp, these are referred to as custom fields, which can be added dynamically per audience.

Daylite recognizes the merge tags in use and transmits certain contact information to Mailchimp. In order for information to be transmitted between Daylite and Mailchimp via merge tags, you first need to create the merge tags in Mailchimp and then assign them to the corresponding Daylite field in the Marketing&Chat preferences.

1. Navigate to the Marketing&Chat preferences
2. Select the audience you want to transfer additional information to
3. Click the plus icon to jump directly to the merge tag area of the audience in Mailchimp
4. Create the merge tags, for example prefix, category or all keywords
5. Navigate back to the Marketing&Chat preferences
6. Map the merge tags to the corresponding Daylite fields

After the next synchronization with Mailchimp, the data from Daylite is transferred to Mailchimp.

Creating Mailchimp tags directly from Daylite

Tags in Mailchimp can now be created directly from the Marketing&Chat preferences. In Daylite, these tags are shown in the Tags subgroup.

To create a tag in Mailchimp from Daylite, proceed as follows:

1. Navigate to the Marketing&Chat preferences for Mailchimp
2. Select an audience and navigate to the Mailchimp Tags tab
3. Use the plus icon to create a new subgroup in Daylite and a same-named tag in Mailchimp
4. If a tag already exists in Mailchimp and the new subgroup is named exactly the same as the tag, the two are linked to each other
5. Contacts linked to a tag subgroup receive the tag in Mailchimp on the next sync. Contacts that receive a tag in Mailchimp are moved to the corresponding subgroup on the next sync.

Creating a segment in Mailchimp

To create a new segment in Mailchimp, proceed as follows:

1. Open the Mailchimp website and log in to your account
2. Navigate to Audience and select All contacts
3. Click the Create Segment button
4. Define the filter conditions for the segment
   Note: if you want to use keywords as a filter criterion, choose “contains”, since all keywords are transferred comma-separated into a single text field.
5. Click Preview Segment
6. In the segment preview, click Save as Segment

If you need help creating segments, feel free to contact us.

Mailchimp on the person record

Using the Mailchimp integration on people

Every person in Daylite has a Mailchimp icon available under Integrations. It lets you perform the following actions directly from the person record:

1. Add the contact to audiences
2. Change the email address within the audience
3. Add or remove tags
4. Unsubscribe the contact from an audience

In addition, the current status of the contact for each selected audience is shown greyed out, so you can see at a glance whether the person is, for example, subscribed, unsubscribed or archived.

Unsubscribing and archiving contacts

Unsubscribing contacts from an audience

To unsubscribe a contact from an audience, simply link the person to the Unsubscribed subgroup of the corresponding Mailchimp group. During the next synchronization, the contact will be marked as unsubscribed in Mailchimp and removed from the audience.

If a contact unsubscribes directly through Mailchimp, the contact is automatically removed from the main group and moved to the Unsubscribed subgroup.

This action is also available directly on the person record, see Using the Mailchimp integration on people.

Archiving contacts

The new Archived subgroup lets you archive contacts in Mailchimp directly from Daylite. Link a person to the Archived subgroup of the desired Mailchimp group, and during the next synchronization the contact will be archived in Mailchimp accordingly.

Conversely, contacts that have already been archived in Mailchimp are automatically moved to the Archived subgroup in Daylite during synchronization, so the status is always visible in Daylite as well.

Troubleshooting and FAQ

Why are some contacts not synchronized?

When synchronizing Daylite contacts with Mailchimp, contacts may be moved to the Errors subgroup. This can have several causes:

• The contact has no email address stored in Daylite
• The contact's email address is not set as the primary email address in Daylite
• The email address is invalid (for example, contains leading or trailing spaces)
• The email address is not a personal address, but a shared address such as info@…
• The email address bounced during a previous mailing, i.e. the receiving mail server rejected it because the address was unknown or the mailbox was full
• The contact has been set to the status Cleaned in Mailchimp

As soon as an email address no longer exists or is permanently undeliverable, Mailchimp triggers a hard bounce – the contact is then immediately set to Cleaned. If a mailbox is, for example, full, a soft bounce is triggered; after seven soft bounces, Mailchimp sets the contact to Cleaned as well.

All contacts with the status Cleaned can be found directly in Mailchimp:

1. Navigate in Mailchimp in the left sidebar to Audience
2. Select the status Email cleaned under Subscription status

Updating a contact with the status “Cleaned”

Mailchimp works on an email-address basis, meaning every contact only has one email address in Mailchimp. As soon as a contact hasn't received a mailing seven times, or the email address no longer exists, that address is automatically set to Cleaned. Cleaned contacts can no longer be updated or contacted and are moved to the Errors subgroup during the next synchronization. This does not affect the synchronization of the other contacts; it only shows a warning message.

You have two options to reactivate the contact in Mailchimp:

1. Delete the affected email address of the contact in Daylite. During the next synchronization, the contact is automatically removed from the Mailchimp group in Daylite, the link to the email address in Mailchimp is removed, and the contact is archived in Mailchimp
2. Replace the primary email address in Daylite with a new, valid email address. During the next synchronization, a new contact with the new email address is created in Mailchimp and linked to the contact in Daylite. The link to the cleaned contact is removed and it is archived in Mailchimp

Why isn't a company transferred to Mailchimp?

Daylite and Mailchimp are designed so that communication always happens with a person, not a company. A company therefore cannot be transferred to Mailchimp and is not taken into account by the Marketing&Chat plugin.

If you'd like to transfer a person's company name as well, use the dynamic merge tags, see Using merge tags. People can be transferred from Mailchimp to Daylite, but companies cannot.

Avoiding duplicate contact records

If a person subscribes to your Mailchimp newsletter – for example via your website – using an email address that is not stored on the corresponding contact record in Daylite, that person is automatically created as a new contact record.

The matching criteria are first name, last name and email address. Use the Find Duplicate Records function in Daylite (under the Edit menu) to quickly merge duplicates.

Why doesn't the mailing show up in the Daylite history?

Only emails sent through Apple Mail can be added to the Daylite history. A mailing sent through Mailchimp is sent by Mailchimp itself and can therefore not be transferred into the Daylite history.

Can I send mailings through Marketing&Chat?

The Daylite extension Marketing&Chat cannot send mailings itself. It acts as an interface and can be used together with the provider Mailchimp. If you have a Mailchimp account, you can use the extension to transfer contact data back and forth – the actual newsletter is then sent through Mailchimp.

How does double opt-in work in Mailchimp?

Double opt-in is a consent procedure that protects end users from unwanted emails. When a user fills out a form to sign up for a newsletter, they receive an email (or SMS/call) asking them to confirm their data and subscription again.

If you enable double opt-in on your Mailchimp audience, people who newly sign up to the list – for example via a form on your website – will receive an email to confirm their subscription.