MailChimp for Salesforce is an App created by MailChimp and available for free in the Salesforce.com AppExchange. I recently installed the App in my Salesforce account in order to sync subscribers of our weekly into Salesforce Leads and contacts. I’ve been so impressed with this integration that I decided to focus this week’s blog post on some of the highlights of having integrated these two tools. ( MailChimp for Salesforce on AppExchange )
Well documented Installation and Setup instructions
Be forewarned, there are a number of steps that you need to do to make sure that the objects are created correctly, and the Lead and Contact screens contain the MC subscriber details. The positive point is that MailChimp has documented this clearly. If you follow the steps laid out in the MailChimp documentation then the integration can be setup without issues.
The setup wizard walks you through creating a mapping between fields in Salesforce and the MailChimp Subscribers. At this point you can also define new fields to be created in MailChimp based on data you collect in Salesforce. I was also able to add to the mapped fields at a later point after the setup wizard was completed.
Integration with your lead generation processes
Synchronization can be on demand or setup on an hourly schedule. As part of the sync, Leads can be generated automatically. If there is a clear match found in your Contacts, then it can add to that Contact the fact that they are a subscriber of your list. Otherwise, you can manually merge potential duplicates on the Lead tab.
If a Lead is generated from the sync, then the Lead source is set as your MailChimp list, resulting in the regular Salesforce Lead analysis reporting including this data.
If you are integrating a existing large mailing list, MailChimp suggests you avail of the option to not have Leads generated until a time when you can review them. It is simply a matter of changing a configurable option to not create Leads during the sync. The installation will integrate in all other features of the App. When the configurable option is changed at a later date, the Leads are created on your next Sync.
Management of mailing campaign
Detailed data on your MailChimp campaigns are available for viewing from MailChimp for Salesforce screens. There is also a series of reports that are made available to you that can be run on the data. These are added onto the Salesforce reports Tab.
You can also launch new mail campaigns from Salesforce, pulling in the functionality from MailChimp.
Per-User detailed information and management
Subscribers’ mailing list preferences can be updated from Salesforce, letting this function be integrated with any other user-care functions that you perform from Salesforce.
You can also drill down at the Contact/Lead level and view your subscriber’s mailing list activit such as; when they signed up, what campaigns they received, and whether they opened and clicked links. This may be useful information in understanding the subscribers interests for when you follow-up or make contact with the person. As a sample, I’ve included one of the screens from the App (having greyed out the personal information of my Contact). This is a drill down into the MailChimp Subscriber information that is stored in the Contact.
