A lot of Shopify users were peacefully running their e-commerce related email campaigns until the Mailchimp-Shopify Breakup was announced.
In the wake of this breakup, users have started to get worried about their existing workflows and data sync across Mailchimp & Shopify. Few are looking to shift from Mailchimp or Shopify and others are looking out for connectors like Automate.io to sync Mailchimp & Shopify.
If you want your email marketing efforts to not go up in flames by May 12th, you have arrived at the right blog.
In this article, we will explain how you can sync your Shopify store data like products, customers, orders, and carts to your Mailchimp account in minutes. You’ll also learn how you can best segment your customers to Mailchimp lists automatically.
As a bonus, we’ve added some pro tips to help you make the most out of Mailchimp Shopify Integration.
TL;DR: If you’re an existing user of the Mailchimp integration for Shopify, you can use Automate.io to run your existing campaigns & workflows (without any modification). It lets you sync your orders, products, abandoned carts, and customers, across Shopify & Mailchimp in a matter of just a few minutes.
Table of Contents
Sync Shopify E-commerce Data to Mailchimp
Who is this for: Shopify users who are looking for an easy solution to help them with their existing workflows that would be affected by the Mailchimp Shopify Breakup.
In order to run all your existing e-commerce marketing campaigns in Mailchimp without any interruption, we have written down clearly what you need to do.
What Shopify Store data can you sync to Mailchimp?
- New Customers
- New Orders
- Abandoned Cart
- New Products
1. Add New Customers from Shopify to Mailchimp
It is important for online stores to keep in touch with their new customers, in order to grow their business. These customers have the potential to turn into loyal customers and promote your brand to others too!
Syncing these customers from Shopify to your email marketing platform and running targeted campaigns for them is now very easy with Automate.io.
You can sync new customer data from Shopify to Mailchimp in 5 easy steps:
- Link your Shopify and Mailchimp E-commerce app to Automate.io
- Select Shopify as your trigger app and select ‘New Customer’ as your trigger.
- Select Mailchimp e-commerce as your action app, select ‘Add a Customer’ as your action and select your store name from the dropdown list of Store input field.
- Map Shopify data to relevant input fields for Mailchimp e-commerce.
- Save your bot and do a test run.
The highlighted row displayed in Mailchimp shows the newly created customer from Shopify.
Automate.io’s easy-to-use visual interface will help you to do these steps in mere minutes! You can concentrate on attracting new customers to your store while the workflows run in the background without any effort.
Once this workflow is set, you can continue to sync your customers to Mailchimp just like how you’re doing it at the moment.
2. Send New Order Data from Shopify to Mailchimp
Businesses run product recommendation campaigns to their existing customer base to sell more products. And as a Shopify business store, what if you miss out on relevancy in your emails?
If you want the performance of your recommendation mails to shoot up, syncing customer’s order data from Shopify to Mailchimp is your resort to this.
So when you send out a recommendation campaign, you can choose what type of products are to be added for a particular segment of customers.
Once you do this, it will be easy for you to pitch relevant products to users that will genuinely interest them.
- Link your Shopify and Mailchimp apps to Automate.io
- Select Shopify as your trigger app and select ‘New Order’ as your trigger.
- Select Mailchimp e-commerce as your action app, select ‘Add an order Customer’ as your action and select your store name from the dropdown list of Store input field.
- Map Shopify data to relevant input fields for Mailchimp e-commerce.
- Save your bot and do a test run.
After doing these steps, you will see the order history of all your customers in their Mailchimp profile like this.
3. Shopify Abandoned Cart Email Automation
Every online store has an abandoned cart campaign running!
The main agenda of these campaigns is to target those customers who’ve abandoned their carts and motivate them to come back for a successful purchase.
Automate.io helps you run your existing abandoned-cart marketing campaigns automatically by transferring all the cart data from Shopify to your Mailchimp.
You can STILL continue using these effective campaigns by using the workflow below:
- Link your Shopify and Mailchimp e-commerce app to Automate.io
- Select Shopify as your trigger app and select ‘Abandoned Cart’ as your trigger.
- Select Mailchimp e-commerce as your action app, select ‘add a cart’ as your action and select your store name from the dropdown list of Store input field.
- Map Shopify data to relevant input fields for Mailchimp e-commerce.
- Save your bot and do a test run.
When you are designing an abandoned cart campaign in Mailchimp, you will see the products that were abandoned in the cart.
4. New Product Recommendation Email Campaign
How will you send great product recommendation emails when you do not have access to all your products in Mailchimp?
Having all your products synced from your Shopify store to Mailchimp makes it easy to drag n drop those products while setting up an email.
Relax, you can make a simple workflow to do this.
Here’s how you do it:
- Link your Shopify and Mailchimp e-commerce app to Automate.io
- Select Shopify as your trigger app and select ‘New Product’ as your trigger.
- Select Mailchimp e-commerce as your action app, select ‘Add a product or a variant’ as your action and select your store name from the dropdown list of Store input field.
- Map Shopify data to relevant input fields for Mailchimp e-commerce.
- Save your bot and do a test run.
Below is an example of how you can set up a product recommendation email:
Add Shopify Customers to Mailchimp List(s)
Who is this for: Shopify users who are looking for solutions for their existing workflows that would be affected by the Mailchimp Shopify Breakup. E-commerce users who want to make the most out of Shopify & Mailchimp Integrations.
What worse can it be than sending the same email to all your shop customers, which does not resonate with them? Like sending a skincare product recommendation email to a customer who’s interested in home decor.
Personalization has always been the key to conversion in e-commerce & email marketing. Segment’s 2017 State Personalization Report states – nearly half of shoppers surveyed (49%) have purchased a product that they did not initially intend to buy, but after receiving a personalized recommendation from a brand.
You can differentiate based on shopping pattern & interest, interaction with your brand, paid customers, potential customers, or inactive customers.
Below are a few intelligent and easy ways of segmenting and syncing Shopify customers as subscribers in Mailchimp Lists:
- Push new Shopify customers to a list in Mailchimp
- Sync High-Value customers from Shopify to a list in Mailchimp
- Add Abandoned Users from Shopify to a list in Mailchimp
1. Push New Shopify Customers to a List in Mailchimp
It is a good practice to identify your paid customers and trigger an automated email immediately after their purchase. You can send only these customers a follow-up email on their purchase with the order details, similar products, etc.
What you can also do is have only one single campaign to send out promotional content to these customers and differentiate these campaigns from those that you send to your potential customers.
Here’s how you do it:
Prerequisites: You need to have an account with Automate.io, Mailchimp & Shopify for this. And in your Mailchimp account, make sure you have a separate list (also known as an audience) for the new customers. Let’s name it – ‘New Customers’.
- From your Automate.io dashboard, create a Bot.
- In this bot, your trigger app would be Shopify as we want this automation to trigger when there is a new order.
- Select ‘New Customer’ as your trigger.
- Choose the action app as Mailchimp and select ‘Add or Update a Subscriber’. This helps you add or update a subscriber to the list mentioned. In this case, we’ll mention the list – ‘New Customers’
- You can now easily drag and drop the fields related to the order like – Customer Email Address, Customer First Name, Customer Last Name, to your Mailchimp list.
2. Move High-Value Customers to New List in Mailchimp
Your high-value customers are not just customers, they’re your brand advocates. Keeping them happy and sending out campaigns targeted to them, lets your brand stand out.
By marking out your high-value customers distinctly, it gets easy to send campaigns to reward them with sale announcements and special coupons.
Here’s how you do it:
Prerequisites: You need to have an account with Automate.io, Mailchimp & Shopify for this. And in your Mailchimp account, make sure you have a separate list (also known as an audience) for the new customers. Let’s name it – ‘High-Value Customers’.
- From your Automate.io dashboard, create a Bot.
- In this bot, your trigger app would be Shopify as we want this automation to trigger when there is a new order.
- Select ‘New Paid Order’ as your trigger.
- Now, we need to check if the order value is greater than a specific value – for example – $70. Add a filter action where you can specify the condition like – ‘Continue Only If..’ the parameter – ‘Total Price in USD’ is ‘Greater than’ a value – ‘$70’.
- Next, choose the action app as Mailchimp and select ‘Add or Update a Subscriber’. This helps you add or update a subscriber to the list – ‘High-Value Customers’
- You can now easily drag and drop the fields related to the order like – Customer Email Address, Customer First Name, Customer Last Name, Total Price in USD, etc. to your Mailchimp list.
- That’s it. All those customers whose order price is greater than $70 will be added to your High-Value Customers’ list.
3. Filter out Customers who’ve Abandoned their Shopify Cart
With online shopping cart abandonment averaging 69.23%, you can have huge sales if you can reduce your shopping cart abandonment. We have written some great tips on reducing your shopping cart abandonment.
One of them is to have a separate list in Mailchimp for those users who’ve abandoned your store and target them with personalized emails including their abandoned cart link.
You can automatically add your abandoned users from the Shopify store to the Mailchimp audience. And all of this without any manual import/export and instantly.
Here’s how you do it:
Prerequisites: You need to have an account with Automate.io, Mailchimp & Shopify for this. Before we create workflow automation, in your Mailchimp account, make sure you have a separate list (also known as an audience) for the abandoned users. Let’s name it – ‘Abandoned Users’.
- From your Automate.io dashboard, create a Bot.
- In this bot, your trigger app would be Shopify as we want this automation to trigger when there is a new abandoned cart.
- Select ‘Abandoned Cart’ as your trigger.
- Choose the action app as Mailchimp and select ‘Add or Update a Subscriber’. This helps you add or update a subscriber to the list mentioned. In this case, we’ll mention the list – ‘Abandoned Users’
- You can now easily drag and drop the fields related to the abandoned cart like – Customer Email Address, Customer First Name, Customer Last Name, to your Mailchimp list.
Pro Tips
1. Sync Customer Data from Shopify to Mailchimp & Assign Tags
What you can also do apart from segmenting them to different lists, is add tags to the subscribers in your Mailchimp list based on the activity in your Shopify store.
Once you add tags to your subscribers, you can segment them according to the aim of your campaign. Below are a few workflow ideas that you can start using right away:
a) Automatically Tag High-Value Customers
Tags help you segment users based on their activity and send relevant campaigns. You can send out a coupon code to all high-value customers in your holiday campaigns, new product launches, etc.
Manually assigning tasks based on user activity can be quite a task. With the help of Automate.io, you can create a simple workflow that would trigger whenever you have a new paid customer, add that as a subscriber with a tag ‘High-Value’ in Mailchimp.
Here’s how you do it:
- From your Automate.io dashboard, create a Bot.
- In this bot, your trigger app would be Shopify as we want this automation to trigger when there is a new paid order.
- Select ‘New Paid Order’ as your trigger.
- Choose the action app as Mailchimp and select ‘Add or Update a Subscriber’. In this case, we’ll mention the list – ‘Customers’
- You can now easily drag and drop the fields related to the paid order like – Customer Email Address, Customer First Name, Customer Last Name, to your Mailchimp list.
- Add a Filter action wherein you specify that it should trigger if the ‘Total Price in USD’ is greater than a particular value (let’s say $100).
- Now, in the same workflow, add another action using the Mailchimp app. Here the action would be – ‘Assign a tag’. (Point to note: You need to make sure you have a Tag created in Mailchimp from before as ‘High-Value’)
- Choose the list – ‘Customers’ and Tag – ‘Paid.
- This way, whenever there is a new paid order above $100, a subscriber with a tag ‘High-Value’ will be added to your list automatically.
What you need to do in Mailchimp once you have all your paid customers tagged:
- Once you have all your customers synced to the audience in Mailchimp, you can create a segment of ‘Paid Customers’.
- Click on the ‘New Segment’ and add a rule on your merge tag ‘Type of Customer’ to be ‘Paid’. Save this segment.
- Once you have this segment saved, you can create a campaign for this particular segment.
Go to ‘Campaigns’. Click on the button – ‘Create a Campaign’. Select ‘Email’ as the campaign and give it a name. - Now, you can assign which Audience and Segment, in particular, you wish to send out this campaign to. That’s it!
b) Assign Product Tags to Customers in Mailchimp
Running out of time and want to launch a quick campaign for those customers who’ve purchased a particular product?
Adding ‘Product Name’ as Tags in Mailchimp to your customers makes it easy for you. You can then create an easy upsell campaign from Mailchimp for all those who have purchased a particular product by just segmenting users on the tags.
2. Win Back Abandoned Customers
a) Trigger automated email to customers who’ve abandoned their cart
By targeting abandoned customers with a personalized ‘check out your cart’ CTA link, you can win back more money. Stats say, nearly 70% of carts are abandoned, and by this method, you get those lost sales back.
Once a user abandons their cart from your Shopify store, you can send an automated reminder email to these users with their abandoned cart URL. Customers can have a look at their cart and proceed to shop.
You can either use Mailchimp to trigger personalized & visual emails or simply send an email via Gmail with an Abandoned Cart URL.
Here’s how you do it:
- Follow similar steps as mentioned here for syncing these abandoned users as subscribers in your Mailchimp list – ‘Abandoned Users’.
- After that, in the same workflow, add another action app – ‘Gmail’. Select – ‘Send an Email’ as the action.
- Add the ‘From Address’ & ‘To Address’
- In the email body, you can have a plain text email or an HTML one. You can easily drag and drop the ‘Abandoned Checkout URL’ in the body of the email.
- This way, abandoned users can easily click on the URL and they’ll be redirected to their cart.
- That’s it. This workflow will run in the background and you can focus on other important tasks!
Conclusion
This is how you can easily create automation workflows for your Shopify store and send email campaigns from Mailchimp using Automate.io.
To sum up the above article for you:
If you’re an existing user of the Mailchimp integration for Shopify, start using Automate.io to run your existing campaigns & workflows (without any need to modify them). You can sync your orders, products, abandoned carts, and customers, across Shopify & Mailchimp in a matter of just a few minutes.
Go ahead and connect your Shopify & Mailchimp apps within minutes.
