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Email Marketing, Business & Monkeys

Auto-Update Lists When Importing

January 18th, 2009 | by Ben

If you manage a database externally from MailChimp, you don’t want to keep creating new lists in MailChimp every time you want to send a new campaign. Tons of lists get hard to manage.

Instead, sometimes you just want to log in to MailChimp, copy-paste your most up-to-date version of your list, and then have MailChimp auto-detect whether or not there are any changes to a subscriber’s profile.

So whenever you import your list, check this box in order to do that auto-update:

Hint: this is an extremely powerful option if you’re sync’ing your database with MailChimp via our API. For each campaign you send, you can automatically update your customers’ data (like purchase history, product alerts, etc), then use our advanced merge tags in your campaign to insert dynamic content for each recipient. If you take a moment to think about that, you’ll actually poop your pants, so be careful.

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Posted in Using MailChimp | 2 Comments »

2 Comments

    • Ryan Thrash says:

      Great and way cool feature. Are the customer opt-in/opt-out preferences maintained, so you can’t accidentally reactivate a customer via the API?

      Reply to this comment
    • Ben says:

      @Ryan – Glad you like!

      To answer your question: If someone opted-out of your list on MailChimp, then you tried to import them (into that same list) via the API, we would *not* allow them back in. We would “remember” their opt-out request.

      This was one of the reasons we did this in the first place. When there was no auto-update feature, MailChimp users would often create *new* lists for every campaign they create.

      These new lists did not “share” opt-out records from other lists (and rightfully so), so they’d sometimes result in abuse complaints from people who already unsubscribed.

      The MC engineers watch the blog closely (because I’m frequently wrong about stuff) so I’m sure they’ll jump in to correct me here.

      Reply to this comment

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