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If you're not a fan of reading documentation, you should at least take a quick look at the Quickstart page.
While Mailchimp suggests that you use their very cool emailing platform as your CRM, and many FileMaker developers will tell you that they can build some sophisticated emailing tools in your FileMaker system, both of these approaches are likely flawed. Why not play to the strengths of these two platforms and get the best of both worlds? Mailchimp can help you with email deliverability, has a built-in "unsubscribe" feature, can help you deal with compliance issues like GDPR, and has some sophisticated automation tools to help build and maintain your audience. FileMaker can help you with custom workflows, has unparalleled flexibility, and (for many organizations) is often the authoritative data source for your business-critical data. With some discrete connections between these two systems, we can let them do what they do best without a lot of data management overhead.
You've got your business contacts (suppliers, customers, collaborators) in your FileMaker system and you use Mailchimp for email outreach, and yet the two systems don't communicate with each other. How do you:
- Ensure that all of your (FileMaker) contacts are in your (Mailchimp) audience?
- Ensure that each of your (Mailchimp) audience members is in your (FileMaker) contacts?
- Leverage Mailchimp engagement data in your FileMaker system?
- Segment your (Mailchimp) audience based on FileMaker data?
With fm_mailchimp, it's easy to build tight integration between these two systems and eliminate manual sync processes.
Most organizations can get by with a single Mailchimp "audience". Coupling your audience with a single contacts table in your FileMaker system is the simplest and easiest way to get started, and will work for all but the most complex organizations. This doesn't mean that you're always mailing the entire audience, there are ways to segment your audience to do more targeted outreach based on data stored in Mailchimp and in your FileMaker system (more on that later).
Use Groups in Mailchimp to allow audience members to self-select based on criteria that they choose. For example, if you're running a Mailchimp campaign for your local cycling club, you might allow members to choose whether they're interested in cyclocross, mountain biking, road cycling or triathlon. Giving audience members control over what types of communications they might receive helps to build stronger relationships with your customers. If having this groups data in your FileMaker system would be useful, use fm_mailchimp to grab groups data for your audience members and write it into your FileMaker system.
Use Tags in Mailchimp to segment audience members based on criteria that you want total control over. For example, you want to flag some of your donors as "major donor" so that you can prepare targeted email to this sub-group. This is a flag that only you can see but can be used to target a specific group of audience members. Use fm_mailchimp to push tags to audience members in Mailchimp based on data stored in your FileMaker system.
Push new contacts created in FileMaker to your Mailchimp audience. When you create a new contact in FileMaker, push that contact to your Mailchimp audience using fm_mailchimp.
If new members get created in Mailchimp (e.g. via a sign up form), pull those contacts down into your FileMaker system periodically.