How does the MailChimp Integration Work?

Our integration with MailChimp allows campaigns to be sent via MailChimp using a customer list generated by ProPet. 

To connect your MailChimp account to ProPet:

1. Create a Mailchimp account (mailchimp.com)
2. In Mailchimp navigate to your “Account & Billing” page
   
3. In Mailchimp click on “Extra > API Keys”
   
4. In Mailchimp click on “Create a Key”. Copy the key.
   

Your API key is the communication bridge between your ProPet and Mailchimp accounts. Once you have copied the API key, go your ProPet account and follow these instructions:

1. Go to your ProPet account and click on Settings
2. Click on “MailChimp” under “Integrations”
3. Click on the “Mailchimp Connection” tab.
4. Paste your API key into ProPet and click Save. Select a Mailchimp Audience to hold your ProPet customers. If you have a Free Mailchimp account, there is only one Audience to choose from.
   
5. ProPet will immediately push your customers to the selected Mailchimp Audience. It can take up to an hour to push all of your customers. You can monitor the progress by clicking the Mailchimp Connection tab above.
6. Once your Connection is completed, you will get the following validation:

The free Mailchimp plan includes up to 500 contacts, with 1,000 sends per month and a daily limit of 500. If you have more customers in your ProPet database, you will need to upgrade to a paid Mailchimp plan.

When a new customer is added, their email is automatically synced to your Mailchimp audience. Similarly, if a customer is deleted or the status is set to “inactive” or “disabled”, their email is automatically removed from Mailchimp. However, if you need to change that customer back to active, you will need to resync your customer list to add them back to your audience list.

You are now ready to start sending bulk email campaigns using MailChimp.

To Create and Send a MailChimp Campaign:

In MailChimp:

1. Select the “Content” page
2. Select “Email Templates”
3. Select “Create Template”

Choose the type of template you wish to create (A notice, Seasonal Promo, Announcement, etc.), choose the elements you wish to have in these types of notices and add different elements, such as your logo.

You can personalize your email templates using Mailchimps merge tags. See this article for more information: https://mailchimp.com/help/getting-started-with-merge-tags/

Some common merge tags you may be interested in include:

*|FNAME|* – Clients first name
*|LNAME|* – Clients Last name
*|Pets|* – Clients Pets Name (multiple pets will be separated by a comma)

**Please note** If you choose to use merge tags, you must thoroughly test to make sure you have them set up correctly. If you have any issues, consult Mailchimp support, as we do not support Mailchimp content. 

**Please Note** June 2023: Mailchimp recently launched a “New Email Builder” for building email templates, but they are still working through some issues. For now, ProPet can only send using templates built with Mailchimp’s “Classic Email Builder”.

Once your template is created, go to ProPet.

In ProPet:

You can then create a Campaign through the Mailchimp Campaign Tab or generate a contacts list from certain reports:

Mailchimp Campaign Tab:

1. Click on the Campaign Tab:  

2. Click “Create MailChimp Campaign”
3. Enter the different fields, select your Template and the email you wish to send this campaign from
4. Select your targeted audience. You can choose between All customers or a list of customers by date range, by service (e.g. Boarding customers with a service between May 2018 and Sep 2018) and choose whether to include pending orders if applicable. 

5. Click “Save MailChimp Campaign”

ProPet Reports

You can generate campaign contact lists through the following ProPet reports, including:

• Birthday Report
• Vaccination Report
• Last Service Report

Simply generate the report from the applicable report above and click “Send to Mailchimp”. Then, enter the different fields, select your Template and the email you wish to send this campaign from. Save Mailchimp Campaign. 

Once the campaign has finished saving, click “Send” next to the campaign you just created.

Wait for the “Campaign ‘campaign name‘ sent successfully” message to appear before you close the browser.

You can review the details of the campaign from your Mailchimp Account under the “Campaign” page.