Email Made Easy With Salesforce-Native Mailchimp Integration

Take the next step in your email marketing journey with a native, effortless, and user-friendly Mailchimp to Salesforce integration.

Highlights

• Create, manage, and assign members to Mailchimp Audiences through a Salesforce-native experience.
• Automate record sync between Salesforce and Mailchimp in just a few clicks.
• Allow users to review Mailchimp activity and metrics directly on Salesforce records.
• Deep dive on campaign performance metrics with Salesforce Reports and Dashboards.

With Mailchimp being one of the most popular email marketing services on the market nowadays, it comes as no surprise that quite a few Salesforce customers, regardless of their size, make use of this product to execute their email campaigns. Whether it’s a newsletter or a one-time email, how can you ensure the key contact information flows seamlessly between your CRM and your Mailchimp? 

Mailchimp for Salesforce is a native application developed by Beaufort 12, which allows your organization to manage and analyze everything related to Mailchimp audiences, activity, data flow, and campaigns directly from your CRM. With customer experience being front and center, this product not only makes it easy to execute various initiatives but can also empower your marketing team to conduct their email marketing and audience segmenting tasks in one place in a matter of minutes. 

This in-depth review will showcase the main features Mailchimp for Salesforce brings, ideal use cases, and setup effort, as well as how fast your marketers can (and will) adopt this new integration.

Features

As a native Salesforce application, your marketing team will benefit from bespoke functionality to support their efforts without navigating away from Salesforce. After the package installation and permission assignment, Mailchimp will appear as a separate App in the App Launcher and will include all the tabs you and your team will need to set up the integration and subsequently continue the tasks previously done manually and potentially in silo.

Sync Mailchimp to Salesforce

Within the Mailchimp Settings, the General Settings tab will not only be the starting point but also where the Mailchimp connection will be managed from. You can add as many connections as needed, determine the data import frequency, and edit attributes such as the timezone any time it’s needed. Additionally, the sync can be triggered manually outside of the scheduled import in the event of an ad-hoc need to import data from Mailchimp into your CRM.

Additional instructions related to Record Pages, messages to be actioned, and the Audit Log related to the Mailchimp to Salesforce integration will appear in the Maintenance tab. As an admin, you’ll always know when refreshes are triggered and when the frequency is changed. 

Audience Management and Data Wizard

After the Mailchimp connection is completed and the first import is done, it’s time to switch the focus to your audiences. This is no longer a task for the Salesforce Admin, as following the initial configuration it’s all about Marketers starting to enjoy the new functionalities. 

The Mailchimp Audiences tab is where all your existing Audiences from Mailchimp will appear once the initial sync is completed. When needed, new Audiences can be created directly from Salesforce and will be synced to Mailchimp. Clicking into any of the Audiences will provide users with a comprehensive summary of performance metrics such as Open and Click rate, number of members, and historical subscription data.

Additionally, you can see where the audience members are located on a map, which can prove useful in a scenario where you’d like to send out event invites to members in a particular area, for example.

Continuing onto the Members tab, this is where users will have the possibility to analyze the existing audience members, filter them, or even open Mailchimp external links when needed. Clicking on each member will offer additional details as well as the possibility to update, add, or create Mailchimp Tags. 

Any previous campaigns related to the Audience will be available directly in Salesforce under the Campaigns tab – note that Campaign in this context refers to the Mailchimp Campaign, which may be a simple email, landing page, or even an ad that performance is measured for. All metrics the marketing team may need and additional information are available for each Campaign within this modal.

In addition to the stats, the Email Preview is also available within Salesforce with the possibility to open it in Mailchimp contextually with the click of a button.

Data Wizard

Gone are the days when audience members had to be manually added in Mailchimp, as the Data Wizard will help your team pick and choose the members directly from Salesforce. If you choose to create a new Audience, the Data Wizard is what you’ll be using to narrow down the exact audience you’re looking for, map selected fields, and determine any Mailchimp Tags or Groups to which the members should be related. This all occurs in a matter of seconds.

Possible data sources are Salesforce Reports, List Views, Campaigns, or SOQL for more complex queries. The great news is that it doesn’t matter what Salesforce object is chosen to be included as a source – as long as an Email field is available, then any Standard or Custom object can be used. Additionally, during the last step of the wizard, make sure to select the import frequency – that’s right, if this is not a one-time exercise, users can choose one of the available frequencies or set their own. 

As soon as at least one Job is created, it’ll appear in a list under the Data Wizard tab. As you might have guessed, users will be able to edit the job whenever needed and also create new ones if data is needed from multiple sources. The Audience and Members will be synced to Mailchimp, all without the user having to leave this Salesforce page – how easy was that?

Record and Data Flexibility

As mentioned earlier, any Salesforce object can be used as a source as long as an email field is available, however, when it comes to records being matched or created in Salesforce, Leads or Contacts (and Person Accounts if you have them enabled) are the available options. 

Matching and Creation Rules

The Field Mapping tabs within the Audience allow users to determine the integration behavior when matching or creating Salesforce records. Matching is done based on Email fields whether they’re standard or custom. 

If the choice is made for Leads to be created if no match is found, note that assignment rules will be triggered if they exist. If the choice is for Contacts to be directly created, then an additional option to create an Account (or not) becomes available. It’s recommended to create records from Mailchimp data only if you have a well-established database or use a form so that the required information is obtained. 

Mappings

Scrolling down to the mapping section, you’ll notice that if Leads or Contacts are to be created in the event of no match being found, users will be able to establish default values. Lead Source is one example which could be used in order to know at all times which are the Leads created through the integration. 

The field mapping itself can be set field by field for both Leads and Contacts and while it can be completed manually, why do that when Mailchimp for Salesforce offers the Auto Map option? As long as the field names are descriptive enough, the automatic mapping should prevent your team from having to go through the lists of fields – the result, however, should be checked before saving.

Additionally, you can decide the overwrite behavior for each field in case it should only be updated once when the record is created or continuously with every update.

In the event a new Salesforce field has just been created, for example, or information exists in Salesforce but there’s nowhere to store it in Mailchimp yet, your team can choose to create merge fields on the fly, right from Salesforce. 

Note that while the above options will be first visible in the Salesforce to Mailchimp tab after navigating to Field Mapping, similar functionalities can be found in the mapping for the Mailchimp to Salesforce as well.

User Experience

Ultimately, marketing efforts should align with sales goals within your organization. As a result, it can be helpful to make the efforts visible for teams, such as Sales and Business Development, and for them to have a complete picture of all activities, rather than the sales-only ones. 

Mailchimp for Salesforce includes two Lightning Components which can easily be added to your Record Pages, to offer this visibility on top of the standard Activity Timeline. Similar to other components, these can be filtered and positioned wherever it makes sense for your teams considering what else you have going on the Record Pages. If you prefer the out-of-the-box option, the components can be automatically added once the managed package is set up. 

Once these components are added, your teams have access to both the past activities but also any lists that the Lead, Contact, or Person Account is part of. Keep in mind that the Mailchimp Memberships list does allow the option to add or remove Contacts from lists, so if you only want this to be available for Marketers and not Sales, don’t forget to filter it accordingly on the Record Page.

The Mailchimp Activity Timeline includes all relevant activities, such as members being created, subscription activity, and emails sent out. Users can filter the list based on the audience they’re a part of or even the type of activity.

For a scenario in which Emails appear in the Mailchimp Activity, users can explore the activity further by clicking on it and discovering key insights such as Statistics. They can even preview the actual content of the Email that was sent – all, of course, without having to navigate away from the Salesforce record.

For Marketers or the users you decide to grant access to the Mailchimp Memberships list, an available functionality with Mailchimp for Salesforce is for the email validity to be checked automatically. Such checks can increase the success of your communications, and the team will know in real time if the email seems to be a test or an invalid one in real time. 

Analytics

Salesforce Reports and Dashboards can be used to track all results from your Mailchimp campaigns. Since all the information you might need is stored within Salesforce custom objects and related to Leads, Contacts, or even Person Accounts or other custom objects if you choose to use them, any user can quickly create insightful analytics in no time. 

While users can create their own Reports, quite a few will be already available out of the box as part of the managed package. As soon as there is enough data for them to be populated, they can quickly be accessed from the Audience Summary page. Even more than that, before selecting any of the Reports, their description will be made visible so that your users can easily find out what the Report will display.

Roadmap

In addition to the features already covered, Beaufort 12 is working on providing invocable actions as part of their managed package. As I am sure you know, Salesforce invocable actions are a powerful feature within the Salesforce platform that allows users to create custom logic and processes that can be called (or invoked) from various automation tools such as Flows. This addition will make it easy for admins to support even more complex processes between Mailchimp and Salesforce. The invocable actions will be a beta feature that will become available to Mailchimp for Salesforce customers later this month.

Use Cases

Email marketing processes have numerous components, from the content being sent out to properly tracking the results. With Mailchimp for Salesforce aiming to optimize all the components the team has to interact with, the number of use cases the tool can be used for is by no means low. Let’s go through a couple of them, for which the readily available functionality can make a clear difference. 

Empowering users is by far the broader use case, as Mailchimp for Salesforce not only offers the tools for email campaigns to be successfully conducted, but it goes a few levels further from a monitoring perspective. In a similar Member Detail modal to the one Sales Managers or Business Development Reps can access to see when a Lead or Contact received an email, Marketers can swiftly explore members right from the Audience’s Members list. 

They can simply choose to open the member in Mailchimp if needed, but more than that they can add new or existing tags directly from this screen, review the entire Mailchimp Activity, deep dive into the Audit, or explore any completed Merge Fields. This way, there’s no need for your team to switch tabs to obtain all the information they might need. 

Irrespective of the industry your organization activates in, there may be situations in which record matching should be done based on various fields. As mentioned above, Mailchimp for Salesforce requires an email field per Object which matching can be done on. What if I told you there can be as many email fields as needed?

The use case to identify people based on multiple email addresses is particularly popular with Non-Profit orgs, as donors may use both their business as well as their personal email. With Mailchimp for Salesforce, as long as the additional email fields exist, it’s only a matter of choosing them in the Field Mappings section of an Audience. In this way, both potential duplicates as well as sending the same communication more than once can be prevented. 

Impact

After going through the capabilities and seeing how easy everything can become for users working with Mailchimp and Salesforce in your company, going back to manual work and switching between platforms surely seems like a hassle. Mailchimp for Salesforce aims to make all email marketing processes easy, fast, and above all, seamless to complete from start to finish regardless of the audience size or criteria.

Setup

Getting started with Mailchimp for Salesforce is a breeze, as after the managed package from AppExchange is installed, the Mailchimp Settings tab within the Mailchimp App is the only place you would have to navigate – unless, of course, you prefer to set the Record Pages yourself. 

Right from the start, when you first reach the Settings tab, a guided wizard will come up with links to the setup documentation and the user guide. Even if you choose not to go through the documentation from the start, if you’re familiar with both Salesforce and Mailchimp already you’ll have no problem going through all the available functionalities. 

Even though you can opt to assign permission sets through the native Salesforce functionality, why navigate to a different page when you don’t have to? The User Security Settings page allows you to quickly search for any user and determine their access to Mailchimp for Salesforce. Either the Mailchimp Standard or Mailchimp Admin permission set will be assigned right on this page.

Support

In addition to the guided setup wizard appearing in Salesforce which you can go through right after installation, all admin and User guides are available for you and your team to explore separately on the Support page whenever needed. Note that most resources also contain interactive tutorials, making it a breeze to get started. Additionally, resources are embedded across the different Salesforce pages and modals, making sure that both you and your marketing users have the answers you need while conducting your activities. 

Since Beaufort 12 team’s goal is to leave no question unanswered, you can also easily reach out to them via the Contact Us form on their website with any additional questions related to your implementation. 

A surprise that you’ll surely enjoy as much as I did is the fact that Beaufort 12 has compiled a list of all possible standard errors you may receive while using Mailchimp for Salesforce and how to resolve them. This list is constantly updated as the product evolves, making it as easy to troubleshoot as it is to use the tool – note though that if you choose to create any custom validations, these will not be on this list as they’re specific to your org.

Pricing

Starting at $25/company/month for up to 10K active audience members, Mailchimp for Salesforce is suitable for all types of Salesforce customers, regardless of the organization’s size. With such a competitive pricing offering, it means that you can easily supercharge your marketing activities at a low cost with maximum return on investment.  

There’s no hidden or additional cost and any Salesforce user can make use of the product as long as permissions are assigned. You can find more details on how to purchase directly from the Billing tab within the Mailchimp Settings and subsequently access the billing portal here. 

Summary

All in all, with a growing list of easy-to-use functionalities, seamless integration, automated processes, and even detailed insights and analytics right into your Salesforce org, Beaufort 12’s Mailchimp for Salesforce can become your entire team’s new favorite tool for all tasks related to email marketing. Even if your organization is a well-established enterprise or a small business just getting started with Salesforce, Mailchimp, or both, get ready to scale your marketing initiatives at lightning speed! 

Since it’s always more insightful to test out new applications in your own sandbox or developer edition with processes and data of your choice, Mailchimp for Salesforce is available for a free 30-day trial, giving you plenty of time to explore everything this product has to offer – make sure to take it for a spin!