Do you need your Repfabric contacts to automatically synchronize to your Mailchimp audiences? If so, this tutorial is for you. The word “Tags” is used in Mailchimp. It references different fields in Repfabric that can be used to mark contacts as part of a specific group. We are NOT talking about the “Tags” field inside a company record in Repfabric.

Background

Mailchimp is a popular “email mass blaster”, designed to send emails such as newsletters, line card updates of new products, and general announcements to thousands of people at a time. Mailchimp’s most basic pricing plan is “Free” for up to 2000 contacts.

Email contacts added to Mailchimp constitute what Mailchimp calls an “Audience”. The audience is a list of potential recipients for campaigns of one or more emails. Paid plans of Mailchimp allow you to have multiple audiences, although a single Mailchimp audience can be segmented using “Segments” and “Tags” associated with each contact. This ability to slice and dice contacts within a single audience is sufficient for most Mailchimp and Repfabric users. Separating out customer from prospects for example, is very simple using tags rather than separate Mailchimp audiences.

Normally, a paid Mailchimp subscription is needed for a single company, rather than for each user at that company.

Repfabric has created an integration that allows you to mark a contact in Repfabric with a “Contact Group”, which is specifically designed to add/remove contact to/from a Mailchimp “Audience”. This Tutorial will first show how it works, followed by the configuration needed to make it happen.

Usage

You will need to create “Contact Groups” in Repfabric with a matching “Category” in Outlook if you’d like to be able to mark contacts from anywhere you are working (Outlook, Mobile app, Repfabric online). You will need to match these up to audience tags in Mailchimp.

For example, you create a contact group called “Newsletter” in Repfabric. Any contact assigned “Newsletter” in the “Contact Group” field of Repfabric will synchronize to the Mailchimp audience that also has the “Newsletter” tag assigned. Other popular contact group names would be “Mailchimp” or “Mailchimp – Newsletter” and so on.

A contact can be marked to sync to Mailchimp via the Contact Group field in three ways:

  • Web portal
  • Mobile app
  • Outlook

Once you have the “Contact Group” configured to synchronize with the Mailchimp audience (per below), all you have to do is mark your contacts that you want to synchronize.

**If you do not want to individually click each contact one by one, please use the Export / Reimport article to apply the contact group tag in excel for all of your contacts.

Configuration

If you are new to Mailchimp, please sign up for a free account. Once you are logged in to Mailchimp, please follow these steps. If you are already using Mailchimp and have an audience you want to sync contacts from Repfabric to, please see the Repfabric configuration section below.

  1. Add a Mailchimp Audience, such as “All Agency Contacts”

2. Now return to Repfabric to add the Contact Group in the Settings > Subtables menu of Repfabric. (If you do not see this Subtable menu, contact your administrator to enable that menu for you.) In this example, we will use a Contact Group called “Mailchimp”, but you can define it to your preferred term.

3. Repfabric needs to know which Mailchimp server to connect to from your Repfabric system. Return to your Mailchimp browser tab, and copy onto your clip board the first portion of the URL at the top of the browser for Mailchimp.

4. Navigate to the Repfabric web portal, and follow the Settings > CRMSync menu path. (Must be enabled for your user id by your administrator)

5. Select Mailchimp from the dropdown menu on the left hand side.

6. Paste in the url link you copied from the Mailchimp tab.

7. Return to Mailchimp to “Generate an API key”. This is a special token that acts like a password so that they two systems can talk to one another. Within Mailchimp, go to your Account > Extras > API key menu path, generate an API key and copy it so you can paste it into the next step.

8. Next, return to Repfabric and add the primary Mailchimp user login to Repfabric using the “New” button. Paste the API token from the step above into the Token line of that user. Test the connection to confirm it works.

Demonstrates adding the primary Mailchimp user id and API key

8.b. <OPTIONAL: new feature 3/15/22> Check the box for creating a custom field in the Mailchimp audience (list of contacts) for the Repfabric Company name.

Rather than adding every company name to the Mailchimp tags section, this custom field is used to store which company a contact works for in Mailchimp, so that you can send email to all contacts that work for a particular company location or parent company without cluttering your Tags section of Mailchimp with every company name in your Repfabric system. In order to do add the “RF_COMPANY” custom field, please follow these Mailchimp instructions:

Add a field in the audience settings

To add a field in the audience settings, follow these steps.

  1. Click Audience.
  2. Click Audience dashboard.
  3. If you have more than one audience, click the Current audience drop-down and choose the one you want to work with.
  4. Click the Manage Audience drop-down and choose Signup Forms.
  5. In the Settings dropdown, click Audience fields and *|MERGE|* tags.
  6. Click Add A Field to see the available field types and choose TEXT for type of field you’d like to add.
  7. Type “RF_COMPANY”, and click Save.

9. Finally, map the Mailchimp Audience to the Contact group in Repfabric, and enable Sync status if you want the sync to be automated. For immediate sync, click the sync circle icon below.

With sync enabled, it will refresh the list nightly.
Click the circle icon to sync on demand. If sync is enabled in settings, it will happen automatically every night.

Frequently Asked Questions

  1. Will adding and removing Product Potentials, Product Interest, Industries and Contact Groups update the existing contact records in Mailchimp? Yes. Changes you make to any of those fields are mirrored in Mailchimp which keeps your segments updated automatically.
  2. Will contacts that I delete from Repfabric also be removed from Mailchimp? Yes. Contacts that get deleted from Repfabric get removed from your Mailchimp list automatically during the next sync process.
  3. Will opens and click throughs be captured in Repfabric? Yes. Setting up Repfabric to listen for actions in Mailchimp CRMSync Settings within the “More Settings” button. To run the Repfabric process that scans Mailchimp campaign results, push the “Trigger Actions” button. Actions that have previously been recorded in Repfabric will not be re-recorded when pushing “Trigger Actions” more than once. If you want it to mark your contact “Do Not Email” in Repfabric, you will need to click “Trigger Actions” button as well.
Where to set up subscriptions and trigger the Mailchimp RF scanner
  1. When first connecting Repfabric sync to Mailchimp, will my Mailchimp audience members not created in Repfabric sync? No. We are working on a possible solution for this, but at the moment, a hand created audience member in Mailchimp will not automatically link to the Repfabric contact via that has the same email address. It will not create a duplicate in Mailchimp either. We are exploring how to link the two existing records and enrich the record in Mailchimp with Repfabric tags.