MailChimp campaign

Creating a MailChimp campaign and add Candidates and Contacts to it

Updated over a week ago

To simplify this article we speak of 'candidates' here. However, the method of work is the same when you add contacts to a campaign.

Create Campaign

  • Go to 'Marketing' | 'Campaigns';

  • Click [New];

  • Choose 'Type Campagne' | 'MailChimp'; This hides all irrelevant fields.

  • Set the receivers and other fields;

  • [Save']

Add Candidates / Contacts

The method is similar to a regular campaign:

  1. Candidate overview

  2. Create a selection of candidates

  3. Choose 'Action' --> 'Add to campaign' and select the MailChimp campaign.
    Attention: did you just create the MailChimp campaign and it's not on the list? Relogin and add the candidates again.

Preparation for the first MailChimp campaign

IMPORTANT: please make sure all these steps have been taken before sending the first campaign to MailChimp

  • Activate integration
    Please follow Start working with CxMailChimp

  • Emailtemplate
    To send the mail you need an emailtemplate. This template can be edited in MailChimp by you or for you by our partner M440.

  • Domain verification
    MailChimp requires that the FROM address uses a verified domain. If you haven't verified the domain in MailChimp yet, you will receive an error notification that holds a link to the instructions how to verify a domain in MailChimp.

  • SPF record
    MailChimp also requires that a valid SPF record is added to your DNS for the verified domain. MailChimp provides instruction regarding CNAME and SPF records, please make sure you carefully follow these instructions.

Creating and sending or scheduling 

When you have activated MailChimp integration and successfully initialized your app, you can start creating and sending or scheduling you campaign. Assume you already have created Campaign of type MailChimp in Carerix and added several Contacts or Candidates to it. 

  1. Open your MailChimp campaign details and switch to MailChimp tab. The tab shows you three fields to provide and a radio-group to select your MailChimp template. Subject field is predefined for you by your campaign title in Carerix, but you must explicitly provide ‘From email’ and ‘From name’ fields. Then you select a template.

    These templates are fetched from your MailChimp saved templates, which can be found by following url https://admin.mailchimp.com/templates/. Note that you must have at least one prepared templated to be able to use MailChimp functionality. (See image 1)

    Note: You can use MailChimp merge tags functionality in fields Subject and From name. They are used the same way you would use them in campaign email content.

  2. After you hit ‘Create and send’, the system does following for you:

    Processess every email of a Carerix Contact/Candidate related to this campaign in a following way:
    - Checks is Contact or Candidate belongs to 'MailChimp opt-out' group'. If it is - skips it.
    - Checks email of Contact or Candidate to be valid, is it's not - skips it.
    - If a subscriber with this email exists in MailChimp Carerix Users list, it updates its information - first name, last name, owner fullname and owner email.
    - If there were no subscriber with this email, it creates a subscriber and fills subscriber data - first name, last name, owner fullname and owner email.

    After your MailChimp Campaign was successfully created and sent, you’ll see ‘Reports’ in MailChimp tab in Carerix. It’s just a short overview of what’s happened to your campaign.

  3. If you click 'Create and schedule', you'll be shows additional fieldset to choose date to schedule your campaign. (See image 2)

Picture 1)

Picture 2)

After you choose a date and time and hit the blue 'Create and schedule' button, the flow will be the same as with 'Create and send' button, but instead of direct sending, campaign will be scheduled and you'll see scheduling information instead of 'Reports' screen.

Both this flows include three step process: create a campaign, check its readiness and sending/scheduling itself. A campaign that's not ready cannot be sent or scheduled. This might happen because of various reasons, and the most common ones are non-complete template and failed domain verification. If it's the case and your MailChimp campaign was created but not sent/scheduled, you might want to delete MailChimp campaign and start over.

Please, note, that after MailChimp campaign was created, it's not possible to change selected template, so you'll have to delete already created MailChimp campaign before selecting another one.

Customizing your campaign

To be able to send a personal mail to your candidates, there are 'Merge Tags' available in MailChimp that will put information from the candidatefile in Carerix in the mail.

You can see available merge tags list in your MailChimp account. Go to Lists -> Carerix Users -> Settings -> List fields and *|MERGE|* tags

Every subscriber that's added to this list will have specific values for those fields. These fields are updated every time a Candidate or Contact is processed by 'Create and send/schedule' procedure. That means before every campaign is sent, all needed subscribers will be updated with their actual information.

To customize your campaign, type these merge tags in 'subject' or 'from name' fields, when creating a campaign (or use them in template body, when you create a template in MailChimp) 

When your campaign is sent, these *|FNAME|* and *|OWNERNAME|* values will be substituted per each subscriber, making your email personalized:

Available merge tags:

*|FNAME|* - Contact/Candidate first name

*|LNAME|* - Contact/Candidate last name

*|OWNERNAME|* - Contact/Candidate's owner full name

*|OWNEREMAIL|* - Contact/Candidate's owner email

Contact/candidate activities

There are four types of MailChimp events tracked: bounced, opened, clicked and unsubscribed. Every activity has campaign id, and title for your convenience.
Each of these events represent respective activity in MailChimp reports. Thus, every activity, that's present in MailChimp is duplicated in activities tab, in campaign details. 

Also, every activity is connected to respective contact/candidate, which means you can see these activities in contact/candidate details Activities tab.

Contact/candidate statuses

There are four statuses for MailChimp Campaign users in order of importance: bounced, opened, clicked and unsubscribed. Every user can have only one status.

The status, which is considered more important overwrites previous. E.g. user has opened email, then clicked a link, then opened email once again - in this case we won't change status back to opened, because the user will have already more important status set - clicked.

The most important status is 'Unsubscribed'.

Unsubscribed users

When a user unsubscribes from the received mailing, the unsubscribed user is added to a specific 'MailChimp opt-out' group. The 'MailChimp opt-out' group has a specific tag, named 'NoMailChimpMailingsTag' that's used to identify this group among others. This tag and groups will be added automatically to your system as part of the activation.

When a contact or candidate are members of 'MailChimp opt-out' group, they will not be processed by MailChimp campaign, event if they're added as subscribers.

MailChimp integration app sees them as 'MailChimp opt-out' users and will not take them into account.

Synchronization proces

MailChimp integration provides three integrated functionalities:

  • contact/candidate activities, 

  • contact/candidate statuses, 

  • contact/candidate group updates for users unsubscribed from MailChimp list.

These updates are done automatically. That's done per each mailchimp campaign using the following logic:

  • every 10 minutes for campaigns that were created less than two hours ago

  • once in an hour for campaigns that were created 24 hours ago

  • eight times a day for campaigns that were created during last week

  • four times a day for campaigns that were created during last two weeks

  • twice a day for campaigns that were created during last month

  • once a day for older campaigns

That approach is meant to reduce API calls, so that MailChimp will not consider it as abusive behavior.

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Keywords : UD-368

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