MailChimp Integration

We are excited to announce that for users on our paid plans only, Insightly now integrates seamlessly with your MailChimp account. For those of you not familiar with MailChimp, it’s an online newsletter/marketing platform that’s well worth checking out. With the new feature roll-out you are able to Import Contacts to Insightly from your MailChimp account and Export Contacts from Insightly to any of your MailChimp Lists.

Setup

Your MailChimp account can be set up to communicate with Insightly on a per instance basis. This means that you only need to set up the Integration once, and then all your users will have access to the features. To setup your MailChimp Integration, please follow these steps:

1) Log into Insightly using an Administrator account, navigate to System Settings > MailChimp Integration. The MailChimp Settings window will be shown.

2) In a separate browser window, log into your MailChimp account and navigate to Account > API Keys & Authorized Apps.

3) If you have an enabled API Key in the “Your API Keys” list, copy the key you wish to use and paste it into the “MailChimp API Key” text box in Insightly.  If you do not have an API Key, just press the “Add A Key” button and one will be generated for you.

4) Once you have the API Key in Insightly, choose a “Contact Email Option” next. This determines which email address of your Insightly Contacts will be used when you send a Contact to a MailChimp List. The Default option is “First Email Address Listed”.

First Email Address Listed means that if the Contact has one or more email addresses, the first address will be chosen regardless whether it is tagged as a “Work”, “Home” or “Other” email address.

5) Press “Save Settings” to complete the setup.

Sending Contacts to MailChimp 

From the Contacts list in Insightly you now have the option to send contacts to a specific mailing list in MailChimp. The procedure is similar to any other bulk action you would be performing on the Contact records.

NOTE: You will need to have at least one list defined in MailChimp to send Contacts. If you have not already done so, please set one up before you attempt to send (In Mailchimp, go to Dashboard> Create a List).

To send Contacts to MailChimp, follow these steps:
1) In Insightly, navigate to the Contacts tab and select the Contacts you wish to send.
2) Once you have completed your selection, click the “Send to MailChimp” option.

3) A drop down list will appear.  From this list, select the MailChimp list you wish to send the selected Contacts to and press “Send to Mailchimp”. The duration of the send procedure will vary based on the number of Contacts you have selected.

4) When the procedure is complete you will see a confirmation message at the top on the page displaying how many Contacts were sent.

NOTE: It’s quite common for the number of successfully sent contacts to not add up to the number of contacts you selected to send. This is due to a couple of factors:

• MailChimp does not accept duplicate entries, so if the contact is already in MailChimp, the contact will be rejected; and/or
• Contacts sent depends on the email option you have selected in your MailChimp Integration settings.  For example, if you selected “Work”, only contacts who have a work email address will be sent.  The default option is “First Email Address” which means that if the contact has one or more email addresses, the first one will be chosen when sending to MailChimp.

Importing Contacts from MailChimp

Once you have setup your MailChimp Integration, you have the option to import subscribers from your MailChimp lists to Insightly Contacts. To import your subscribers, please follow these steps:
1) Navigate to Contacts in Insightly and click “Import Contacts and Notes” on the right hand side of the screen.
2) Click “Import your Contacts from MailChimp”.

3) From the drop down list that appears, select your MailChimp list you wish to import from and click “Import”.

4) You will be presented with a list of Contacts. Select the ones you wish to import by checking the box next to the Contact. Once you are done with the selection, click “Import Selected Contacts”. The duration of the import procedure will vary based on the number of Contacts you selected, but typically should not take more than a minute or two.

5) Once the import is done you will be redirected back to the Contacts Page and a message at the top of your screen will indicate how many Contacts were imported.

Disabling the MailChimp Integration

To disable your MailChimp Integration you can do so simply by following these steps:
1) Log into Insightly as an Administrator and Navigate to System Settings  > MailChimp Integration.
2) Click on “Delete” on the MailChimp API Key line and you’re all done.