MailChimp and Campaigns

Double opt-in means that a customer has requested the subscription (or you have manually added the contact in Brightpearl and opted them in), they are then sent an email requiring them to confirm (or deny) the subscription. It is a good idea to use the double opt-in method when adding contacts to your mailing lists. MailChimp are really hot on cracking down on email spamming and it is possible that they will block your account if you consistently add people to subscription lists without their explicit permission.

You can read more about double opt-in in the MailChimp help pages

Follow these steps in Brightpearl to activate double opt-in:

Go to Setup > Integration > Email marketing.
Select "Yes" to Send opt-in email.
Click the Save changes button.

When a contact is created (either through your website or manually in Brightpearl) they will automatically be sent a standard MailChimp email asking them to confirm their subscription.

When a contact accepts/confirms the subscription

If they accept they will be added to the subscription list in MailChimp and you will be able to send them emails, in their Brightpearl record (Info tab), the Receive email newsletters option will be set to "Yes". This can be changed to no manually if you decide you later want to remove them. You can also remove people from subscription lists in MailChimp by unsubscribing them; this is irreversable.

When the contact denies/refuses the subscription

If the contact denies the subscription they will not be added in MailChimp and in their Brightpearl record you will see "Unsubscribed" in the Receive email newletters field; you are not able to change this setting and you will not be able to subscrive them in the future.

4. Create a list & groups in MailChimp

Lists are used in MailChimp to collect names of contacts whom you wish to email. You only need one list as you can split your contacts into Interest Groups in MailChimp for different mailshots.To add a new list:

"We have added you to our mailing list because we believe you may be interested in the products/services we offer. Our email marketing is integrated with our CRM system, and if you have called or spoken to one of our operatives then you may be subscribed to our list. You can opt out at any time." ... and so on.

Go to your MailChimp account.
Click the Lists menu at the top of the screen.
Click the create list button.
Click the create list button in the middle of the screen to continue.
Enter the required detail for the list.
Enter a short reminder about how the recipient joined this list, for example:
Click the save button.

Groups are used to split your list of contacts into Interest Groups which are used for sending different mailshots. Although you can add these in MailChimp, they are automatically created for you when you add a Tag in Brightpearl...

5. Create a Tag connected to a MailChimp list & add it to contact records

Lists of recipients are created from your Brightpearl contacts. To automatically upload Brightpearl contacts to a MailChimp subscription list you will need to create a Tag and add it to the relevant contact records. Each Tag you add will create an Interest Group in MailChimp using the Tag name.

Note: Brightpearl Tags = MailChimp Interest Groups.

Follow these steps to create a Tag which is connected to MailChimp:

Go to Setup > Contacts > Tags.
Click the Add a new Tag button.
Name your tag.
Set the tag as Top level - child tags do not work with the MailChimp connection.
Select your MailChimp subscription list from the drop-down menu.
Select a colour for your tag - select the colour from the outer circle and then the shade from the inner square.
Click the Save Tag button.

Your Tag is now ready to be added to contact records. A few minutes after adding a Tag and adding that Tag to contacts you will see the Group on the MailChimp List and the contacts added to the list and group.

You can choose to connect up to 30 of these Tags to MailChimp Interest Groups. You can have multiple tags on a contact, and of course this will put the contact in multiple interest groups in Mailchimp.

Removing a tag from a contact in Brightpearl will remove them from the interest group in MailChimp, but will leave them on your MailChimp list.

Any time that you use a connected tag, Brightpearl will talk to MailChimp and make sure that everything is A-OK!

To move a Tag to a different list, you'll need to save the Tag without a list, then go back in and save it to the new list.

Connected Tags appear in bold.

Learn more about tags

6. Create & send an Email Campaign

Go to Marketing > New Campaign.
At the bottom of the screen you can choose a previous newsletter to start from, or select one of the displayed templates.
Edit the template, add a subject, enter a test email address and click Save draft.
Click Next, which will save, send a test email and take you to the next screen.
Select the tags (interest groups) that you want to send this to.
Enter the email subject as you want it to appear for the recipients.
Enter from and to email address as yourself and test again.
Click Send it now to send it out to the selected recipients.

A note is automatically added to each of the contacts timelines with details of the campaign used to send the email.

You can quit the email process at any time, and then return to pick up where you left off. Until you log out your most recent campaign will be automatically displayed when you return to the New campaign screen. If you want to add another without overwriting the other draft, go to Marketing > New campaign and ensure you select the Template stage to start over.

All of your unsent/draft campaigns can be reloaded from Marketing > Draft Campaigns.

Designing Your Email

We've got over 35 templates for you to choose from, which have all been tested across multiple email clients like Outlook, Gmail, Hotmail and so on. Email design is a notoriously tricky thing to get right; the most important thing to remember is that every email reader is different. There are excellent tips all over the web for good email design; if you're planning to mess around with the templates, then make sure you've got some good background reading done first.

Some of the wide selection of email marketing templates available in Brightpearl CRM

Don't design an email that's wider than 600 pixels. Many of your readers won't be able to view the whole thing, or it will look horrible on their screen.

Inline CSS/Advanced Editing

When you're in the edit email screen, you can switch between Visual and HTML mode to get dirty with the code. The more technical of you will notice that our email templates have a large chunk of CSS at the top of the source code; this is bad practice for sending the email, but works nicely when you're editing the document. When Brightpearl sends a test to your email address, we automatically convert the HTML file to place these styles inline with the HTML. MailChimp does the same when the actual campaign is sent.

Advanced reporting

Who's read my mail?

You can see the number of opens, clicks and so on from within Brightpearl on the Marketing > Sent Campaigns screen, and also from within your MailChimp account under Campaigns. MailChimp do offer an extended reporting level call "A.I.M.", which is a paid add-on to the standard package that also gives you detail of who clicked. We don't currently support this. From the Marketing > Sent campaigns screen, click the "refresh" icon to get the latest statistics from MailChimp. Note that the total number of opens or unsubscribes reported by MailChimp may not be what shows on the Brightpearl screen; we only give you the number that are still in your CRM database, so that the drill-down from the data takes you to a more accurate contact list.

Note:The contact list does not show staff members, something to watch out for if you're testing to yourself.

Unsubscribing

Every email recipient will get the unsubscribe link in the bottom of the mail. If they click this they will be marked as unsubscribed from the list. Contacts will automatically be marked as unsubscribed in your Brightpearl account too. Once unsubscribed, they cannot be added to the list again, and you won't be able to update the "newsletter" status within Brightpearl:

Bounces, Cleaning & List Management

There's a lot of information within the MailChimp help sections - read their documentation for a good general overview of email marketing and how it works with your system. Each time a contact email address bounces or is cleaned, Mailchimp sends a message to Brightpearl, which will appear on the contact timeline:

WebHooks

MailChimp can send a signal to Brightpearl to remove contacts from your lists automatically, as they unsubscribe themselves, or as MailChimp decides that the email address is no longer valid (after a hard bounce, for example). This connection is called a Webhook, and is set up automatically by Brightpearl as you add Tags to mailing lists. The great thing is that they pop a note onto the contact note history, eg "UNSUBSCRIBED my@email.com". Note that Webhooks can sometimes take a couple of hours to arrive from MailChimp.

Opt-in/List Management

It's a good idea to set the system up so that MailChimp sends your customer an opt-in email when they are first added to a List. It ensures that your list only contains people that actually want to read your email, which improves the List score, increases delivery rates and reduces complaints. Note that if you're going to be adding contacts to your List from within Brightpearl then we strongly suggest that you edit the section in MailChimp that lets users know how they ended up on the list; to say something like:

Handy Tips

It's easier to see which of your contacts are subscribed to newsletters if you add the "newsletter" column to your CRM screen search results, click on your user name and select My Preferences to edit your column settings.

Adding New Leads to your MailChimp List Using SmartForms

Always use the "newsletter" field when creating SmartForms for capturing new leads. It's set to "yes" by default. If it's not on your SmartForm, then the user will be created with "newsletters" set to "no".

More info:

When you're writing your email campaign in Brightpearl, you can choose to send a copy to your inbox so that you can see what it looks like in an email reader. There are some important points to note:

Always put styles inline

Email readers don't usually respect CSS styles embedded in the document using <style> tags. You'll notice that many of the templates we provide contain the <style> tag ... when MailChimp actually sends the email, these styles are automatically placed inline. When we send you a test from the edit screen, we also put the styles inline.

For example, a P tag with inline CSS is as follows:

<p style="font-size:18px">Content here</p>

Watch out for line breaks

We suggest using P tags to define paragraphs.

Use tables for layout

DIVs with CSS will give unreliable results in many email readers; don't use them.

MailChimp merge tags

When sending a test from the edit email screen, you won't get the merge tags replaced. Only when you send a test at the last step of the campaign process will you get these fields replaced by MailChimp, using test data such as << firstname here >>. The real campaign of course will go out with the actual subscriber's information.

Sign in

MailChimp and Campaigns

1. Sign Up with MailChimp

2. Connect Your MailChimp & Brightpearl Accounts