Export your RealtimeCRM Contacts to Mailchimp

A lot of businesses when they begin email marketing make the mistake of dumping their entire address book into a mail automation platform not realising they need to have permission to email prospects and clients. In this article we will help you get only those Contacts who have given permission to receive emails from you out of RealtimeCRM ready to be imported into Mailchimp.

You really don’t want to be accused of being a spammer or having your Mailchimp account suspended by not properly filtering your email list, fortunately RealtimeCRM makes the process of distinguishing between your Contacts who have opted into an Email list and those who haven’t much easier.

We highly recommend recording whether a Contact has opted into email marketing as soon as you can into RealtimeCRM. There are three methods to do this, one is to assign a Tag to the Contacts that they have opted into email marketing, whilst the other is to create a Custom field which records whether they’ve opted in or not.

Both of these methods will be described in this help article however RealtimeCRM allows you to integrate Mailchimp into it and directly subscribe your RealtimeCRM Contacts to any lists you have in Mailchimp, to find out how to integrate Mailchimp into RealtimeCRM scroll see the following article

Both approaches are explained below and it is at your discretion which you decide to use.

Recording opt-ins via Tags

To an individual record

  • Click the Contacts panel on the left hand side bar
  • Then select the new Contact you’ve just added to which you wish to add the opt-in Tag to
  • Once in that Contact’s record click the  symbol and in the box that appears type ‘opt-in’ then press enter
  • Now this Tag will be assigned to the record clearly displaying that they have opted into email marketing, simply click outside the Tags box to close it

To multiple records

If you’ve got a list of Contacts who have opted into email marketing but you simply haven’t recorded this information in RealtimeCRM you can do so by using our list management system.

  • Click the Contacts panel on the left hand side bar
  • Then click the check boxes next to the Contacts who have opted in from the list you have
  • Now click Manage selected  and from the drop-down list select ‘Manage tags for selected records’
  • The following dialog box should appear
You should type in ‘opt-in’ and then press enter, the Tag ‘opt-in’ will now be applied to all the Contact records you selected
To finish, just click the cross on the dialog box to close it

Recording opt-ins via Custom Fields

Another option is to create Custom fields to record whether a Contact has opted into email marketing. The advantage of this is that it will appear in every Contact record so whenever you add a new Contact to RealtimeCRM it will be there so you don’t have to remember to Tag each new Contact if they have or haven’t opted into email marketing.

So to that end we are going to create a check box Custom Field that will appear in every Contact record allowing you to record their preference and then later filter your Contact records by only those who have opted in.

To summarise:

If the check box has a check mark in it that means the value is true and they have opted into email marketing, if the check box is empty then the value is false and they have not opted into email marketing.

  • To create the opt-in Custom Field first click on your Username and then select ‘Settings’
  • Now select the ‘Configuration’ panel and scroll down the Configuration page until you reach the Custom Fields heading
  • Now click Add custom field and a dialog box will open allowing you to choose from a variety of Custom Field types
  • Type in the name of the new Custom Field, in this case it will be ‘opt-in Mail list’ and the type of Custom Field will be a ‘Checkbox’ so select that option from the list
  • Then select ‘Contact’ from the ‘Record type’ drop-down menu as we want this Custom Field to appear in all Contact records
  • Once you’ve completed all the necessary fields simply click the blue Add button and this new Custom Field will be added to all Contact records
  • Now when you go to add new Contacts you can go Custom Fields box in the record and click the Edit button and then if they have opted into email marketing click the check box and then click Update or leave it empty if they haven’t which is its default value in this instance as we did not set the default value to be true in the above dialog box

Exporting Tagged opted-in Contacts

Now that we’ve tagged the Contacts who have opted into email marketing we want to only export them out of RealtimeCRM into a CSV file we can later upload to Mailchimp.

To do this we have to filter our list of records down to only those who have opted in.

  • Click on the Contacts  panel on the left hand sidebar
  • Once on the Contacts page click Add filter
  • From the drop-down list that appears click ‘Tag: then ‘Tag: opt-in’
  • Your list of Contacts should now be filtered down to only those who have opted in and you should see the filter applied as Tag: opt-in
  • Now click the top most check box next to the grey menu bar and all of the records in your now filtered list should be highlighted
  • Select Manage selected  and form the drop-down list click on ‘Export selected records’
  • Your filtered list of Contacts should now be downloaded as a CSV file ready to upload to Mailchimp

Exporting Custom Field opted-in Contacts

Now that we’ve recorded the Contacts who have opted into email marketing by the Custom Field we created we want to only export them out of RealtimeCRM into a CSV file we can later upload to Mailchimp.

To do this we have to filter our list of records down to only those who have opted in.

  • Click on the Contacts  panel on the left hand sidebar
  • Once on the Contacts page click Add filter
  • From the list of filters available you should see the name of the Custom Field you created in this case ‘opt-in Mail list’
  • We want only those Contacts who have opted into email marketing meaning the value for this Custom Field must be true so select opt-in Mail list: Yes
  • Your list of Contact records should now be filtered down to only those who have opted into email marketing
  • Now click the top most check box next to the grey menu bar and all of the records in your now filtered list should be highlighted
  • Select Manage selected  and form the drop-down list click on ‘Export selected records’
  • Your filtered list of Contacts should now be downloaded as a CSV file ready to upload to Mailchimp

Importing your CSV file from RealtimeCRM into Mailchimp

Once you’ve downloaded your filtered list of Contacts you should open the CSV file RealtimeCRM has created to double check the information within it is correct, once you’ve done that you can take that file and upload it into Mailchimp ready for use in that platform.

To see how to do so please see the following Mailchimp help article, scroll down the page to the heading ‘Import to MailChimp’ as you’ve already created the CSV file you’re going to import.

Import Contacts into Mailchimp