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Join It Automations
Sync Membership Database to MailChimp
Sync Membership Database to MailChimp

Keep your email communication lists up-to-date with no manual work

Mitch Colleran avatar
Written by Mitch Colleran
Updated over a week ago

MailChimp Integration Summary

Our mission at Join It is to make membership management simple. We think this starts with making all of your most important data syncs across the applications that you’re using to run your Organization.

MailChimp is right in line with this mission. We keep your membership database in sync with your email marketing efforts. Once you setup Join It, you can connect your MailChimp account and select which list you want new Members to be added to.
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Benefits of Integration

Once you’ve synced your Join It and MailChimp profiles, your organization can benefit from:

  • Real-time syncing between Join It and MailChimp: Data from your Join It membership database gets pushed to MailChimp when a new member joins

  • List segmentation: Map members to multiple lists and build MailChimp segments of the additional information that gets pushed into MailChimp (details below).

  • Emailing based on membership type: set up different configurations by membership types

List of Fields that Sync

Once you're set up to start syncing from Join It to MailChimp, you'll notice that Join It sends some extra data to MailChimp that can be useful for segmentation. The fields that sync from Join It to MailChimp lists are: 

  • Email Address (unique identifier in MailChimp)

  • First Name (Merge Variable: FNAME)

  • Last Name (Merge Variable: LNAME)

  • Membership Type (Merge Variable: MEMBERSHIP)

  • Membership Status (Merge Variable: MSTATUS)

  • Expiration Date (Merge Variable: EXPIRATION)

  • Address, if available (Merge Variable: ADDRESS)

  • Birthday, if available (Merge Variable: BIRTHDAY)

  • Membership ID (Merge Variable: MID) - optional setting

  • Joined Date (Merge Variable: JOINEDDATE) - optional setting

How to set up the integration

Step 1: Setup your MailChimp profile 

  • If you do not have a MailChimp account yet, you can create one quickly at www.mailchimp.com/

  • Just to help you learn about the integration, we would suggest creating a quick ‘test’ email list -- this will give a good idea of how Join It works with MailChimp

Next, we need to enable the syncing between MailChimp and Join It. 

  • From your Join It Dashboard, click the “Automations” link on the left, also available here

  • Locate and click on the MailChimp tile

  • Confirm the linkage by clicking the green “connect MailChimp” button

  • Enter your MailChimp credentials

Step 3: start adding your members to your MailChimp lists

Finally, it’s time to create the automations to help you manage communication efforts with your members. Note: it is important that you have your various lists set up within MailChimp before you proceed with this step.

  • From within the Automations link, click into the MailChimp tile

  • The “Connect MailChimp” box will guide you through the allocation of membership types to your different lists within MailChimp

  • Membership type: select which membership type to apply the current automation to

  • Lastly, choose the MailChimp Audience you’d like to send the members’ emails to

And that’s it! Enjoy!

Frequently Asked Question:

Why is my MailChimp subscriber count different than my member count?

Here are some reason as to why your 'membership' count numbers might not always match up to your subscribers in MailChimp: 

  • Members have unsubscribed (if someone unsubscribed from MailChimp, they aren't included in the count). 

  • Memberships can have duplicate emails (they'll only be counted once in MailChimp) 

  • Memberships can have 'no email' address associated with them

  • Members has been removed/blocked by MailChimp for other compliance reason (e.g. GDPR or other regulation) 

Will Membership updates sync over to MailChimp?

If a membership updates (e.g. membership information, status, membership type, expiration date, etc.) that information will flow through to MailChimp.

However, MailChimp uses the 'email' as the unique identifier. So if a member updates their email address, that won't update automatically within MailChimp.

Are my 'Inactive' members automatically unsubscribed from my lists in Mailchimp?

Nope! By default, we keep all of the memberships added to your lists "subscribed" - so if a member is unsubscribed, it's not something that the integration with Join It has done on their behalf.

However, we still make it simple to send emails to only your Active Memberships. To do this, you can build a Segment where the Merge Variable for Membership Status (MSTATUS) is set to "ACTIVE". And the best news, is that you only have to create this Segment once - and then it'll dynamically update as we keep your memberships in sync.

Can I build complex Segments in MailChimp with Membership Data?

Absolutely! Join It pushes in several pieces of data about each membership (see above for exact details) and updates this information in real-time.

So you can build complex segments, making it easy to target specific customers (e.g. 'Active' members only, or members of a specific Membership Type).

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