Business Problem
MailChimp is a great tool for people who are just starting out with email marketing and they currently use Salesforce as their CRM. We have done several implementations of MailChimp and Salesforce and wanted to provide you with our best practice approach of how to set it up right the first time.
This is Part 8 of how to setup the Mailchimp to Salesforce integration where we will show you how to solve the following business challenge we ran into while implementing Mailchimp for Salesforce. Check out our Mailchimp How To section for additional tips on how to extend this integration.
- How to manage email address changes - In this article, we discuss what happens in Mailchimp when an email address changes in Salesforce. The answer is not ideal, but at least you will be ready to manage this issue when it arises.
How to Instructions
How to Manage Email Address Changes
When you change a Contact's email address in Salesforce, a new Contact is created in Mailchimp. Yep, we thought the same thing, not ideal. Because now we have a duplicate contact in Mailchimp with a bad email address. Unfortunately, there is not an automated way to solve for this in Mailchimp because we have no way of querying the records in Mailchimp.
- The best solution we came up with is to create a report in Salesforce that will allow us to see and export the records that need to be archived in Mailchimp. If you have people in Mailchimp that do not exist in Salesforce on purpose, this solution will not work for you because you have no way of knowing which ones should or should not be archived.
- In Salesforce, go to Reports -> New Report -> All -> MC Subscribers -> Start Report
- Click the Filters tab -> Dropdown arrow -> Add Cross Filter
- Add two cross filters:
- MC Subscribers without Contacts
- MC Subscribers without Leads
- Click the Outline tab and add Email Address as a Column field.
- This report will now show all of the MC Subscriber records that do not have a related Lead or Contact based on a match on email address. Therefore, these people need to be archived in Mailchimp.
- Save and Run the report. Then export it from Salesforce as a csv file.
- Now, go to Mailchimp -> Audience -> All Contacts -> Add Contacts -> Import Contacts
- Select Upload a file -> Continue
- Select Browse -> Select the File you exported from Salesforce -> Continue to Organize
- Select a status = Subscribed
- Check the box called Update my existing contacts' information.
- Click Continue to Tag
- If you do not have a tag setup for these Contacts yet, enter the name of the Tag and click Create.
- We named our tag Salesforce Email Address Changed.
- You should see the name of the new Tag under Search for or create tags.
- Click Continue to Match.
- Confirm the email address column from your Salesforce report is mapped. You do not need to map any other columns.
- Click Finalize Import.
- Confirm the information is correct -> Complete Import
- Click View Contacts
- Click Filter by Tag and select the tag you created. You should see the tag selected.
- Select all of the Contacts by checking the boxes .
- Click Actions -> Archive
- Click Confirm.
- You should be all set! Once MailChimp syncs over to Salesforce, there should not be any records in the report you created.
Any comments, questions, concerns – let us know in the comments! We would love to hear from you!