Challenge
Our client uses Mailchimp to market their training courses. Their training courses and associated bookings and contacts are managed in Arlo.
We needed to synchronise contacts, classification data and their course bookings to Mailchimp so that campaigns and automations could be targeted correctly.
Arlo’s approach to Mailchimp integration requires Zapier.
Zapier is a fantastic tool, but was unable to handle the all these requirements in a cost-effective way.
Implementation
We developed a process that runs every time a contact is created or updated in Arlo.
This process finds / creates an associated contact in Mailchimp, and populates the standard merge fields of first name, last name and organisation.
A tag taxonomy for Mailchimp was specified to reflect key data points held in Arlo. These tags are applied to each contact in Mailchimp to represent:
- Business type of the contact
- Accreditation status of the contact
- Membership status of the contact
- Courses booked in the future
- Courses attended within the last 9 months
- Courses attended more than 9 months ago
- Any tags applied to the contact in Arlo.
A sister process runs on a daily basis to find any Arlo contacts who haven’t been updated in over 30 days. These contacts are then automatically resaved in order to trigger the Mailchimp synchronisation process. This is how we ensure all the aged course tags are updated on contacts without any recent activity.
Results
Marketing mastery
The results have been transformational to their Mailchimp marketing.
Previously, campaigns were segmented based on just contact classification since this was the only data available in Mailchimp. This resulted in courses being unnecessarily promoted to people who had recently booked or attended that course.
Now we have all the necessary information available in Mailchimp in near-real-time. This unlocks the power of Mailchimp to segment the audience correctly and power valuable marketing automations.
Deduping Arlo contacts
Some data inconsistencies were discovered in Mailchimp after the initial deployment. These were caused by multiple contacts in Arlo having the same email address.
We iterated the synchronisation process to first query Arlo for all contacts with the associated email address.
If more than one contact is found, we create a Trello card with the corresponding Arlo contact links for the team to review and merge, and abort the update to Mailchimp. (The Arlo API doesn’t allow us to merge records programmatically, and it’s good practice to handle merges manually to ensure accuracy).
This automated duplicate detection process maximises the quality of the data in both Arlo and Mailchimp.
