One of our most popular requests, Vicinity has a bespoke integration allowing your database to integrate with your Audience (or allow you to create a new one), in industry-leading mailing provider, Mailchimp.
The Vicinity -Mailchimp integration works in two ways:
Vicinity to Mailchimp - Update or Create New Audiences in Mailchimp from your database, pulling through essential information such as the Person's name, Organisation/Business Information, Sector, Area, Tags etc so you can segment your Mailchimp campaigns using the filters you have set up in the CRM.
Mailchimp to Vicinty - Automatically record your communications with People in your database and add a new activity to the Organisation's Timeline.
**This is a one-way integration, any contacts that you remove from the database will need to be manually removed from your Mailchimp Audience.
Prepare for your update ✅
As with everything, It's important that before you install any integrations you take a backup of your systems.
Take a backup of your database by exporting the full list. We also take regular backups of your system.
Take a backup of your Mailchimp audience(s) that you will be updating. Click here to see how to do this.
What you will need 🧰
You will need to have full admin access to your Vicinity and Mailchimp accounts. Please note: Mailchimp may also need you to verify using the email or phone number on your account so you'll need access to this too.
Updating your Mailchimp 📤
To begin, in your Vicinity Directory, navigate to the Business/Organisations Tab.
Here you can filter your Directory view as usual, viewing your entire list of Business/Organisation Records, or a filtered list/layout of this.
Scrolling to the bottom of the page, you can then choose to 'Export For Email'. This tool will export all emails that are attached to the Business/Organisation Records in your Directory View and any People attached to those Businesses/Organisations.
ℹ️ Logging Into Mailchimp: If you have not yet synced or your current session has timed out, on this view you will see a 'log in' button below the Mailchimp icon on the Export prompt window. You'll need to click this and log in/authorise the Vicinity Integration before you continue. You can see how by clicking here.
If you are logged in to Mailchimp, the dialogue box will indicate this and you'll only have one button available - 'Export All'. Clicking this will take you to the next step
The next window you will see is where you can check the emails that will be pushed to Mailchimp. In this view the table shows the emails found in your database, the business/organisation they are matched to and if they are attributed to Person(s) in your data.
You should check this to ensure all looks as expected. You can manually de-select any of the emails by using the checkbox on their row. Once you are happy, click Continue.
ℹ️ You can only add an email to Mailchimp once. Where there is more than one Person's name against an email in your database you will have a drop-down menu to select which one of these should carry through to Mailchimp.
The next screen will give you the option to Export to CSV (give a spreadsheet), or Send to Mailchimp.
Clicking 'Send to Mailchimp', you will then have two options:
Update an Existing Audience - This will allow you to push your emails to an audience you already have created.
Create a New Audience - This will allow you to create a new audience in Mailchimp and start from scratch.
ℹ️ Vicinity's Mailchimp Integration works best when updating an audience you already have. For the fastest update, create an audience in Mailchimp first then update this through the update.
You'll now get the option to select the Audience in your Mailchimp that you'd like to update by clicking the title. You can also see a snapshot of the emails it contains by clicking the 'Preview Audience' button.
Once you have selected it, Vicinity will go and check that it can match with Mailchimp and let you know the number of emails that will be imported or updated.
To finalise the update, click the button - this will then push your update to Mailchimp.
ℹ️ It's always advisable to check Mailchimp to ensure all has been successful.
ℹ️ Whilst Vicinity will push all selected emails to Mailchimp and will update profiles, Mailchimp will always be the gatekeeper of the subscription status - if someone has unsubscribed, they won't be re-subscribed. To do this, the user must do this themselves.
Set your reminder 📅
We recommend that you run the update above regularly to ensure your Mailchimp is up-to-date. Lots of our customers have set a monthly calendar reminder, but it is also advisable before any major communication campaign.
Timeline View 🕐
Once you have integrated your Vicinity with Mailchimp you will start to see automatic updates on Business/Organisation's Timelines.
Whenever you send an email campaign, Mailchimp will push this information to your Vicinity database, which will add an Activity to any business/organisation associated with the recipient emails.
Good Practice ⭐
We recommend a few good practices for using Mailchimp alongside Vicinity. You can read more about these here:
Set up Subscribe/Unsubscribe alert emails here
Decide if you need to filter your Directory or wish to push everything to Mailchimp and use Mailchimp's segmenting tools (recommended)
You can search our collection of help articles here 👉🏻 Vicinity Help Desk or we have a useful video of using the system basics here 👉🏻 Back to Basics