Mailchimp integration

Your loyalty program already knows a lot about your customers. Who is almost at their next reward, who used to order every three weeks and has gone quiet, who joined last week, and who spends the most. Mailchimp is where you turn that knowledge into email that people actually open.

The Crowny x Mailchimp integration connects the two. Once you connect your Mailchimp account and pick an audience, Crowny sends your member data straight onto the contacts in it — so you can build segments and automations on real loyalty data instead of guesswork.

Most email lists are flat. Everybody gets the same newsletter on the same morning, and the people who love your brand the most get treated exactly like the ones who bought once and never came back.

Loyalty data fixes that. With Crowny’s data points sitting on your Mailchimp contacts you can:

Crowny talks to Mailchimp through the Mailchimp Marketing API. You keep full control of your own Mailchimp account — we only write to it.

Pick the audience you actually send your marketing from, usually your main one. Mailchimp bills per contact and counts each audience separately, so syncing your members into a second, separate audience means paying twice for the people who are in both. Writing onto the audience you already mail keeps your contact count where it is.

You can point the connection at a different audience later from the same screen. Note that we do not clean up after a switch: everything already written to the previous audience stays exactly where it is.

Connect Mailchimp and let the first sync finish before you build segments and turn automations on. If an automation is already live on a segment, everyone who lands in that segment during the first sync gets mailed at once. Sync first, build second.

We identify members by their email address, which is exactly what Mailchimp uses too. If a member is already a contact in the audience you picked, through Mailchimp’s own Shopify integration, for example, we write onto that existing contact instead of creating a second one. No duplicates, no cleanup afterwards.

Members without an email address on their profile are skipped, simply because Mailchimp has nothing to identify them by.

Your members opted in when they joined your loyalty program, so a member who is not yet in your audience is added as subscribed. A member who is already a contact keeps whatever status you have for them — we never touch it. Your own unsubscribes stay your own.

The one status we do write is the opposite direction: members who leave your loyalty program are set to unsubscribed, so an opt-out on your side carries straight through to Mailchimp instead of quietly going stale.

Mailchimp permanently refuses contacts who unsubscribed, hard bounced or were flagged in a compliance review, nobody can write to those through the API, us included. We recognise them and pass over them quietly, so they never show up as sync errors.

Every data point below lands on the Mailchimp contact as an audience field (Mailchimp’s merge fields), which means you can use all of them directly in the Mailchimp segment builder. Every field name starts with Crowny, so they are easy to find in a long list. Mailchimp caps the technical tag behind each field at ten characters, which is why they all read CRWNY_… — you only need those when you use a field in a template as *|CRWNY_PTS|*.

You do not have to create any of this yourself. Crowny adds the fields to your chosen audience when you connect, with the right type on each one — numbers as numbers, dates as dates — so “points above 500” and “ordered before June” are segments you can actually build.

These come from your connected webshop, so you will see them once your e-commerce integration is running. Members who have not ordered yet show zeroes and empty dates.

Mailchimp allows a limited number of audience fields, thirty on most plans, eighty on Premium, and your other integrations have already used some of them. If your audience is full, connecting will tell you so instead of failing quietly.
Two ways out: remove fields you no longer use in Audience → Settings → Audience fields, or narrow the list of data points Crowny syncs in the integration settings and keep only the ones you actually segment on.

Not sure where to start? These six take a couple of minutes each and cover most of what a loyalty program can do for your revenue.

And of course a birthday automation on Crowny birthday, which Mailchimp can run for you as soon as the field is filled.

The Mailchimp screen always shows when the last sync ran, so you never have to guess.

One Mailchimp quirk worth knowing: large updates go through Mailchimp’s batch queue, and that queue is shared with everything else connected to your account. If your Shopify store is doing a big sync of its own at the same time, a Crowny run can sit in that queue for a few minutes. We wait for Mailchimp to confirm the contacts have actually landed before we report a sync as done, so the timestamp you see is the truth rather than a promise.

After your first sync you can set an activity filter: leave out members who have not joined or ordered within a number of months you choose. Useful if you have a long tail of old members and want to keep your Mailchimp contact count, and your bill, under control. Leave it empty to sync everyone.

One thing to keep in mind: narrowing the filter stops us updating those members, it does not remove them from Mailchimp. Contacts that are already there stay where they are.

You can disconnect Mailchimp at any time from the same screen. We stop syncing straight away. Everything already in Mailchimp stays exactly where it is, with the data from the last sync, so your segments and automations keep working on what they have.

Yes. Your API key is encrypted before we store it, and it is only ever used to write your member data to the audience you picked in your own Mailchimp account. You can rotate or revoke it in Mailchimp whenever you want — just paste the new one in Crowny afterwards to keep syncing.