Mailchimp is a third party tool used for managing email marketing campaigns. Mailchimp and Audience1st together make it easy to reach out to your patrons in a focused way. For example, you can quickly send an email to all patrons who attended last night’s performance to ask them what they thought of the show. Or you can email all ticket holders for the opening night show to remind them of the gala happening afterwards.

How it Works

To use Mailchimp and Audience1st together, you’ll go through a few simple configuration steps shown in the next section. Once setup is complete, all patrons in Audience1st who have not opted out of receiving email will also be present in Mailchimp. Any time a new patron creates an account in Audience1st, that patron will automatically be added to Mailchimp.

When you run a customer list report in Audience1st, you can instruct Audience1st to tag all of the patrons in Mailchimp who appear in the report. For example, if you run a report to find all patrons with tickets to the opening night of Cabaret, you can have Audience1st tag all of those patrons in Mailchimp with the tag “Cabaret opening night”. Then you can go into Mailchimp and compose an email message to all patrons with the “Cabaret opening night” tag.

Configuration

Follow these steps to give Audience1st permission to access your Mailchimp account, specify your default Mailchimp audience, and ensure that all patrons in Audience1st who have not opted out of email are listed in the Mailchimp audience as well:

1. If you do not already have a Mailchimp API key, then log into your Mailchimp account, go to Profile and then Extras and choose to generate an API key. Note that Mailchimp will never display the full API key to you again after you first generate it, so be sure to save it somewhere secure.
2. Mailchimp uses the term “audience” to describe a list of email addresses. Mailchimp allows you to create multiple audiences. Audience1st will work with just one Mailchimp audience. So look at your list of Mailchimp audiences and choose which one will be shared with Audience1st.
3. Log into Audience1st as an administrator and go to the Options tab. Click the Allow Changes button in the Integrations section near the bottom of the page. Carefully paste the Mailchimp API key into the Mailchimp Key field and enter the default audience name into the Mailchimp Default List Name field. Click the Update Settings button.
4. From this point forward any time a patron adds or updates their email address in Audience1st, Audience1st will immediately pass the information to Mailchimp. However, it is possible that patron records that were already present in Audience1st before the Mailchimp API key was entered in the Options tab could be missing from Mailchimp. To bring pre-existing Audience1st patrons into Mailchimp, go to the Reports tab and run the “All Customers” customer list report. Check the boxes “Require valid email address” and “Exclude patrons who have opted out of email”. Choose the option “Download to Excel” and click the Run Report button. Import the resulting file into Mailchimp, specifying the audience that you named in the Audience1st Options tab.

Sending Targeted Emails

See this article for how to send targeted emails to patrons that meet specific criteria.