DEV Community

Discussion on: Mailchimp makes contact management difficult

Collapse
 
cookrdan profile image
Dan

Hey I just want to chime in as a Mailchimp user that it is possible to have a unified list. You must set up groups in the audience.

  • Put all contacts in one audience.
  • Each contact should belong to one or several groups that you define.
  • Segmenting for marketing can be done based on groups/any field/any tag/etc.

You can allow clients to specify which group as a preference on forms, or you can keep that hidden and manually specify it for each client. There may be more options on paid tiers but I’m on a free tier so I don’t know.

You can read more here

Collapse
 
brylie profile image
Brylie Christopher Oxley • Edited

Thanks for the solution Dan. I'll recommend that we take that approach.

In effect, we can stop creating multiple audiences. I suspect most organizations don't need "audiences" as defined by Mailchimp.

Having "audiences" as such a prominent feature in the UX likely contributes to wasteful spending, undesired duplication of contacts, and even frustration when recipients try to manage their communications preferences and happen to be in multiple audiences.

Collapse
 
cookrdan profile image
Dan

Yeah I understand what you mean. I spent a lot of time reading their documentation before I began setting up our audience. Not straightforward. I also had to just sit down and brainstorm what I really needed as well.