Revision as of 08:28, 15 August 2017

MailChimp integration is available in WHMCS 7.3 and later.

What is MailChimp?

MailChimp is a powerful email marketing and automation platform that is free to use for up to 2,000 subscribers and allows up to 12,000 emails per month.

The WHMCS MailChimp integration leverages MailChimp's e-commerce API to synchronize customer, order and abandoned cart data with your MailChimp account. This allows you to take full advantage of MailChimp's advanced e-commerce automations to setup manual and automated campaigns including:

• Thank you's to new customers
• Automated follow-up's on abandoned carts
• To provide on-boarding/drip-feed campaigns to new customers
• Attempt to win back lapsed customers who haven't bought anything recently
• Reward your best customers based on order count or total spent

Plus many more.

Signup

If you do not yet have a MailChimp account, you can create one free here.

Initial Setup

1. Navigate to Setup > Addon Modules
2. Locate the "MailChimp" module and click the Activate button.
3. Assign your admin user role group (typically Full Administrator), access to the addon.
4. Navigate to Addons > MailChimp to access

The first time you access the MailChimp addon you will be guided through a setup process that connects your WHMCS installation with your MailChimp account.

Creating a MailChimp API Key

You will be asked to provide a MailChimp API Key as part of this setup. If you do not yet have a MailChimp account, you can create one free here.

1. Once logged in, to create a new API Key navigate to Account > Extras > API keys

2. Click the Create A Key button. A new key will be automatically generated for you. Copy this key to your clipboard. We also recommend giving the API Key a label inside your Mailchimp account so you know what it is used for. Here we used the label "API Key for WHMCS".

3. Enter the API Key into WHMCS where requested. You will see this screen the first time you access the MailChimp addon after activating it.

Creating your First Automation

1. Login to your MailChimp account at https://login.mailchimp.com/
2. Navigate to Campaigns > Create Campaign
3. Choose Create an Email
4. Select the Automated tab
5. Choose the E-Commerce options. You will see a list like the one below.

6. Now select your desired email from the list of pre-made options. Alternatively you can select the Custom button to create a new automation using the advanced mode.

7. For the purposes of this demo, we are going to select the "Follow up on purchases" pre-made option which will allow us to create an on-boarding automation flow for new customers

8. You have a choice here of "Any product", "Specific product" or "Product category". We're going to select the Product category option.

9. Next enter a name for your new automation, we've chosen "Follow up on SSL purchase" and choose the mailing list you connected with your WHMCS installation earlier

10. The campaign overview will be displayed next. Select the Edit Trigger button to choose the product category that will trigger this email.

11. We are going to select "SSL Certificates" as the product category to trigger this email automation. This means any product purchase within the SSL Certificates product group will start the email campaign.

11. Hit save and now you can begin composing your campaign automation, starting with designing your first email, and adding others as you wish.

Importing Existing Customers

The MailChimp WHMCS integration will track customer signups and e-commerce transactions from the time it is activated. To add your pre-existing customers to your MailChimp mailing list, you can perform an import. It's quick and easy to do. Here's how.

1. Within your WHMCS installation navigate to Reports > Exports > Clients

2. Select the fields you wish to export. We recommend First Name, Last Name, Company Name and Email Address

3. Click Filter to generate the list

4. Now select Tools > Export to CSV to download a CSV list of your customers

5. Now within Mailchimp, navigate to Lists, choose the list you wish to import into

6. Now navigate to Add contacts > Import contacts

7. Choose the CSV or tab-delimited text file option and click Next

8. Follow the steps on screen to locate the CSV file export you just downloaded from WHMCS and complete the import process.