Syncing customers & contacts to Mailchimp

Breww is integrated with Mailchimp to allow you to manage your marketing campaigns within Mailchimp, but without you needing to manually sync your Breww customers & contacts.

You can choose to sync all your customers, or a subset of them (by creating a Customer List within Breww). The list (or audience) must already exist in Mailchimp, then Breww can take over control of the members. Breww will automatically sync your data daily, and ensure new customers are added to the list when needed and old customers removed when required.

Please note: When Breww is asked to sync with a list in Mailchimp, Breww will modify this list to match the data in Breww. This might include removing existing subscribers, adding new subscribers and overwriting tags & other data fields. We recommend backing up (exporting) your existing Mailchimp list data before enabling the integration on a pre-existing list, so you have a copy in case it’s needed for any reason.

Breww will never send emails via your Mailchimp account on your behalf. When you need to send marketing emails to your contacts list, you still design these within Mailchimp’s powerful platform, the benefit of this integration is that you don’t need to manually keep the contact list in sync with Breww.

This integration is available for no extra charge on all Breww price plans. We have plans to integrate with other similar marketing platforms, so if you’d like an integration with another provider, please do let us know.

To get started, head to Integrations > Marketing, and scroll down the page until you see Mailchimp. Next click the Set up Mailchimp now button.

Breww will need a name for this integration and your consent for data transfer. The name allows you to distinguish between multiple Mailchimp accounts if you need to add more than one (for example, if you manage a number of brands). If you only have one Mailchimp account, the default name is probably a good choice.

You’ll be taken to Mailchimp to login

And asked to confirm to Mailchimp that you’re happy to grant Breww access to your account.

Once you’re back to Breww and access has been granted, you need to click the orange button to configure which customers/contacts you’d like Breww to sync with which list (audience) in Mailchimp.

From the “list management” page, you can add your first list with the green button in the top-right. You’ll be presented with a form to confirm how you’d like the list to sync. You’ll need to confirm which tags you’d like Breww to sync to Mailchimp. (Note, Mailchimp as a limit of 60 tags per account.)

Once the list sync has been set up, you’ll see a screen like in the below image. Breww will start a sync of the new list automatically.

If there are any issues with the sync, you’ll see an orange View sync messages button below the sync status. This button allows you to see why Mailchimp rejected Breww’s request.

There are also a number of other buttons, as shown in the above image. Most notably, there is a button to force a sync from Breww to Mailchimp immediately. This is ideal if you know you have newly added/updated customers in Breww that you’d like added to Mailchimp now, rather than waiting for the daily automatic sync.

Breww will include some basic information about the customer in what we provide to Mailchimp to help you create targeted and personalised campaigns. This information includes the customer type, customer group name, price book, last order date, tags and more.

If you’ve any questions about using Breww’s Mailchimp integration, please let us know.

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Hi,
we are trying to set up segment in Mailchimp but can’t see the pricebook in the mailchimp contact information. is that normal or not?
Cheers

Hi Vincent,

Thanks for letting us know. We’ve found a situation where the price book field would be missed and wouldn’t be synced to Mailchimp. We’ve patched this up urgently for you, so if you ask Breww to sync this list again (using the button with the two arrows in a circle in it), this field should appear and be populated for you.

Sorry for the inconvenience caused here.

Luke

Hello. I’m just checking, if we edit a contact with a new email address in Breww will that contact also be edited in Mailchimp?

Great question, with a slightly confusing answer… Mailchimp only knows of list members by their email address, so you can’t change the email of a user without technically archiving the original user and creating a new one (through their API at least) :joy: But you shouldn’t need to do this manually in Mailchimp as well as Breww, as when Breww next syncs with Mailchimp it should effectively record this change for you.

If you change the email address of a contact, then Mailchimp will process this as a brand new list member with this new email address. The old email will no longer be in your Breww data, so this old email will be archived (unsubscribed). Any history, therefore, of the list member won’t be transferred from the old list member to the new one.

I hope this makes sense!

Yeah, this isn’t a great feature. I think you might need a bigger warning pop up before anyone else deletes their contacts

Is there a way to disconnect Breww from Mailchimp within Breww?

This depends on your use case. I can understand how in some situations this might not be what’s wanted, but in others, it’s exactly what’s needed (e.g. a dynamic list of customers who haven’t ordered for 3 months). We have made a change so you can choose to allow Breww to remove list members, or not in your list management settings.

You can disable syncing, by using the red “Pause syncing” button next to the list on the list management page. (Or use the new option to prevent customers from being deleted.)

Hi,

We are using one audience for both our d2c and b2b mailings as we don’t want to start paying Mailchimp just yet.

We currently separate these out with a tag in mailchimp which is connected to our separate mailings. We would like to sync up Breww so as they all get the B2B tag in Mailchimp and as such will be automatically be part of the proper mailing. Is this possible in any way?

Yes, this should be possible.

Firstly, add a customer tag in Breww named “B2B” and then apply this to the applicable customers in Breww. Either apply the tag manually to each customer using the website, or you can use the bulk customer update tool in Settings → Data imports & updates, to set the tag within a spreadsheet export and re-import this to Breww. Just be careful not to change anything else in this file as you can make big changes to your customer database using this tool.

Once the tag has been applied to each of your customers, you can edit your list’s sync settings and add this tag in the “Tags to sync” box. After a short while, Breww should have synced this to Mailchimp and you’ll be able to filter your members on Mailchimp without needing to pay Mailchimp for extra lists :sunglasses:

Hi Luke,

I see what you mean.

I find the mass upload a bit sketchy - there is only one field with primary contact for instance, and some of my customers have multiple contacts with emails that I would like to sync.

An idea would also be that you upload customer types as tags to mailchimp - this would make filtering for your mailings even easier!

Thanks Gijs, the bulk updater does have great power and of course, this increases the risk of mistakes, but it does work correctly. Any given customer can have a maximum of one primary contact and as such, there’s only one primary contact section in the bulk updater. Your customers can have additional contacts, but they are not applicable to the bulk customer updater, as this tool only deals with the primary contact (any additional contacts are ignored by it entirely).

Customer types should already be being uploaded to Mailchimp in the “Type” field, so you should be able to filter on these without them needing to form part of the tags field.

Hi Luke,

If I can filter with type I think that is all I need, but I saw no default type field in mailchimp so I was figuring I needed to work with tags.

It is not as a default, but I can add it manually like this (I put in the values). Is this correct for a proper sync?

I must admit that I thought that TYPE was a default field in Mailchimp, but I could be wrong (we don’t use it ourselves). If you set it up as in your suggestion, I do think that’s correct, but if that doesn’t work, please let us know and we’ll investigate for you with a test account.

Hi Luke,

The type sync works. great.

Am I correct in that it does not sync leads currently?

That’s great to hear, Gijs :+1:

You’re right that leads do not currently sync (it’s just customers), but if you want leads to sync too, I’m sure we could add an option to allow these to be included in the sync. If you’d like to see this, can you please add this to the feature requests section and we’ll see what we can do for you.

Ok, I will. I’m also having an issue where the customer name in breww does not seem to sync up with the company name in Mailchimp?

Hi Luke, if I could just clarify on this answer. We’re also now looking to manage our B2B and B2C mailing databases from 1 ‘audience’ within Mailchimp using tags to separate and filter them when needed. Will Breww overwrite the entire audience when syncing?

Also we use Sellar as our new customer form where customers can select to get marketing emails/mailing list permission. Would it be feasible to automatically add customers in Breww to a customer list for marketing based on their selected preference in Sellar using the Breww - Sellar integration?

Thanks

Hey Jack, I’m sorry for the slow response.

Breww will assume that it is the source of valid information for the audience and may not play very nicely with other platforms feeding into the same audience, but there is something you can do to make it play more nicely.

There’s a setting named “Allow Breww to remove list members”, see this screenshot:

With this setting NOT ticked

In this case, Breww will look at everyone that it thinks should be on the list, and update their “member information” on Mailchimp to match what Breww thinks is correct. This may involve adding new members (if they were not found on Mailchimp), and also updating existing members’ information - such as name, tags, last order date, etc.

With this setting ticked

Breww will do exactly as when this is not ticked, but it will also remove members completely if they are not on Breww’s version of the list. This means that if Sellar were to add a customer to the list and Breww didn’t know about them (based on email address), then Breww would remove them from your list for you. Clearly, this would be unhelpful in your case, so you most likely wouldn’t want this box ticked.

Having this box ticked allows for some clever things in Breww/Mailchimp, but they’re not usually relevant if you’re trying to use a single audience in Mailchimp (and have other platforms like Sellar also syncing to it). For example, with this ticked, you could make a dynamic customer list in Breww for all customers who have not ordered for over 60 days but have ordered in the last year, then get this to sync to an audience in Mailchimp. Breww would then keep this list up to date at all times for you automatically by adding & removing people from the list as and when they fall into or out of the criteria. If someone placed an order, Breww would remove them from the list/Mailchimp audience shortly after. You could then have automated email sending schedules in Mailchimp for members of the list.


I’m sure we could explore updating the Sellar integration to bring over marketing preferences to Breww, for us to then sync to Mailchimp, but as Breww doesn’t have its own concept of opted-in/out of marketing yet, this would be a big task. If you’d like this, please do post it in the feature requests section and then we’ll be able to track it through to implementation and allow others to vote it up the priority list.

Hi Luke - any thoughts on the company name not syncing?

I’m sorry Gijs, I missed your message.

This should be syncing to a field named BUSINESS, which again should have existed already, but if this doesn’t exist in your Mailchimp account, can you add it, as you did for the TYPE field.

This should sort it :+1: Thanks

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