MailChimp is a leading email-marketing platform, allowing organizations to send newsletters and automated messages, and set up targeted campaigns to help their business.
Higher Logic Vanilla (Vanilla) includes the Mailchimp Push addon, which synchronizes the email addresses of your community’s users with a MailChimp mailing list of your choice. As new users join or existing users update their email addresses, Vanilla will automatically send notifications to MailChimp to add or update the users.
Enable MailChimp Push
MailChimp Push is available at every plan level. To enable it:
- Access the Dashboard.
- Navigate to Settings > Addons > Addons.
- Click the MailChimp Push toggle to turn it ON.
MailChimp Configuration
Once enabled, you will need to provide an API key to allow Vanilla to communicate with MailChimp.
1. Click here to learn how to generate your MailChimp API key.
2. Once you have a valid API key, click the settings icon to enter it.
3. On the MailChimp Settings tab, you will now see all of the mailing lists tied to your MailChimp account. Select the mailing list that you wish to sync with your Vanilla community.
4. The Group dropdown will display if you have created any in MailChimp for the list you’ve selected. You can read about groups in their knowledge base, here.
5. Click Save to apply your settings.
Now, every time a new user registers with your community or an existing user changes their email address, Vanilla will notify MailChimp and update that mailing list.
Mass synchronization
By default, MailChimp Push only updates the synced mailing list when it detects changes. If you decide to set up this addon after your community has been around for a while, it is still possible to sync up your users’ emails with MailChimp via the Mass Synchronization feature.
Mass Synchronization is a one-time action that sends an entire community’s worth of email addresses to the selected MailChimp mailing list.
- You can also choose to sync banned and deleted users. Syncing banned users will add them to your mailing list despite their banned status in Vanilla. If you have deleted users on the Vanilla side, syncing them will change their emails in MailChimp to a nonfunctional email.
- When you click Synchronize, a progress bar will appear to indicate that the process has started.
- If you have a large userbase, synchronization may take a while. Choosing to send a confirmation email will also add time to the sync, and those users will not appear in your list in MailChimp until they have confirmed on their end.
🛑 IMPORTANT: Vanilla’s integration with MailChimp is one-way only: Only email addresses edited within your Vanilla community will be synced to your MailChimp mailing list (it does not work the other way around). In addition, MailChimp Push can only send email addresses; no other profile data can be passed between Vanilla through this addon.
